| Imre Kertész | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born | November 9, 1929 Budapest, Hungary |
| Occupation | Novelist |
| Notable award(s) | Nobel Prize in
Literature 2002 |
Imre Kertész (Hungarian pronunciation: [imrɛ ˈkɛrteːs]; born November 9, 1929) is a Hungarian Jewish author, Holocaust concentration camp survivor, and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature[1] in 2002 "for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history".
Contents |
He was born on 9 November 1929 in Budapest, Hungary.[2] At the age of 14 he was deported with other Hungarian Jews during World War II to the Auschwitz concentration camp, and was later sent to Buchenwald.[2]
Kertész' best-known work, Fatelessness (Sorstalanság), describes the experience of fifteen-year-old György (George) Köves in the concentration camps of Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Zeitz. Some have interpreted the book as quasi-autobiographical, but the author disavows a strong biographical connection. His writings translated into English include Kaddish for a Child Not Born (Kaddis a meg nem született gyermekért) and Liquidation (Felszámolás). Kertész initially found little appreciation for his writing in Hungary[2] and moved to Germany. Kertész started translating German works into Hungarian[2] - such as The Birth of Tragedy by Nietzsche, the plays of Dürrenmatt, Schnitzler and Tankred Dorst, the thoughts of Wittgenstein - and did not publish another novel until the late 1980s.[3] He continues to write in Hungarian and submits his works to publishers in Hungary.
A film based on his novel Fatelessness was made in Hungary in 2005 for which he wrote the script.[3] Although sharing the same title, the movie is more autobiographical than the book. The film was released at various dates throughout the world in 2005 and 2006.
Kertész and his wife currently reside in Berlin.
Vasvári, Louise O., and Tötösy de Zepetnek, Steven, eds.
Imre Kertész and Holocaust Literature. West Lafayette:
Purdue UP, 2005.[1]
Vasvári, Louise O., and Tötösy de Zepetnek, Steven, eds.
Comparative Central European Holocaust Studies. West
Lafayette: Purdue UP, 2009.[2]
Molnár, Sára. "Nobel in Literature 2002 Imre Kertész's Aesthetics
of the Holocaust," CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and
Culture 5.1 (2003)[3]
Tötösy de Zepetnek, Steven. "And the 2002 Nobel Prize for
Literature Goes to Imre Kertész, Jew and Hungarian," CLCWeb:
Comparative Literature and Culture 5.1 (2003)[4]
Tötösy de Zepetnek, Steven. "Imre Kertész's Nobel Prize, Public
Discourse, and the Media," CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and
Culture 7.4 (2005)[5]
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Imre Kertesz
Hungary
|
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||
| Look for Imre Kertész on one of Wikipedia's sister projects:
Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. Please search for Imre Kertész in Wikipedia to check for alternative titles or spellings.
Other reasons this message may be displayed:
|
Imre Kertész (born November 9, 1929, Budapest) is a Hungarian Jewish author, Holocaust concentration camp survivor, and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002.
Contents |
Kaddish for a Child Not Born (translated by Christopher C. Wilson and Katharina M. Wilson), 1999
• I do what I have to do, although I don’t know why I have to.
• I am still here, although I don’t know why; accidentally, I guess, as I was born; I am as much or as little accomplice to my staying alive as I was to my birth.
• Man is always a little at fault, that’s all.
• I stayed alive therefore I am,
• At any rate I found myself writing because I had to write, although I didn’t know why.
• For me this is a fact, writing is necessity, I don’t know why, but it seems it was the only solution offered to me, even if it doesn’t solve anything.
• What we usually mean by fate is what we least understand, that is to say, ourselves, that subversive, unknown individual constantly plotting against us, whom , estranged and alienated but still bowing with disgust before his might, we call, for the of simplicity, fate.
• When I look ahead I only look back, when I stare at the paper I only see the past;
• ‘Auschwitz cannot be explained.’ And yet , it doesn’t take a Wittgenstein to notice that the sentence is faulty even from the point of pure linguistic logic;
• I look up the glorious air or the clouds into which I keep digging my grave with my pen, diligently, like a forced laborer.
• The sentence ‘Auschwitz cannot be explained is faulty simply from a formal point of view, for anything that is has an explanation, even if by necessity a merely self-serving faulty, so so explanation.
• By way of that wretched sentence ‘ Auschwitz cannot be explained’ is the wretched author explaining that we should be silent concerning Auschwitz, that Auschwitz doesn’t exist, or, rather, that it didn’t , for the only facts that cannot be explained are those that don’t or didn’t exist.
• On the other hand, what is really irrational and what truly cannot be explained is not evil but, contrarily, the good.
• Failure alone remains as the one single accomplishable experience;
• The world is not our imagination but our nightmare, full of inconceivable surprises-
• Nothing upsets me as much as a shop window jammed full of objects; such windows literally depress, sadden, even demoralize me.
• My body is foreign to me that body that sustains me and will, ultimately, kill me.
• Cognitively we don’t know and will never discover what occasions the cause of our existence, we don’t know the purpose of our existence and we don’t know why we have to disappear from here once we have been placed here, I don’t know, why I have to live this fragmentary existence, which happened to be my lot, instead of a life that perhaps does exist somewhere. Why did I get this lot? This sex, this body, this awareness, this geographic setting, this fate, this language, this history, this rented room?
• I have felt that some sort of awful shame is attached to my name and that I have somehow brought this shame along from somewhere I have never been, and that I have carried this sin as my sin even though I have never committed it; this sin pursues me all my life, which life is undoubtedly not my own even thought I live it , I suffer from it die of it.
• ‘No”- I could never be another person’s father, fate, god, “No”- it should never happen to another child, what happened to me; my childhood. (Auschwitz).
• How can we do justice even when it concerns truth itself, since for me only one truth exists, my truth, even if it is a delusion, yes, my delusion; my delusion.
• Auschwitz, I told her, appears to me in the image of a father; yes, the two terms, Auschwitz, and father, resonate the same echoes in me, and if the observation is that God is an exalted father, then God, too is revealed to me in the image of Auschwitz.
|
|
Wikis
Quiz
Map
Search
