The Kleptomaniac Translator

by Dezső Kosztolányi [translation not finished]

We were speaking of poets and writers, old friends who began alongside us way back then and who stopped to rest and lost the trail. From time to time we would throw a name in the air. Who still remembers –? We would shake our heads and sketch a vague smile with our lips. In the mirror of our eyes there appeared a face that we had believed forgotten, a career and a life long shattered. Who had heard about him? Was he still alive? There was only silence in response. In the silence, the desecrated wreath of his promise crackled like the dead leaves in a cemetary. We kept quiet.

We always kept quiet, for a long few minutes, whenever someone pronounced the name of Gallus.

“The poor man,” says Kornél Esti. “I myself saw him yet, some years ago, it must be seven or eight now, in a very sad state.” He had come to him then, regarding a detective novel, and the story was one itself, more thrilling and distressing than any I had ever experienced.

As you know, he was not a trivial nobody. He was a boy of talent, brilliant and full of intuition, and, what is more, he was conscientious and cultured. He spoke many languages. He knew English so well, we would say, that the Prince of Wales himself would have taken lessons from him. For four years he had lived in Cambridge.

But he had a fatal flaw. No, he didn’t drink. But he swiped anything he came across. He thieved like a magpie. Whether it was a pocket watch, a pair of slippers, or a huge stove pipe, it was of little importance. He was not so much concerned with the value of his larcenies as he was with their volume and their dimensions. No more often did he consider the usefulness of what he stole. His pleasure consisted simply of doing that which he could not not do: steal. We, his closest friends, tried hard to make him listen to reason. With affection we made appeals to his fine sentiments. We reprimanded him, we threatened him. And he agreed. He would not stop promising to fight against his nature. But tenable though his reason was, his nature was the stronger. Without pause, he repeated his crimes.

More than one time he found himself publicly exposed and humiliated by some strangers, more than one time he was caught for this reason, and we, well we had to expend an incredible effort to clear in one way or the other the consequences of his acts. But one day, on the express from Vienna, he nicked the wallet of a moravian merchant who at once siezed him in a trap and, at the following station, handed him over to the police. He was sent back to Budapest, his wrists and feet bound.

Once again we had to try to save him. You who are writers, you are not unaware that everything depends on words; the thief of a poem knows even better this sort of man. We attempted to prove that he was a kleptomaniac and not a robber. A kleptomaniac is generally someone you know, a robber is someone you don’t. The tribunal didn’t know him and so judged him as a robber and condemned him to two years in prison.

After his release, one sombre December morning a little before Christmas, he burst into my house, starving and in rags. He fell to my knees. He begged me not to abandon him, to come to his aid, to find him some work. It had been out of the question for some time for him to write under his own name. But he knew nothing except how to write. I went therefore to a brave editor, one full of humanity; I recommended him, and the very next day the editor entrusted him with the translation of an english detective novel. It was one of those things only good for the wastebasket, with which one is ashamed to dirty his hands. You don’t read them. You only translate them, if you absolutely have to, but you put on some gloves to do it. I still remember the title of the book today: The Mysterious Mansion of Count Vitsislav. But of what importance is it? I was content to have been able to do something, and he was going to be able to get some bread, and, in complete happiness, he set himself to the work. He worked with such zeal that, without even waiting for the fixed deadline, he returned the manuscript at the end of three weeks.

[The second half to come later. Revisions to the first half still needed.]