“Szentkuthy’s “commentary” is possibly better classified as a novel; he himself considered it the first volume of Szentkuthy’s recherché, pan-European opus, the 10-volume Szent Orpheus breviáriuma (St. Orpheus Breviary). Marginalia on Casanova is a dazzling English rendering by Tim Wilkinson, of Szentkuthy’s 1939 book, and also Szentkuthy’s English debut. (The other volumes of the Breviary — with titles like Black Renaissance,Europa Minor and In the Footsteps of Eurydice — will, I hope, be forthcoming from Contra Mundum Press soon.)

Miklós Szentkuthy — born Miklós Pfisterer, in 1908 — introduced himself to Budapest’s literary circles in 1934 with a self-published novel, Prae, and he remained a provocative figure until his death in 1988. Szentkuthy is still referred to as the “sacred monster” of Hungarian letters, and the expression is apt. His huge output — foremost, the “Romanesque cathedral” that is the Breviary — is at once speculative and manneristic, hyper-erotic and hyper-religious, bleary eyed and clear-sighted.         

Szentkuthy’s ambition was medieval: to produce a catalogus rerum, “an index of all entities.” His method is “Hellenistic-rococo”: he writes spirited variations on the letter of the canon. His syntax and affect are irreverently modernist, yet there is nothing programmatic about his avant-gardism, and what he wrote of Casanova holds true of him as well: “the muck of literary programme is not allowed to dirty his white cuffs.” In the Marginalia, “metaphysical facts,” “factual truths,” and deliriums are calculated to transect “with the epic grace of an apoplectic fit.” It is not accidental, then, that he was thrilled by the expression of the15th-century polymath, Nicolas of Cusa — echoed by Romantics like Novalis and Coleridge — that the essence of all things is a coincidentia oppositorum: a “coincidence of opposites.” Szentkuthy is, himself, such a coincidence.”

To read the entire review: Los Angeles Review of Books (May 2, 2013)

“As a text that defies classification into any particular genre, Towards the One and Only Metaphor is perhaps most accurately thought of as literature — in Blanchot’s expansive sense of the term, literature is that which ‘ruins’ distinctions and limits in its creation of a unique and amorphous hybrid beyond the distinctions of a particular genre. Originally published in 1935 and republished in 1985, Towards the One and Only Metaphor is, as Dezső Baróti elucidated, comprised of “unconventional journal-like passages expanded into short essays, plans for novels, poetic meditations that have the effect of free verse, and paradoxical aphorisms,” all of which reveal a moral philosophy, a politics, an erotics. “Its predominant motifs (insofar as one can succinctly describe it in a few words) are most especially nature, love, eroticism, sex. All that, however, is constantly painted over by the vibration of the unconcealed presence of a writer constantly in search of himself, and rife with beguiling, stimulating, and ever-renewed surprises.” In this sense, it is an essayistic and confessional work à la Montaigne, or like the ruminative waste books of Lichtenberg, or Joubert’s keen-eyed observations. Yet, if as fragmentary as those texts, Towards the One and Only Metaphor is at the same time ordered, like a group of disparate stars that, when viewed from afar, reveal or can be perceived to form a constellation — they are sculpted by a geometry of thought, for, as András Keszthelyi observed, the text is essentially something of a manifesto, “an explicit formulation of the author’s intentions, his scale of values, or, if you wish: his ars poetica.”

For the full essay: Asymptote (April 2013).

And for an excerpt from: Towards the One and Only Metaphor.

“The philosophical essays [of Pessoa] are thematically similar to Schopenhauer’s writings, especially his essay on free will, which Pessoa owned in a French translation.  The writing style resembles Pascal’s Pensees, Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human, and even Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Remarks in that they are fragments on various philosophers and topics: rationalism, free will, causation, Pascal, Heraclitus, and Thomas Aquinas.

The essays will unlikely appeal to Anglo-American philosophers who eschew literary writing in favor of formal logic and linguistic analysis.  Pessoa’s meditations are impressionistic and fragmentary, not rigorously argumentative.  Thereby, he provides no deductive proofs or formulae.  Rather, he provides notebook entries that show a brilliant mind at work—profound insights without logical apparatus.

The newly published essays will allow readers to explore Pessoa’s philosophy in the context of his work.  Although Pessoa claimed to be a “poet animated by philosophy,” we can now consider him to be a philosopher, not merely a poet who researched philosophy.  In this way, Pessoa was a poet-philosopher akin to W.B. Yeats, not like T.S. Eliot or Wallace Stevens, who wrote on philosophical themes.”

Read the whole review here.

Allan Graubard on Pessoa’s Philosophical Essays in Leonardo 46: 1 (2013).

“The relationship of poetry to philosophy, and vice versa, which to my mind at least is one theme of these musings, however seemingly couched in the discourse of argument, is an exceptionally rich area. In one sense it returns to language a resolution not to foreclose too quickly on meaning, significance and resonance. In another sense it can open a reciprocal current that enlivens the concept that seeks clarity in its expression and the expression that seeks clarity in its embodiment.

I cannot but believe that behind Pessoa’s “pre-heteronyms,” which feed the current volume, and his “heteronyms,” which feed the books he is celebrated for, that play carried the day, and that all else to follow for their author would come because of his mastery in playing.

Pessoa’s Philosophical Essays are part and parcel of this sensibility, which left me wanting more from the aforesaid Charles Robert Anon and Alexander Search, however much those two last names, when placed contiguously, transform my want into something entirely else: Anon Search.” — Allan Graubard

Read the full review here.

