Ever since its first publication in 1934, Miklós Szentkuthy’s Prae has continued to baffle generations of critics and readers alike. Regarded as a seminal work by some, dismissed as a pretentious monstrosity by others, Prae, Szentkuthy’s first work, was published when the Hungarian author was merely twenty-six years old.[1]
To date, the book has never been translated in its entirety into any language, though excerpts appeared in French and Serbo-Croatian in the 1970s, and sections had been translated into German in the 1930s but were never published. It is quite an enterprise, then, on the part of Contra Mundum Press, to commit to publishing Prae[2], following two other works by Szentkuthy—Marginalia on Casanova and Towards the One and Only Metaphor—all three translated by Tim Wilkinson. For a translator, the sheer bulk of the book is daunting enough, not to mention its myriad stylistic idiosyncrasies: long, convoluted sentences, stunning metaphors and neologisms, the references to branches of learning as diverse as art history, physics, philosophy, and biology, as well as Latin and German phrases, often invented by the writer.
When it comes to writers of stature, comparisons used as advertising catchwords are usually more misleading than helpful, but to give an idea of what reading Szentkuthy may remind the reader of, I would say that he is Joycean in his masterful juggling of European culture in describing everyday life, Rabelaisian in his grotesque extravagance, Sterneian in his predilection for digression as a structural device, and Proustian in his keen and precise recording of sense impressions and their sediments in our mind.
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