{"title":"Szilárd Borbély","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"kafkas-son-book-szilrd-borbly-9781803092683","title":"Kafkas Son","description":"A posthumously published Hungarian masterpiece that reflects on fragmented lives.     Born in 1963, Szilárd Borbély emerged as one of the most important poets of post-communist Europe, exploring the themes of grief, memory, and trauma in his critically acclaimed work. Following the murder of his mother during a burglary in 2000, and the subsequent breakdown and death of his father, Borbély suffered from post-traumatic depression and tragically ended his own life in 2014.   Among the manuscripts that Borbély left behind was Kafka’s Son, a fragmentary work, rendered still more fragmented through the author’s death. Through a series of haunting passages that explore early twentieth-century Prague, including the ruins of the ancient Jewish ghetto during the time of its demolition, Borbély inscribes the story of Franz Kafka and his father onto the city. We are used to hearing from Franz; here Hermann Kafka is also given a voice. “The son,” he tells us, “is the life of the father. The father is the death of the son.” By extension, then, this book is also an indirect telling of the story of Borbély and his father, and about sons and fathers in the Habsburg empire and the culture of brutality that defined Eastern Europe.   A posthumously published Hungarian masterpiece, Kafka’s Son now appears in English in award-winning translator Ottilie Mulzet’s sensitive translation, a fragmentary yet iridescent work inviting us to reflect on our fragmented lives.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49745085726993,"sku":"NGR9781803092683","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51052028985617,"sku":"NIN9781803092683","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1803092688.jpg?v=1750724201"},{"product_id":"in-a-bucolic-land-book-szilrd-borbly-9781681375915","title":"In a Bucolic Land","description":"\u003cb\u003eA moving, posthumous collection of elegies and eclogues that meditate on nature, landscape, and history, by a great Hungarian poet.\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eSzil rd J zsef Borb ly is one of the most searching and powerful poetic voices to emerge in the twenty-first century. \u003ci\u003eIn a Bucolic Land\u003c\/i\u003e was his final work, completed but left unpublished at the time of his premature death in 2014. At the heart of the book are poems in which Borb ly returns to his 1960s childhood in a tiny, impoverished town in northeastern Hungary. Conditions were brutal, as the poems attest, even as, shifting between present and past, they are also invested with a strange shimmering sense of myth and eternity. The book opens and closes with elegies for his teacher Lajos Szuromi in which the poet meditates on the nature of language and speech and on the adequacy of words to speak of and for the dead. Ottilie Mulzet's English translation conveys the full power of a writer of whom L szl  Krasznahorkai has said, He was a poet--a great poet--who shatters us.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49809442832657,"sku":"NGR9781681375915","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1681375915.jpg?v=1751447149"},{"product_id":"final-matters-book-szilrd-borbly-9780691182438","title":"Final Matters","description":"An award-winning translator presents selections from the haunting final volumes of a leading voice in contemporary Hungarian poetrySzilard Borbely, one of the most celebrated writers to emerge from post-Communist Hungary, received numerous literary awards in his native country. In this volume, acclaimed translator Ottilie Mulzet reveals the ful","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50049806434577,"sku":"CIN0691182434VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50297966395665,"sku":"GOR010905039","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50762631872785,"sku":"CIN0691182434G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0691182434.jpg?v=1751136381"},{"product_id":"final-matters-book-szilrd-borbly-9780691182421","title":"Final Matters","description":"An award-winning translator presents selections from the haunting final volumes of a leading voice in contemporary Hungarian poetry  Szilárd Borbély, one of the most celebrated writers to emerge from post-Communist Hungary, received numerous literary awards in his native country. In this volume, acclaimed translator Ottilie Mulzet reveals the full range and force of Borbély’s verse by bringing together generous selections from his last two books, Final Matters and To the Body. The original Hungarian text is set on pages facing the English translations, and the book also features an afterword by Mulzet that places the poems in literary, historical, and biographical context.  Restless, curious, learned, and alert, Borbély weaves into his work an unlikely mix of Hungarian folk songs, Christian and Jewish hymns, classical myths, police reports, and unsettling accounts of abortions. In her afterword, Mulzet calls this collection “a blasphemous and fragmentary prayer book … that challenges us to rethink the boundaries of victimhood, culpability, and our own religious and cultural definitions.”","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50356094140689,"sku":"CIN0691182426G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0691182426.jpg?v=1751262155"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/en-gb\/collections\/author-books-by-szilrd-borbly.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}