Lajos
Parti Nagy

Lajos Parti Nagy was born in Szekszárd, Hungary, in 1953. After studying literature and history at the College of Education in Pécs, he first worked as a librarian and later became editor of the literary magazine Jelenkor. Since 1986, he has lived and worked as an independent author and translator in Budapest. Among other things, he has translated plays by Werner Schwab and Thomas Bernhard into Hungarian. At the end of the eighties, Parti Nagy turned increasingly to stories, novels, radio plays and drama alongside lyric poetry. In 1993, his first theatre play “Ibusár”” (Bahnstation Ibuschar, 2003) received a critics’ award as best Hungarian drama. Like the play “Mauzóleum” (1994) and numerous dramatic works that he has translated or revised, it may be found frequently in the programmes of Hungarian and international theatres. At the beginning of the nineties, Part Nagy also wrote features for the literary magazine Magyar Napló.

Besides Parti Nagy’s sparkling command of language and form (which make his works very difficult to translate), Zsófia Balla, Zsuzsanna Gahse, Péter Esterházy and other writer colleagues value his fine sense of humour. Another characteristic feature of Parti Nagy’s work is his obsessive handling of everyday Hungarian language. He sees it as a lively reservoir, in which he observes a “baroque fermentation”. In 1999, Part Nagy published a four-language volume of poetry (including German) entitled “Europink”.

“Meines Helden Platz” appeared in 2005. In this novel, set in 1999, Parti Nagy reckons with the dictators of the century that is coming to a close. While the despotic cock pigeon Tubitza is striving for world rule, the protagonist and narrator – who does not live in Heroes’ Square in Budapest by chance – falls into the hands of the movement “Pigeons Awake”. This “piece from the madhouse of political fanaticism” is a “glowing parable of totalitarian systems” and promises “breathtaking reading, during which ones laughter regularly catches in ones throat” (Frankfurter Rundschau). Lajos Parti Nagy invents a specific language for political madness, and Terézia Mora has made an excellent translation into German of the outrageously, deeply funny nonsense voiced by this world-conquering fanatic.