András Nagy’s portrait of Szentkuthy in The Berlin Review of Books:

“The mask in general is an important part of the identity of the personality; paradoxically it may be even a synonym for it as the use of the borrowed “face” tells more of the person applying it than the features he is born with. The experience with identities was regularly developed into novels applying different protagonists, characters, and roles, yet Szentkuthy had to realize in the years to come that daily life must also be lived in different masks. A mask was needed to hide those features of his very self that were rejected by the more and more intolerant authorities that directly and indirectly attempted and partly infiltrated his life and even his works. However, with Szentkuthy’s intellect and unlimited free spirit, the attempts to control him regularly failed as he was happily using different incognitos and roles, while keeping deeply hidden what was behind the masks. These secrets were carefully registered and kept in a “giant-diary” as he liked to call it, hundreds of thousands of pages of the most authentic chronicle from his early age until almost to his death. It included significant entries for each day, obviously touching upon the most personal and the most abstract issues, being both extremely vulgar and extremely subtle, as well as ideas and recollections of people and events he came across, likely matching the same high artistic level and aesthetic quality as the rest of his work. Even if it will not be revealed still for many years to come, it is an important part, if not the most important one of the author’s oeuvre. Szentkuthy suggested in an interview that his whole oeuvre could be defined, described, and interpreted as a “giant-diary”, modeled on the textual corpus of Saint-Simon and of Montaigne. Stories, novels, studies, essays, etc. may turn out to have a wholly different meaning once read in the  larger context. It is easy to imagine then that once the diaries will be opened – this will occur for the first time in 2013 – readers will have to reinterpret all of Szentkuthy’s writings in a radically new way. Surprises, and even revelations, of literary history are to be expected in the years to come.”

For the full essay: go here.

FORTHCOMING THIS APRIL!

Stuart Kendall works time in a physical way — takes the ancient tablets and breaks them into pages, pages that shatter the ongoing narrative into (instead) confrontative moments. [...] the strikingly handsome Contra Mundum edition [of Gilgamesh] has the feel of picking up a fragment of the cuneiform tablet, miraculously lucid, magically set … the solemn priestly tablets of the “original”  … are transformed into communiqués from the field of action: the page, [which is] the field, spacetime itself, your moment. … [This is an] exemplary translation [that] recover[s] the time of listening. 

By chopping sentences into lines, staggering them down the page, not letting the sentence rest, Kendall keeps us going, each page a reward and a challenge to go on. It’s wonderfully unsettling [… and] dramatically urgent, starting and stopping like a man in rage, his timeless pauses, his insistence on bringing us at every moment into the hero’s moment.

Kendall can make us feel the baffled stammer of a hero unsure of what to cry out next. His method is frictional, making the reader react tablet by tablet, ever thrown back into the story. Ability to react to stimuli is the universal property of, surest sign of, life.  – Robert Kelly, Nomadics

Read the whole review here.

“I come back to scandalous neglect (other European countries are fine with him). Wilkinson himself once said that English literature is “boring”, and compared to this, it is: with a very few exceptions, and they know who they are, English writers (I refer specifically to the English) may as well be producing Ladybird books, so formally conventional, so stylistically timid, are they. Open your minds, then, to the European enlightenment, sit back and let this exquisitely thought-provoking book seep into you. Let’s hope the remaining nine volumes, and indeed the rest of Szentkuthy’s oeuvre, get translated soon.” – Nicolas Lezard, The Guardian

Read the full review here.

Against a narcotic culture whose primary desire is stupefaction

Andrea Scrima talks to Rainer J. Hanshe, founder of Contra Mundum Press

The Brooklyn Rail, Dec/Jan 2012-13

“Often, typically before disasters or in the midst of excruciating crises, many artists believe or feel that their work is meaningless and without value. Who is an artist before a surgeon or scientist? But the fact that tyrants and political regimes of every age have been threatened by art again and again, condemned it as degenerate or poisonous, and have silenced, brutalized, or murdered artists because of their work (and it is happening in our own time) only serves to illustrate how significant art is, that it is our one greatest power — the unique power of the individual, the singular force of the marginalized, and therefore, a political force. I would even go so far as to say that the ‘enemy’ of art experiences it more acutely than its devotee or acolyte, for the latter is generally too ‘pious’ and adoring, whereas art’s ‘enemy’ suffers its transformative threat more, is even endangered by it, hence their terror. It is the Platonic fear of art’s power over the ‘soul.’ And the fear of the destruction of the polis, but destruction only leads to new creations, to mutations that take us into new territory. What we have here is something inordinately potent — art is a life force, the vital breath that sustains us in the midst of our most excruciating trials. It is the powerless individual’s animating energy.”

Read the full interview here: against a culture of stupefaction.

M.A. Orthofer on Marginalia on Casanova:

“Marginalia on Casanova is an odd, fascinating book — a philosophical work, but also one of interpretation, in several layers, from eras and context, to Casanova’s own words as reflection of his life, times, and deeds, and finally also as a work of self-reflection. Living in such very different times — 1930s Hungary ! — Szentkuthy does travel to nearby Vienna and Venice but even these descriptions seem removed from the reality of the times, and these asides are more aesthetic mind-voyages than physical ones; the bulk of the book is grounded entirely elsewhere, situated in even more distant times. Szentkuthy comments little on the present-day — but then Casanova also allows him to focus on the timeless universals, love first and foremost among them. [...] Marginalia on Casanova is not so much digressive as involuted, its arguments and observations turned and repeated in a structure that is complex, ordered, yet also strikingly creative. Rigorously argued, offering a broad and deep vision, it is also surprisingly entertaining.

Read the full review here.