Description

‘The Tolstoy of Transylvania… Banffy’s trilogy is just about as good as any fiction I have ever read’ – Charles Moore, Telegraph

‘The elegiac wisdom of his writing makes him one of those people whose life you wish could have ended in something other than calamity… a great storyteller’ – Guardian

Back from Troy, the ‘divine’ Helen looks with fresh eyes at her foul-mouthed hero-husband; a girl in a mountain village seeks reassurance about her arranged marriage; a drunken mandarin invites the devil to tea; and a German princess discovers that people actually drink goat’s milk. These delightful tales exhibit Banffy’s customary blend of high seriousness and subtle humour, his rich imagination and his remarkably wide-ranging sympathies.

Appearing in English for the first time, in finely nuanced translations by the prize-winning Len Rix, The Enchanted Night furthers the writer’s growing reputation as one of the most compelling European writers of the twentieth century.

Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globe.

Translated by Len Rix.

Count Miklos Banffy was born in 1873 in Kolozsvar in what was then Hungarian Transylvania. A brilliant polymath, he studied law, music and painting, became a noted stage and set designer, wrote plays, short stories and novels, and served as his country’s foreign minister. During the Second World War he urged both his own and the Romanian governments to withdraw their support for Germany: in revenge the retreating Wehrmacht looted and burned his estate. After the Soviet occupation he was declared a ‘class enemy’ and had to wait until 1949 before, penniless and in broken health, he was allowed to rejoin his family in Budapest. He died a year later.

Len Rix was born in Zimbabwe and now lives in Cambridge. A celebrated translator from the Hungarian, he has been awarded the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize and the PEN America Translation Prize. His translations of works by Antal Szerb, all published by Pushkin Press, have been widely acclaimed.

Publisher Review

- 'The Tolstoy of Transylvania... Banffy's trilogy is just about as good as any fiction I have ever read' - Charles Moore, Daily Telegraph - 'The elegiac wisdom of his writing makes him one of those people whose life you wish could have ended in something other than calamity... a great storyteller' - Guardian - 'A genuine case of a rediscovered classic. The force of Banffy's enthusiasm produces an effect rather like that of the best Trollope novels, but coming from a past world that now seems excitingly exotic' - Times Literary Supplement - 'Banffy's masterpiece resembles Proust, [yet] he writes with all the psychological acumen of Dostoevsky' - The London Magazine