Pages

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::

    ReplyDelete
  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).

    ReplyDelete
  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!

    ReplyDelete
  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.

    ReplyDelete
  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!

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

    ReplyDelete
  7. Read much Piers Anthony?

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

    Thanks for all the comments.

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

    ReplyDelete
  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.

    ReplyDelete
  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"?

    ReplyDelete
  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'

    ReplyDelete
  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.

    ReplyDelete