Imre Kertész translated Nietzsche, Freud and Wittgenstein

Person: Imre Kertész
Lived: 1929–2016
Field: Literature
From: Hungarian

The story

After surviving Auschwitz and Buchenwald, Imre Kertész returned to Budapest and in 1948 finished high school. He found work at the journal Világosság, but in 1951 he lost his job when the publication adopted the Communist Party line. He worked briefly in a factory and in the press department of the Ministry of Heavy Industry, and after two years of military service he began, from 1953, to support himself as a freelance journalist and translator.

NobelPrize.org records that he translated German-language authors including Friedrich Nietzsche, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Arthur Schnitzler, Sigmund Freud, Joseph Roth, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Elias Canetti, all of whom had a significant influence on his own writing. Wikipedia adds his translations of Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, of plays by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Schnitzler and Tankred Dorst, and of aphorisms and thoughts by Wittgenstein.

This work kept him alive as a writer during the decades when his own novels found little appreciation in Hungary. The Jewish Virtual Library notes that translating German authors was how he made his living. It also made major works of European philosophy and drama available to Hungarian readers, and the dialogue with these writers runs through his own books. His fictional diary, Galley Diary, engages with Nietzsche, Kafka and the wider tradition of European cultural criticism.

The German language played a central part in his later life. He found more active support from publishers and reviewers in Germany than at home, and during the 1990s he moved to Berlin. He continued translating German works into Hungarian while writing his own fiction in Hungarian. In 2004 he received the Goethe Medal, an official German decoration awarded by the Goethe-Institut to non-Germans who have performed outstanding service for the German language and international cultural relations.

There is a striking irony in a survivor of the Nazi camps devoting so much of his life to German literature and thought. Kertész's translations built a bridge between two cultures and helped Hungarian readers encounter some of the most important minds of modern Europe.

Why it matters

Kertész's translations opened key works of modern European thought and theatre to Hungarian readers.

About Imre Kertész

Budapest-born survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald whose novel Fatelessness transformed Holocaust literature; in 2002 he became the first Hungarian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

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Imre Kertész

1929–2016 · Literature

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