Petőfi Literary Museum awards independent publishing house
Contra Mundum Press is honored to announce that within our very first year as a publishing house we have received a grant. Just last week the Petőfi Literary Museum awarded us a grant for our forthcoming translation (September 2012) of Miklós Szentkuthy’s Marginalia on Casanova, the first book of Szentkuthy’s epic multi-volume work St. Orpheus Breviary. Read the news on Hungarian Literature Online [Read more]
Originally published in 1939, as Csaba Sík noted, the seven volumes of the St. Orpheus Breviary “represent the greatest enterprise in scope, in worth? – undertaken in the Hungarian novel.” Justifiably, Szentkuthy has been compared to Proust, Musil, and Joyce, and has already been translated into French, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovakian, and Spanish. Our translation was done by Tim Wilkinson (known for his translations of Imre Kertész and others) and will feature an original cover designed by Hungarian artist István Orosz.
As the first ever translation of Szentkuthy into English, this should prove to be a momentous if not even historic publication for the Anglophone world. Over the next decade, CMP hopes to publish a tr. of the entirety of Szentkuthy’s Breviary and many other works, including his monumental Prae. News will follow about possible book events this coming fall in NYC, if not elsewhere...
Forthcoming next from CMP is a new edition of W.J. Bate’s long out of print canonical study on Keats, Negative Capability: The Intuitive Approach in Keats, featuring an introduction by the distinguished Italian poet, playwright, and critic Maura Del Serra.
Other forthcoming publications include Richard Foreman’s Plays with Films, Elio Petri’s Writings on Cinema and Life (the first ever translation into English), and Nietzsche’s Greek Music Drama (another first ever translation into English).
Our most recent publication was Rainer J. Hanshe’s controversial novel, The Abdication, which Stuart Kendall called “a book both experimental and assured, a comedy of high seriousness and gospel of the flesh that our winded civilization has needed for 2,000 years.”
Website: Contra Mundum Press
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