Even if her own novels did not exist, Christina Viragh would be an integral part of German-language literary history, because as a translator from Hungarian, her mother tongue (she was born in Budapest in 1953, but her parents fled a few years later after the failed popular uprising against the communist rule in Switzerland), she ensured that the ties between Hungarian literature and German literature are closer than in any other language area.

Let's just take the most famous example: Imre Kertész's "Novel destinyless", published in Hungary in 1975, was lost in its first German translation.

Viragh ventured into a second one in 1996, and thus began the worldwide triumph of this book by Shoah survivor Kertész, culminating in the 2002 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Andrew Plathaus

Responsible editor for literature and literary life.

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But Viragh has also given her German voice to other prominent Hungarian writers: first and foremost Péter Nádas, for whose novel “Parallelgeschichten” (Parallel Stories) a veritable rain of awards fell primarily on the translator in 2012, then Sándor Márai (also his novel “Die Glut”, the brought this writer to German consciousness), Dezső Kosztolányi, Antal Szerb and László Krasznahorkai.

There are no women in her book portfolio as translators and only a few representatives of languages ​​other than Hungarian, but the French have it all: Marcel Proust is there, and immediately after working on the "Novel of a Fateless One" she set about a new German one Adaptation of the classic French novel "The Great Meaulnes" by Alain-Fournier.

And that for a German classic publisher: Manesse.

But just as Hungary is her country of life, her publishing home from 2003 became Ammann-Verlag, which was a central point of contact for young Swiss literature until it closed in 2009.

Viragh wasn't that young when her own novel Pilatus was published there, and it wasn't her prose debut either.

In fact, three other novels had been published by Klett-Cotta since the early 1990s, but they didn't have a great response.

The importance of Egon Amann's publishing commitment was shown by the fact that "Pilatus" was a continuation of the plots from the previous novels, but received much more attention than these.

For a long time, however, Viragh's main focus was on translation.

Today she rarely allows herself to be persuaded to do so;

even Nadás' most recent novel apparently no longer tempted her.

A new one will appear in six weeks: “Montag bis wednesday”, meanwhile by Dörlemann, another small but fine Swiss publisher.

Like all of Viragh's previous novels, it is closely linked to the experiences of its author.

In it, she describes the course of the year of two friends who, sometime in the early 21st century, remember their twenties with a third person in their eighties, while they are now driven through Italy, Switzerland and southern Germany - in every respect a highly moving book, namely constantly moving between introspection,

Retrospective and purely external description (up to the recipe of a late autumn soup from Uzbekistan).

Productive uncertainty is the program of this prose, but one thing is certain: we would like to read more from Christina Viragh, who is celebrating her seventieth birthday today.