Interview

Carol Brown Janeway, the English language translator of Embers, describes what it was like to first read Sándor Márai's lost classic.  The Communists banned his books and destroyed every copy they could find but thanks to the Italian publisher Roberto Calasso, his books have been resurrected.

Sometimes there is justice in the world. A couple of years ago, the great Italian publisher Roberto Calasso was on a trip to Paris when he noticed in a publisher's catalog the reissue of a list of neglected classics. Given his encyclopedic interest in Central European culture, he was curious to see the name of a Hungarian novelist, Sándor Márai, of whom he had never heard, and asked for material. Some French translations arrived, he started reading, and he realized that he was in the presence of that rarest of discoveries, a lost masterpiece. Calasso being Calasso, after a quick blizzard of phone calls, he was not only the owner of publishing rights to this book and two others, but was well on the way to unearthing an entire literary oeuvre.

Cut to the Frankfurt International Bookfair -- where publishers and agents from around the world meet to share their finds. I have hardly plopped down into my seat next to Calasso at a dinner when, with barely a nod to the usual convention of ten minutes of uproarious and unvarnished gossip about everybody and everything, he begins to talk about Márai. Nonsense forgotten, publishers from six countries around the ...