November 1, 2008

Frigyes Karinthy, Soliloquies in the Bath

This post now resides on my other site 50 Watts:


Search for Frigyes Karinthy on Amazon

14 comments:

  1. Wow! Are the 50 other bathtub tales anything like that? ::scrounges in pocket for book money::

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  2. I haven't read them all, but the other pieces are similar -- you might try his collection "Grave and Gay" first, as it is a little easier to find. Definitely pick up "A Journey Round My Skull." It uses the writing style of "The Moral" to describe undergoing brain surgery with only local anesthesia (it's a memoir).

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  3. whoa... this is totally amazing... along with the humor, which is pretty hilarious, it's totally poignant and full of poetry, and amazingly written... and beautiful.

    great great great... i will definitely look at the rest of his books... i am grateful you are so willing to post so much text, i don't have the copyist discipline in me very often!

    p.s. the dust jacket is certainly unbelievably gorgeous, even with teh coffee stain!

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  4. Re: copyist discipline... Walser is my hero in many ways!

    (Typing the Wilhelm Busch excerpt a couple weeks ago, I somehow made no errors -- it was unsettling.)

    I will see what I can find about the dust jacket artist, H.W. Perl.

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  5. Wonderful stuff. Very witty and economic--Martin Amis' "Time's Arrow" 50 years early and much more pared down. I loved 'Journey..' (the book)--must try to find more of his books!

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  6. bought "Journey Around My Skull" on your recommendation, I'm really looking forward to it! Tx!

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  7. Read much Piers Anthony?

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  8. Never read Piers Anthony. Does he have a similar story?

    Thanks for all the comments.

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  9. wow man.. thanks for this.. i guess, i'll have to hunt the flea markets.. only with purpose now..

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  10. Great writing.. Karinthy has been one of my favorites but I missed this one until now. I looked up the short story in Hungarian, and one difference I noticed was in the end instead of 'expressionist poetry' he wrote 'poetry of Kassak', refering to the dadaist painter/writer:

    http://www.lajos-kassak.de/e/index.shtml

    The translator probably thought he would be unfamiliar to the English readers.

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  11. Thanks for sharing lkozma! I like the translation, but suspected some things were changed -- if not by the translator, then by the editor/publisher: after all, the publisher must have decided to change Frigyes to Frederick.

    I've been dying to know: how do you pronounce "Frigyes"?

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  12. Will, it is quite hard to pronounce because 'gy' together denote a sound that doesn't appear in English, it sounds as 'g' plus some semi-mute consonant, but there is also a touch of 'd' in it... it is probably most similar to 'g' as in 'angular', as some people pronounce it 'ang-yular'. Most native English speakers hear it as 'dg', as in 'dodge', but I would say it is quite different.

    Then the s in the end is pronounced 'sh'.

    So it would be something like 'Freed-yesh' or 'freeg - yesh'

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  13. Have you read anything about or by about "Koz'ma Prutkov"?


    http://www.geocities.com/uniart/mix/kp.htm

    I love your blog, I found it when I searched for Marcel Schwob.

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