Thread by @AlexanderFaludy

🧵Rare for me publish in Hungarian media but 60th anniversary of 1st of Grandpa’s HAPPY DAYS IN HELL / Pokolbéli víg napjaim = good reason for piece in @MagyarHang this week. Please do purchase if you are in #Hungary. Contains super cute picture of me aged 2 btw.😉

@MagyarHang Hard to appreciate seismic impact the book (a bestseller) had in UK that year. It was = first full length gulag memoir published in English years before Solzhenitsyn‘s work (by which it was later overshadowed) became available. Picture of 1st edition in dust jacket here (Ebay).

The work‘s success was due not only to narrative force / symbolic artistry but outstanding quality of the translation by Kati Szász/ Szász Katalin who rendered the text into beautiful literary English. Sadly I lack a picture of Kati to illustrate this thread (can anyone help?).

In tracking a photo down might help to mention the only two other biographical facts I know about her: that she was married successively to the writer Szász Béla and BBC Hungarian Service journalist Katona Pál. She should though, of course, not be defined by who her husband was.

The book has never been out of print in English since with editions variously by Duetsch, Corgi and -present edition- @PenguinClassics (pictured).

Here is fun Corgi cover from 1987 ed. showing young dandyish GF in #Budapest in his 20s - contrasting rather with main focus of the book (!). My dad Andris / Andrew supplied photo at GF’s request. Dad become custodian of family archive early as GF was hopeless with losing stuff.

Speaking of his tendency to lose things… somewhere amid dizzying number of exilic house moves he misplaced original Hungarian MS of Happy Days. This caused major headache when dissidents wanted to produce a #Samizdat version in #Hungary in 1987.

GF had to retro translate back into Hungarian + the MS was smuggled from Canada back to Hungary in a complex ‘tag team’ operation by Kőszeg Ferenc (today my neighbour) and his elderly mum Lili -by then living in Frankfurt and possessed of a handy West German passport.

Feri says Happy Days = most succesful Samizdat produced by underground Beszélő group. It was ‘must have’ purchase in Budapest, Xmas 1987. Profits subsidised group’s work until 1989/90 changes. They shifted 3000 copies (x3 metric tons) under nose of the ÁVH/ secret police.

Feri tells the dramatic, and entertaining story himself in this article. koszegferenc.atlatszo.hu/2021/11/26/az-…

NB Samizdat version much better than post-1990 commercial editions as closest to English pronting. In later version he altered text (mainly by inserting erotic content) which expanded length but distracted from core literary merit.

Literary merit significantly consequence of complex intertextuality with all 3 books of #Dante’s Divine Comedy which GF used to navigate / narrate his experience. Hell predominates both Purgatory + Paradise are present proleptically. I explain that in the @MagyarHang article.

English readers can access piece here. @ChurchTimes version incl. only surviving pic of my grandparents together (in @nepszava office c1947/8 -according to family trad.). Nice to anchor Zsuzsa as a ‘real woman of flesh and blood’ -not GF’s ‘Beatrice’.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2021/…

Some ask why I published piece in @MagyarHang not @nepszava (GF was Literary Editor). It’s because @Magyarhang, is under huge pressure from #Fidesz: unable to print in Hungary its advertisers are threatened, its staff harassed. It needs help. #Faludy would approve of choice.

Addendum to thread. Here, courtesy of his biographer Csiszár Gábor, are two little extras
1) A pic of the 1980s #Samizdat edition.

2) Manuscript page discovered recently in the National Archives of #Canada, Ottowa. This shows GF revising *part* the text somewhen between 1971 + 87 most likely for extract publication in ‘Menorah’-magazine of the Hungarian-Jewish community in #Toronto.