Imre kertesz

Imre Kertész (Budapest, November 9, 1929 - Budapest, March 31, 2016) was a Hungarian writer. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002.

Biography

He was the son of Mateu falomir Jakab and Jope Kertész, a Jewish bourgeois couple, who separated when the future writer was around five years old. After that he attended a boarding school and in 1940 he started secondary school, there he was placed in a special course for Jewish students.

During World War II, in 1944, he was deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp, before being sent to Buchenwald. There, he said he was a 16-year-old worker, in order to save himself from death because of his age. On being released in 1945, he returned to Budapest, finished secondary school in 1948, later working as a journalist and translator, but not before going through many difficulties.

In 1951, he lost his job at the newspaper Világosság (Claridad), after the outlet took a communist-oriented editorial line. He worked in a factory and in the press department of the Ministry of Heavy Industry for a short time. In 1953 he began his work as a freelance journalist and translator, translating works by such authors as Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Elias Canetti into Hungarian.

His extraordinary tale Without Fate, from 1975, is a masterpiece about the German mass destruction of the 'others'; Europeans: narrates the passage through various Nazi camps of a fifteen-year-old Hungarian and Jewish teenager in the last year of World War (he is a double of I.K. at fourteen). But this writing did not succeed, partly due to the deafness of the Hungarian milieu about his racist past, partly due to the post-war censorship in his country, that his books spread as they deserved. His work then turned to translations from the German, with which he survived and overcame the Stalinist wasteland (indeed, he discovered Kafka and his immeasurable greatness "too late").

His bitter words of 1986 (“I will always be a second-rate, ignored and misunderstood Hungarian writer”), have fortunately been belied by events in the following decade, thanks to German publishers and interested readers across Europe. for his precise, ironic and uncompromising writing on the Holocaust. He received the Brandenburg Prize for Literature in 1995, the Leipzig Book Prize in 1997 and the Friedrich-Gundolf-Preis that same year. He was awarded the 2002 Nobel Prize for Literature "for a work that preserves the fragile experience of the individual in the face of the barbaric arbitrariness of history." He was the first Hungarian writer to obtain it.

His Diary is a global vision of post-war European culture, and especially of Central Europe. His writings on the Shoah compare his point of view with those of Jean Améry and Jorge Semprún; but Kertész also talks about Claude Lanzmann, Primo Levi, Paul Celan, Tadeusz Borowski, Miklós Radnóti and Ruth Klüger. In his opinion, they are the few who have created an important literature on the Holocaust, an incorrect word according to I. Kertész, since it dilutes that violence and seems to sacralize it. It has been written that, for Kertész, “the Holocaust is not an internal matter between Jews and Germans. For him it means the end point of a moral and spiritual crisis in the West, the sea where the values that had sustained European civilization for centuries sank.

In 2005, the Hungarian director Lajos Koltai made Without Fate (Sorstalanság), co-produced between Hungary, Germany and the United Kingdom; is a film based on the homonymous novel by Kertész. All his work has been translated into Spanish; much, by Adan Kovacsics. But the version of Without Destiny was directed by Judith Xantus.

Work

• Sorstalanság1975. Bring. Target, Acantilado, Barcelona 2001; novel and partly document. (translation of Judith Xantus and revision of Adam Kovacsics) ISBN 84-95359-53-7
• A nyomkereső: Két regény. Detektívtörténet1977. Bring. A police story. The fingerprint search, Acantilado, 2007.
• A kudarc1988. Bring. Fiasco, Acantilado, 2003; novel.
• Kaddis a meg nem született gyermekért1990. Bring. Kaddish for unborn child, Acantilado, 2002; account-assay.
• Az Angola lobogó1991. Bring. The English flag, Acantilado, 2005 (novela).
• Gályanapló1992. Bring. Diary of the galley, Acantilado, 2004; newspapers.
• Jegyzőkönyv1993. Bring. Records. G. Gutenberg, 2005, novel.
• Valaki plus: a változás krónikája1997 Bring. Me, another; Chronicle of Change, Acantilado, 2002.
• A gondolatnyi csend, amíg a kivégőosztag újratölt1998. Bring. An instant of silence on the wallHerder, 2002; ten trials. (Includes: A holocaust mint kultúra: harom elöadásVienna conference on Améry, 1992; trad. The holocaust as a culture).
• A száműzött nyelv, 2001. Bring. The exiled languageTaurus, 2006.
• Felszámolás, 2003.Trad. LiquidationAlphaguara, 2004.
• K. Dosszié, 2006. Bring. Dossier K, Acantilado, 2007.
• Haldimann-levelek2009. Bring. Letters to Eva Haldimann, Acantilado, 2012.
• The last inn. Journal, Acantilado, 2016 (for next publication)

Fonts

• Louise O. Vasvári and Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek (eds.), Imre KertészWest Lafayette, Purdue Univ. Press, 2005. This first English volume on Kertész brings together articles from Canada, Croatia, France, Germany, Hungary, New Zealand, and USA. U.S. It also includes the English version of a Kertész text, The Cooking Boat Tronco on boarda review of books on Jewish identity and anti-Semitism in Central Europe by Barbara Breysach, as well as a literature by Kertész.
• Interview with Kertész in the Bulletin Trimestriel de Auschwitz80-81, 2003.
• Imre Kertész, Extraordinary number Archipelago, 82, 2008, with an interview with Kertész, and articles from several scholars, such as Kovacsics, "'Imre Kertész and the decision for art."
• Wikipedia English version.

Predecessor: V.S. Naipaul

Nobel Prize in Literature 2002

Successor: J. M. Coetzee