Translator Ottilie Mulzet joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to talk about her award-winning translations of Nobel Prize winner László Krasznahorkai’s work*.* Mulzet, who was born in Canada and now lives in the Czech Republic, discusses how she learned Hungarian and began working with Krasznahorkai. She explains the humor in his novels and how his background in music shapes his prose. Mulzet also reflects on the timeliness of his writing and the breadth of his influences, including Europe and Asia more broadly. She considers its political context, including the Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orbán’s recent Kulturkampf, or efforts to control Hungarian cultural production. Mulzet reads an excerpt from Herscht 07769, which takes its title from the protagonist’s decision to write German Chancellor Angela Merkel a letter using only his name and postcode as a return address.

To hear the full episode, subscribe through iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app (include the forward slashes when searching). You can also listen by streaming from the player below. Check out video versions of our interviews on the Fiction/Non/Fiction Instagram account, the Fiction/Non/Fiction YouTube Channel, and our show website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/ This podcast is produced by V.V. Ganeshananthan, Whitney Terrell, Amelia Fisher, Victoria Freisner, Wil Lasater, and S E Walker.

Ottilie Mulzet’s Translations of László Krasznahorkai

Herscht 07769 • A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East • Seiobo There Below • Destruction and Sorrow beneath the Heavens: Reportage • Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming • The World Goes On • Animalinside**

Others:

Under a Pannonian Sky: Ten Women Poets from Hungary edited by Ottilie Mulzet • Satantango • George Szirtes • “An Angel Passed Above Us” | The Yale Review • Hungarian Translators House • “Herscht 07769 by László Krasznahorkai review – sinister cosmic visions” | The Guardian • “Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s Novels Find a U.S. Audience” |The New York Times

**EXCERPT FROM A CONVERSATION **WITH OTTILIE MULZET

V.V Ganeshananthan: For our listeners who haven’t yet had the pleasure of reading Herscht, this is a show about literature in the news and one of the things that Herscht does is to write to Angela Merkel. That appears on the first page. It’s part of the conceit that may be of particular interest to our listeners.

**Ottilie Mulzet: **Oh, yeah, I forgot about that part. He’s writing to Chancellor Merkel because he’s convinced that the Big Bang is going to be reversed and the whole thing is going to disappear.

**Whitney Terrell: **Speaking of that, there’s a lot of physics in the book. That’s what he’s studying with his buddy, the guy who’s got the weather station. I just want to say the title and the numbers at the end come from his postal district. That’s how he sends the letter off with just his last name and his postal district to the Chancellor, figuring she’ll be able to find him and send her letter back if she needs to. So, the title of the book is a joke in its own way.

**OM: **What’s interesting is that he really immerses himself. For example, before he wrote Satantango in the 80s, he came from this middle class family—one of his one of his parents was a lawyer or something—and he took these really low-paying jobs. It’s important to know that in Hungary, the social stratification, the discrepancy between the poor and the wealthy, is so extreme. This was something that communism corrected to a certain degree, but not really. So he spent a lot of time in this very non privileged social strata, and that’s a lot of where Satantango came from. Just as here, the town in Herscht is modeled on a genuine East German town. I think the postal code is from a district in Spain, but it’s actually Kahla in East Germany. And, for example, when he names the Neo Nazis, a lot of them are either genuine Neo Nazis or he just changed one letter. There’s a lot of almost documentary material in it as well. The house where the Neo Nazis were hanging out, which he refers to as the Burg, that really existed in this town. It really was a fascist hang out. Now the city council owns it, and they’re trying to decide what to do with it.

**VVG: **What does the city council do with the old fascist hangout?

**OM: **I think it’s gonna be like a children’s library or something? It’s crazy, because when I was going over the edits, at one point there’s this whole list of names of Nazis. And so my wonderful editor at New Directions, Declan Spring, wrote a note like, “I couldn’t find all these guys.” And I said, “Well, I spoke toLászló, and I asked him ‘where did you get these names?’ And he said, ‘Well when I was talking to this German cop, I asked him who are the Nazis around here?’” He really does serious research. Some of the names were changed slightly, not a lot, but some of them are still doing time for murder. So I can understand why he didn’t want to name them precisely.

