4 ms·

I think you're conflating "internationally" with "in the US". Hungarian (Márai, Kertész, Esterházy), Czech (Kundera, Hrabal, Hašek), Polish (Sienkiewicz, Lem) n

• Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  Kertész is even an example of an author more popular in translation – namely those German editions – than in his own country. When he won the Nobel Prize, the response even among many Hungarian intellectuals was “Who?”, followed in some cases by anti-Semitic remarks, which just goes to show how little a prophet (for nearly all Kertész’s works grapple with the Holocaust and its impact on Hungarian Jewry) is honored in his own homeland.
• dhosek 6y ago
  Possibly. I think some of that is a lingering cultural hangover of the Austro-Hungarian empire (which is also reflected in the cuisine of the nations that formerly composed said empire). My first reading of a Hungarian author in translation was when I was in grad school studying under Tibor Fischer. Despite it being my heritage, I only read Czech authors for the first time when I was working on a novel set in 1900 Prague. On the flip side, I'm fluent enough in Spanish now that I only read translations of authors writing in Spanish unintentionally (I hadn't realized that Optic Nerve was a translation when I read it) in favor of reading them in the original.