Read Portraits of a Marriage Online
Authors: Sándor Márai
Portraits of a Marriage (59 page)
Welcome, gentlemen. You are served, sir!
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This is a joke impossible to translate directly. Ede / Lajos is mispronouncing the names of the two leading, opposing schools of Hungarian writing in the twentieth century: he says
népis
instead of
népies
(popular ruralist) and
turbánus
(or turbanists) instead of
urbánus
(urbanist, cosmopolitan).
Sándor Márai was born in Kassa, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in 1900, and died in San Diego, California, in 1989. He rose to fame as one of the leading literary novelists in Hungary in the 1930s. Profoundly antifascist, he survived the war, but persecution by the Communists drove him from the country in 1948, first to Italy, then to the United States. His novel
Embers
was published for the first time in English in 2001.
George Szirtes is the prize-winning author of thirteen books of poetry and several translations from Hungarian, including Sándor Márai’s
Casanova in Bolzano
and
The Rebels
. He lives in the United Kingdom.