{"id":294606,"date":"2013-07-15T19:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-07-15T19:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2013\/07\/15\/laf-interview-with-laszlo-krasznahorkai\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T15:56:36","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T15:56:36","slug":"laf-interview-with-laszlo-krasznahorkai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2013\/07\/15\/laf-interview-with-laszlo-krasznahorkai\/","title":{"rendered":"LAF Interview with L\u00e1szl\u00f3 Krasznahorkai"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over at the Literature Across Frontiers<\/a> website, there’s a great interview with everyone’s favorite apocalyptic writer, L\u00e1szl\u00f3 Krasznahorkai:<\/p>\n

\n

[. . .] First I wanted to talk to him about another work of his, Animalinside<\/em>, a beautifully published pamphlet (in The Cahiers Series) of a collaboration between the author and the German painter, Max Neumann.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

James Hopkin: What was the idea behind this work that alternates paintings of a black dog with your words?<\/b><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

L\u00e1szl\u00f3 Krasznahorkai: I wanted to look at a picture so long until I could look at it no more and after that to write about what I saw in this picture and after that I would show this text to the painter, and the painter, perhaps, could make a new version of this painting, like a response, and after that I would write again, and so on, and so would come a dialogue, and perhaps from this material we could make something.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

To begin with, I wrote a short text about this picture, because this picture deals with the bad, and I couldn\u2019t be free of this picture, because I understand that it is not a solution to drop out because something stays forever, so the best way was to write about it. I had a plan to write about the \u2018new brutale\u2019 and that\u2019s why, the next day, I went to Max Neumann, the painter, and I made a small translation of my text into German, and Max was very satisfied, very excited, but he said absolutely nothing.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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A few days later, he called me: can you come to my atelier this afternoon? And he showed me the second version of his painting. It was unbelievable because I didn\u2019t talk about this plan to him. So I wrote a text about the second picture and I translated it into German for him, and so on, for 14 pictures and 14 texts. Why 14? That\u2019s so easy to explain. I had a feeling that 13 is not enough and 15 is too many.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

When it was finished, I had a problem with this project: is it possible to paint about the bad, to write about the bad \u2013 Will we pay for that? If yes, when? The texts, like the picture, were quite hard. Because I understood immediately from the beginning that to give a form to the bad is only possible when you are inside, from outside there is no chance, but from inside, it has some\u2026it is a little bit dangerous, I felt. I kept thinking, or somebody or something kept speaking to me in only one sentence, \u2018about the bad, people have to speak\u2019, \u2018about the bad, people have to speak.’<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

[And he utters this mantra two more times, his voice fading to a whisper until his lips are moving and there is no sound.]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

That\u2019s the story of AnimaIinside.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

JH: Could you say something more about your idea of \u2018the new Brutale\u2019?<\/b><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

LK: You know this kind of bad, in the form of brutality, always comes back and back in the pose of history, and this is such a time, and the brutal is on the street, and absolutely free on the street; the only thing I can do in our defence is to write.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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JH: So writing becomes a form of resistance?<\/b><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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LK: In this case, yes. Normally, I have never done anything like that. My other novels and short stories are absolutely different. Animalinside is a shout. And it is the first collaboration in my life. And perhaps the last. But very interesting.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

JH: But you collaborate on films with B\u00e9la Tarr. [If you haven\u2019t seen Werckmeister Harmonies<\/em>, Tarr\u2019s rendering of Krasznahorkai\u2019s novel, The Melancholy of Resistance<\/em>, I strongly recommend it.]<\/b><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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LK: That\u2019s different, because a movie has only one director, and he\u2019s responsible for the film. Of course, I am not a scriptwriter. The films are almost always made from my books, except one. I draw for B\u00e9la the philosophical background of our question, day and night, day and night, that\u2019s our method of collaboration. I never want a literary adaptation, never, because it is absolutely unnecessary for me. A book by me does not need an adaptation.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

It\u2019s a nice thing that somebody, B\u00e9la Tarr, has a mania, a wish, always to make a movie from Krasznahorkai\u2019s works and that\u2019s why I think: ok I will try to understand why he thinks that this new movie is absolutely necessary. When I have understood that, my second question is: what kind of movie is he thinking about from my book? When I have understood that, my third and last question to myself is: how can I help Bela? My aim is to help his imaginative power.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

In B\u00e9la\u2019s last movie, \u2018The Turin Horse\u2019, from my early essay about a day in Turin with Nietzsche, I had a different question: Ok, we know everything about Nietzsche, about the man, the owner of the horse, but nobody wondered what happened to the horse. Why not? I wrote about that.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Be sure and check out the whole interview<\/a> — it’s well worth it. <\/p>\n

\n<\/a>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over at the Literature Across Frontiers website, there’s a great interview with everyone’s favorite apocalyptic writer, L\u00e1szl\u00f3 Krasznahorkai: [. . .] First I wanted to talk to him about another work of his, Animalinside, a beautifully published pamphlet (in The Cahiers Series) of a collaboration between the author and the German painter, Max Neumann. James […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[52356,9546,52346],"class_list":["post-294606","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-james-hopkin","tag-laszlo-krasznahorkai","tag-literature-across-frontiers"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294606","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=294606"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294606\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":339486,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294606\/revisions\/339486"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=294606"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=294606"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=294606"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}