Berlin-Hamlet

Berlin-Hamlet evokes a stroll through one of the phantasmagoric shopping arcades described in Walter Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk—but instead of the delirious image fragments of nineteenth-century European culture, we pass by disembodied scraps of written text, remnants as ghostly as their authors: primarily Franz Kafka but also Benjamin himself or the Hungarian poets Attila József or Ern Szép. Paraphrases and reworked quotations, drawing upon the vanished prewar legacy, particularly its German Jewish aspects, appear in sharp juxtaposition with images of post-1989 Berlin frantically rebuilding itself in the wake of German unification.

Szilard Jozsef Borbely (1963–2014) was born in Fehergyarmat in eastern Hungary and studied Hungarian philology and literature at the University of Debrecen, where he was an associate professor. A recognized authority on Hungarian literature of the late baroque period as well as an author, Borbely was awarded several literary prizes in Hungary, culminating in the highly prestigious Palladium Prize in 2005. His first major critical success was his third book, Hosszu nap el (Long Day Away, 1993), extensively praised by leading Hungarian literary figures such as Peter Esterhazy and Peter Nadas. His novels Halotti pomp (The Splendors of Death, 2004) and The Dispossessed (2014) were hailed universally as some of the most important Hungarian works of literature of the decade. His poems were published in English in The American Reader, Asymptote, and Poetry. Berlin-Hamlet is his first full work to be published in English.
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Ottilie Mulzet is a translator of poetry and prose, as well as a literary critic. She has worked as the English-language editor of the Internet journal of the Hungarian Cultural Centre in Prague, and in 2014 she received the Best Translated Book Award for her translation of Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s novel Seiobo There Below. She is based in Prague.