Finally another translation by Danilo Kiš, author of a wonderful oeuvre ★★★★☆

Béla Hamvas, the great Hungarian essayist, has said: ‘One must travel as fire spreads, from a center in all directions, and in doing so, like fire, eat up everything one encounters.’ Danilo Kiš, descended from a Montenegrin mother and a Hungarian father, puts it this way: ‘I always travel – and this is a paradox – in both directions: forward and backward, to the past and to the future.’ Perhaps it is because he wrote about the train journey, and not like Hamvas about the life journey, that the Yugoslav writer sounds more prosaic, although he also recognizes something of the travel metabolism that Hamvas spoke of. We travel through landscapes, Kiš notes, and she through us.

We also see something of this double travel movement in his literary works. In it he returned to the near past in order to create an image that could at the same time serve as a warning for the future of Europe. Danilo Kiš (1935-1989) is the author of a number of wonderful novels and collections of short stories, each of which attempts to renew the literary form. Whether it’s about A funerary monument to Boris Davidovich or Encyclopedia of the Dead, these are works that still bear witness to great literary beauty. This is especially true for the trilogy in which he recorded his family history: Childhood† garden, as and Hourglass†

That some three or four decades after the appearance of the Dutch translations of those works, a collection of his works is finally published in Dutch is almost a miracle. Central European literature no longer has the prominent status it had in the 1990s, although what appeared there then (and still appears today) can be regarded as a literary Fundgrube consider.

Polemic against Kundera

In gay poet Kiš’s texts about travel, about his writing, but also about political subjects have been brought together. Below this is the important text ‘Variations on Central European Themes’, a series of reflections still worth reading for those trying to understand how Europe works. The text appeared in 1987 and can be read as a personal confession: Kiš positions himself as a Central European author. In doing so, he also got involved in a debate in which writers such as Péter Nádas, Ryszard Kapuściński and, last but not least, Milan Kundera took part. The ‘Variations’ are primarily a reaction to the latter’s position.

In his polemic against Kundera, Kiš warns against a ‘nostalgia for Europe’; say the longing for a mythologized Austria-Hungary. Vienna was for Kiš the ‘center of all annexationist and reactionary tendencies’. And although Kiš is averse to any form of nationalism (which, according to him, stems from pointless laziness), it is precisely here that he shows sympathy for European nationalism. This does not isolate oneself from the European context, according to Kiš, but does just the opposite: they oppose uniformisation.

The importance of language

‘Language is destiny’, he writes; a thought that sometimes seems to be forgotten in the Netherlands. “Any attempt to interfere with the integrity of a writer’s language is uncertain and fraught with risk.” Central European writers know this all too well. They are often (though not always) writers who work in a small language.

Perhaps it was precisely this position that forced them to strive for innovation in form. For Kiš elevates ‘a sense of form’ to the quality of Central European literature. It is false modesty to add that in doing so he is generalizing a personal obsession. One cannot think of the novels of Kundera or Nádas without naming their specific form. Central Europe is therefore more than a landscape that you can travel through by train and eat as you pass.