Diego Isaias Hernández Méndez, Destruccion por un remolino del aire Xocomeel del Lago Atitlán / Destruction from a Vortex of the Xocomil Winds around Lake Atitlán (detail), 2014, oil on canvas. Arte Maya Tz’utujil Collection.
AGNI 94
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The Window
János Háy, after a childhood in rural Hungary, spent his student years in Budapest. The collapse of Communism in 1989 made possible the publication of his first book—a volume of poems and drawings that begins, “No person named János Háy exists.” Since then, he has become a celebrated author of over two dozen volumes of fiction and poetry, and his plays are frequently staged at home and abroad. His recent collection of highly personal essays on Hungarian writers from the sixteenth century to the present, seen through a contemporary prism, is as popular as it is controversial. (updated 10/2021)
Eugene Brogyányi’s literary career began with translating contemporary Hungarian plays for the OBIE-winning Threshold Theater Company in New York City. These included plays by János Háy, which led him to Háy’s fiction. Currently he is translating The Kid, a novel in which the protagonist’s life story anchors a kaleidoscopic array of digressions that move back and forth in time. (updated 10/2021)