Read Satantango by Krasznahorkai.
László Krasznahorkai was born in 1954, in the town of Gyula in the east of Hungary, close to the Romanian border. Having studied Law first then literature in Budapest he went on to publish a series of novels and other writings. The current excerpts are from his first novel, Satantango, published in 1985. Other notable books available in English are Az ellenállás melankóliája (The Melancholy of Resistance), first published in Hungary in 1989 and in England nine years later and Háború és háború (War and War), published in Hungary and Germany in 1999 and in the USA 2006.
Much of Krasznahorkai's work has been filmed by Béla Tarr and they have co-operated on a number of films. László Krasznahorkai has been a considerable traveller. His books are now in several languages and have received international prizes.
George Szirtes was born in Budapest in 1948. His family were refugees from the 1956 Uprising and settled in England where he studied sciences at school, trained as an artist and finished up being a poet and translator. His first book, The Slant Door won the Faber Prize in 1980. His twelve books since have won various awards, most recently the T S Eliot Prize for Reel (2004). He has been translating from the Hungarian since his first return in 1984 and has published over a dozen books of translated prose, verse and drama, that have won a number of prizes. He has edited a number of anthologies of Hungarian writing and written a book on art as well as a number of libretti and musicals. He reviews for The Guardian, The Times and other papers and teaches part time at the University of East Anglia. He is married to the artist Clarissa Upchurch, with whom he has published Budapest: Image, Poem, Film (2006). His website can be found at George Szirtes