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111 Reading Imre Kertész in English Adrienne Kertzer The work of Imre Kertész is rarely the subject of North American scholarship on the Holocaust. Although the canon of Holocaust literature discussed in North America includes many authors who do not write in English—writers such as Elie Wiesel, Primo Lévi, Aharon Appelfeld, Tadeusz Borowski, Ida Fink, and Charlotte Delbo—Kertész is, despite his Nobel Prize, not to be found in this group. His absence , both caused by and reflected in the lack of interest in translating his work, points to the distance between his fiction and popular patterns of Holocaust representation in North America. My Hungarian-born relatives have told me that I cannot pronounce Kertész’s name correctly; this paper begins by acknowledging that failure, for its subject is precisely that limitation, the understanding of Kertész that results when one reads him, as I do, only in English. Other than a few essays and interviews, only two of his eleven works are available for such readers (the three new English translations of 2004 by Tim Wilkinson were not available to me at the time of the writing of this paper; for these, see the Works Cited, below; in the paper, I quote from the Wilson & Wilson translation , Fateless): Sorstalanság (his first novel, published in 1975, translated in English as Fateless in 1992 and as Fatelessness in 2004) and Kaddis a meg nem születetett gyermekért (published in 1990, translated as Kaddish for a Child Not Born by Cristopher C. Wilson and Katharina M. Wilson and published in 1997, and translated as Kaddish for an Unborn Child by Tim Wilkinson and published in 2004). Fatelessness and Kaddish for a Child Not Born are often described as the first and last part of a trilogy, the second part being the un-translated A kudarc (The Failure). Numerous reviewers assume that there is a single narrator in the trilogy and regard him as a veiled portrait of Kertész at different stages of his life, but I regard the narrators as invented characters who are neither identical to Kertész, nor to each other. Here, too, translation affects my reading in that according to the English translation, the narrator of Fatelessness is called George Koves whereas the narrator of Kaddish for a Child Not Born refers to himself only as B. Although I have read that Kertész is “unhappy with the translations and is eager to have the books retranslated” (Riding E5), I have read such statements only in articles that cite Kertész indirectly, not in interviews in which he actually expresses his unhappiness . István Deák says that the English translation of Sorstalanság, Fateless, 112 Adrienne Kertzer “misses the zest of the Hungarian original” (66), but others regard Wilson & Wilson as “the best-ever translators of Hungarian into English” (“Translators” C7; on the translation of Kaddish, see Wilkinson). Certainly, Kertész shares the problem of language with other Holocaust writers. That language is limited in its ability to represent the Holocaust is an idea often expressed by writers who stress that the everyday language we use—for example , the words for hunger and thirst—cannot describe what hunger and thirst mean in the camps. Kertész observes in his essay “The Exiled Tongue” that we are fortunate that the Holocaust does not have its “own exclusive language,” in that such a language “would destroy those who speak it” (qtd. in “The Freedom” 41). His fiction draws attention to the inadequacy of language, for example, in the way that his protagonist George Koves in Fateless observes that “‘Terrible’ . . . is not exactly the term that [he] would use to characterize Auschwitz” (86). In contrast to other writers, however, Kertész does not claim that no words can adequately characterize Auschwitz. He finds the words that he needs in our daily lives. To look for them elsewhere is to fall into the trap of what he calls Holocaust kitsch: “any representation . . . that is incapable of understanding or unwilling to understand the organic connection between our own deformed mode of life . . . and the very possibility of the Holocaust” (“Who Owns Auschwitz?” 270). When George returns to Budapest after liberation, a journalist wants him to write about “the hell of the camps” (181). George rejects the metaphor, and when the journalist falls back upon the predictable response—that the camps are unimaginable—George thinks, “That’s probably why they say ‘hell’ instead” (182). The...

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