**WT: **I want to talk a little bit about what it’s like to be a writer in Europe, and particularly in Eastern Europe which I don’t know much about. I know what it’s like to be a writer in France, it’s very different than in America. Maybe I’m wrong about this, but I feel like, particularly someone like Stephen King, they’re like celebrities in America. And I feel like writers sort of blend in a little bit more in Europe, or they aren’t treated as celebrities in the same way that Americans do celebrity. Am I wrong? Is his life going to massively change now that he’s won the Nobel Prize, in the way people pay attention to him, and think about and read his work? Has he been relatively under the radar? Was he pretty well known in Europe prior to winning the prize?

**OM: **He’s obviously very well-known in Hungary and he’s very beloved by the segment of the reading public that likes serious literature. It also really differs from country to country. Where I live in the Czech Republic, I have come across famous writers, and they’re like, “Oh, I’m just here like anyone else.” In Hungary, for a variety of reasons, László needs to keep his privacy because he’s spoken out very firmly against the Orbán regime. I don’t know if you saw the short story that he published in The Yale Review recently that was translated by John Batki, and there was an interview with Harry Kunzru, and László described the current Hungarian regime as a psychiatric case. I can’t disagree.

**WT: **Also, didn’t Orban tweet about congratulating him, and he said, thanks but no, thanks basically, okay,

**OM: **That wasn’t actually his official Twitter account. If you go on Facebook, though, it’s really worth it. I should probably just back up a bit, because Orbán, since he came into power, has been pursuing this Kulturkampf in Hungary. For example, there’s this wonderful literary culture that I was talking about that just tends to be very Western leaning, very influenced by European avant gardes, to a certain degree, Philosemitic, but they’re the ones who have actually produced the most important literature over the last 100 years. I’m not saying this with a judgment, but I just think, objectively, they’re the ones, the people who came from this one tendency. A lot of Orbán’s Kulturkampf is “How can I undo this?” He’s trying to bring in this substitute canon. But the major problem is that most of these people don’t write that well, so it’s been a joke lately, the people who are winning, the big literary government prizes, etc.

So anyway, the person—he recently just stepped down from this position—who was like the literature czar of Hungary wrote something on Facebook saying that somebody came up to him at the Frankfurt Book Fair. There was no picture of Krasznahorkai anywhere and somebody came up to him and asked why? As you know, the Frankfurt Book Fair put like a giant lead sign with a picture of László outside of the book fair. So this guy wrote something like, “We didn’t have any pictures of Krasznahorkai at the Hungarian stand because we’re not living in a dictatorship. And blah, blah, blah.” I mean, this is how they speak. They’re incredibly manipulative. Anyway, it sort of became a joke online. Somebody in Gyula, I don’t think it was László—in his hometown, nobody put up a sign or anything. Somebody in this tiny town of Gyula put up a little sheet of paper in their window that says, “In this house, we are proud that Krasznahorkai has won the Nobel Prize.” So László put that on Facebook, and he said, “I’m really grateful even for this A4 sheet of paper.”

This is what I mean when I say that he’s absolutely hilarious. But this just shows you how every debate there is wrenched into this absurdist distortion. So I would say that, among the reading public, he’s very well known, instantly recognized. And for the government, he’s like this anti-hero, even though Orbán congratulated him. They don’t support the kind of literature he writes. They don’t support writers who are independent thinkers. And I should probably mention that a really important part of my formation as a translator has been working at the Hungarian Translator’s House. It’s a residence in Balatonfüred, Hungary. I worked on all of László’s books there, and the government does not support this translator’s house either. So, if they really were happy about it, if they really wanted to do something, it’s right there. Yeah, Orbán congratulated him. But in terms of its deeds, the government has been very much trying to push Hungarian literature in an opposite direction. And I don’t really think they’ve been successful.

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Rebecca Kilroy. Photograph of László Krasznahorkai by Nina Subin.