{"id":10314,"date":"2013-05-03T09:49:47","date_gmt":"2013-05-03T13:49:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=10314"},"modified":"2013-05-02T16:52:30","modified_gmt":"2013-05-02T20:52:30","slug":"rereading-no-rewriting-casanova","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/rereading-no-rewriting-casanova\/","title":{"rendered":"Rereading, no Rewriting Casanova"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Set aside for my late summer reading (when all the traveling is done & I can hunker down with fat books) are two strange, neglected yet major European Big Bokes. I’ll get back to one of them later on, but here is news from the other one \u2014 via an\u00a0intelligent, well-informed review published in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Opening paras below; full article here<\/a>.<\/div>\n
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Marginalia on Casanova: St. Orpheus Breviary I<\/p>\n\n\n\n
by:<\/td>\nMikl\u00f3s Szentkuthy<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n\n\n\n
date:<\/td>\n09.03.2012<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n\n\n\n
pp:<\/td>\n360<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n\n\n\n
tags:<\/td>\nFiction<\/a>, \u00a0Literary Fiction<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n
PURCHASE BOOK<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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David van Dusen<\/a>\u00a0on\u00a0Marginalia on Casanova: St. Orpheus Breviary I<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n

All That Exists Is the Only True Luxury: Mikl\u00f3s Szentkuthy\u2019s “Marginalia on Casanova”<\/h3>\n

May 2nd, 2013<\/abbr>RESET<\/a>–<\/a>+<\/a><\/p>\n<\/header>\n

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MARGINALIA ON CASANOVA<\/em>\u00a0is the first English translation of Hungarian novelist Mikl\u00f3s Szentkuthy\u2019s commentary on the German edition of a French memoir written by a Venetian librarian, Giacomo Casanova, in the 1790s. Casanova\u2019s original memoir,\u00a0Histoire de ma vie jusqu\u2019\u00e0 l\u2019an 1797<\/em>, is housed at the Biblioth\u00e8que Nationale in Paris and signed \u201cJacques Casanova de Seingalt\u201d (since Casanova came to prefer the French \u201cJacques\u201d to \u201cGiacomo,\u201d and simply liked the sound of \u201cde Seingalt\u201d). TheHistoire<\/em>\u00a0was unpublished in its author\u2019s lifetime, and the manuscript was partially destroyed when Casanova died \u2014 \u201cnobly enough,\u201d according to his friend the Prince de Ligne \u2014 in 1798. It first went to press in the 1820s as\u00a0Aus den Memoiren des Venetianers Jacob Casanova de Seingalt<\/em>, a German translation totaling over 6,000 pages in 12 volumes.<\/p>\n

There was no complete French edition of the\u00a0Histoire<\/em>\u00a0until the 1960s, and it was the German text that Szentkuthy relied on, in 1938, when he decided to write the singular commentary that he published in Budapest the following year. Szentkuthy\u2019s \u201ccommentary\u201d is possibly better classified as a novel; he himself considered it the first volume of Szentkuthy\u2019s recherch\u00e9, pan-European opus, the 10-volume\u00a0Szent Orpheus brevi\u00e1riuma\u00a0<\/em>(St. Orpheus Breviary<\/em>).\u00a0Marginalia on Casanova<\/em>\u00a0is a dazzling English rendering by Tim Wilkinson, of Szentkuthy\u2019s 1939 book, and also Szentkuthy\u2019s English debut. (The other volumes of the\u00a0Breviary\u00a0<\/em>\u2014 with titles like\u00a0Black Renaissance<\/em>,Europa Minor<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0In the Footsteps of Eurydice\u00a0<\/em>\u2014 will, I hope, be forthcoming from Contra Mundum Press soon.)<\/p>\n

Mikl\u00f3s Szentkuthy \u2014 born Mikl\u00f3s Pfisterer, in 1908 \u2014 introduced himself to Budapest\u2019s literary circles in 1934 with a self-published novel,\u00a0Prae<\/em>, and he remained a provocative figure until his death in 1988. Szentkuthy is still referred to as the \u201csacred monster\u201d of Hungarian letters, and the expression is apt. His\u00a0huge output \u2014 foremost, the \u201cRomanesque cathedral\u201d that is the\u00a0Breviary\u00a0<\/em>\u2014 is at once speculative and manneristic, hyper-erotic and hyper-religious, bleary eyed and clear-sighted.<\/p>\n

Szentkuthy\u2019s ambition was medieval: to produce a\u00a0catalogus rerum<\/em>, \u201can index of all entities.\u201d His method is \u201cHellenistic-rococo\u201d: 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: \u201cthe muck of literary programme is not allowed to dirty his white cuffs.\u201d In the\u00a0Marginalia<\/em>, \u201cmetaphysical facts,\u201d \u201cfactual truths,\u201d and deliriums are calculated to transect \u201cwith the epic grace of an apoplectic fit.\u201d It is not accidental, then, that he was thrilled by the expression of the15th-century polymath, Nicolas of Cusa \u2014 echoed by Romantics like Novalis and Coleridge \u2014 that the essence of all things is a\u00a0coincidentia oppositorum<\/em>: a \u201ccoincidence of opposites.\u201d Szentkuthy is, himse<\/a>lf, such a coincidence.<\/p>\n

[continued\u00a0here<\/a>.]<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Set aside for my late summer reading (when all the traveling is done & I can hunker down with fat books) are two strange, neglected yet major European Big Bokes. I’ll get back to...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,103],"tags":[1281],"class_list":["post-10314","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","category-translation","tag-miklos-szentkuthy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10314","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10314"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10314\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10318,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10314\/revisions\/10318"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}