When Mr. Yu Zemin finished translating "Satanic Tango" by Hungarian writer Krasnohorkai Laszlo with a heroic feeling of "like a moth gnawing on a stone beam", more than 30 years have passed since the first publication of this prestigious novel. Today, when times have passed, when all literary forms and extreme expressions are no longer exciting, the dark black light emitted by Laszlo's works, together with those mysterious and cold metaphors, and the suffocating pleasure stirred by the fierce emotions of the entire article, is still amazing.
Hungarian writer Laszlo, winner of the 2025 Nobel Prize for Literature.
Test reality into the crazy metaphor world
Laszlo is good at using magnificent long sentences and endless paragraphs to fully express his desire to talk, which constitutes the primary feature of his novel language. As people jokingly call it, reading a Laszlo novel is like "staying in a church preaching despair for nine and a half hours". In this way, he wrote this "strange story in a long and meaningless time full of long sentences" in a shocking way. Apart from superb writing skills, what is even more amazing about the novel is its symbolic and metaphorical world. For this reason, james wood quoted laszlo's original words "check reality to the degree of madness" in The New Yorker to summarize this work, and through the image adaptation of famous director bella tarr, we seem to be able to better understand james wood's judgment. Yes, bella tarr restored the novel in an extremely delicate way. The 480-minute miracle of film history, with its length and stagnation, revealed the strange metaphorical world of the novel.
French philosopher Ranciere once gave an in-depth explanation of bella tarr's film of the same name. He has a wonderful illustration of the spiritual core of Satanic Tango in Bella Tar: Time After, which is "the invalidation of promises, the shattering of linear hopes, and what is left is the eternal morass of looping back and forth time and humanity". In another article, "The Empire of Rain", Rancière focuses on the rain in Satanic Tango. As he said, "All stories tell the story of collapse, but such collapse itself is just an ordinary episode in the empire of rain." Besides the rain, the "cobwebs" in the novel are also very meaningful. Those "cobwebs" that follow every corner of the tavern are like shadows, wrapping and devouring all time and hope.
Satan Tango
Author: [Hungary] Krasnoyarsk Raslo
Translated by: Zhao
Edition: Yilin Press
in July 2017
In the novel, the metaphorical meaning of the characters is also extremely wonderful. For example, the role of doctor is very meaningful. He rarely communicates with other villagers, and most of the time he just sits at home and drinks. However, he observed every move in the farm carefully. His daily job is to sit alone in front of the window, watch the situation outside and make detailed records.
In the novel, any secret is seen in his eyes and recorded in the case, the "trick" of Ilimiash is naturally no exception. The man who refuses to forget, seems to have long understood the essence of the trap of life, calmly observing the surroundings in hope and despair. To some extent, he became an obsessive observer of historical memory, however, it was an incompetent enlightenmentalist. He recorded everything, but lacked concrete action force, and could not interfere in the events at all, not just powerlessly more than this. He just recorded, as if always obsessed with just this. Therefore, unexpectedly, at the end of the novel, the doctor returned to his house, drank alcohol, continued to write his observation diary. He closed his windows with wooden
This is how Russell presented the novel's unique appearance with his strange metaphorical world. The philosophical character of this literary metaphor reminds us of the text core of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Kafka, Beckett, Camus and others, as well as the absurdity of these writers, Russell pointed to the unwavering free will of mankind.
Cruelty, nothingness and the "cycle of evil"
As one of the few writers in this century who still writes based on serious philosophical criticism, laszlo is famous for his cruel works, leaving no hope. He was once called "the Hungarian master of doom comparable to Gogol and Melville" by Susan Sontag. To date, Laszlo has written more than a dozen novels and short story collections, almost every one of which is breathtaking. In 2015, he won the International Booker Prize for his praise of "extraordinary enthusiasm and expressive force, capturing all kinds of living conditions in today's world and depicting those terrible, weird, funny, or shocking and beautiful living textures".
Laszlo was born in Gyulo, a small town in eastern Hungary, in 1954. Like most Eastern Europeans born in that era, he experienced an era of freedom and scarcity. It is said that when he was 18 years old, he worked as a night security guard in the countryside, and this experience constituted an important source of the Kafka-like rural scene in Satan's Tango.
The story of Satanic Tango is not complicated, but nothing more than a dark tale of a hoax unraveled and utopian disillusionment. The novel is placed in a rainy village, which is isolated from the world and dilapidated, full of endless death and despair. The collective farm has exhausted the villagers' enthusiasm for life, leaving them with only affair and mutual calculation to obtain the remaining pleasure. When the collective farm was about to disintegrate, the villagers conspired to sell the collective cattle and tried to abscond with money in pursuit of the so-called golden world. At this time, the "savior" from the city bewitched them. Ilmiash and Petrina, two liars who cooperated with the government, claimed to be able to take the villagers out of their difficulties. However, the so-called "savior" is actually Satan the devil. They launched a prophetic speech on the grounds of investigating the death of the little girl Ashti, and took advantage of the situation to extract their money. This forced the villagers to leave the village, live in the city, and after a hopeless struggle, they had to return to the more dilapidated countryside. From rising from the ruins to falling into the ruins again, the end of laszlo's novel echoes the prologue at the beginning. All the stories return to the original doctor, and everything returns to nothingness and starts again, which heralds some desperate "cycle of evil".
As Rushman says, the world underneath the pen is full of "destructional dullness and turmoil", his work depicts the strange, cold, merciless and despair of human survival, he as a prophet predicts the future we do not want to look at. And more importantly, the novel's structure is unique, with a strong musical character, although the scene is desolate, but the storytelling is vast, and the devil's power is in the slow, bitter storytelling. In terms of form, Rushman has taken a continuous observation of the perspective of multiple characters, thereby giving the characteristics of the narrative voice of the work; and another very unique form is the pursuit of the tango dance "six steps forward, six steps back", which makes the work a form of retrospect, this
Bella Tal: The Time After
Author: Jacques Lanzier
Translated by Lt.
Edition: Henan University Press
August 2017
How to deal with history in novels
Thus, it appears that the “Satanic Tango” clearly contains some extremely fierce political criticism of post-socialism, in which the despair and anxiety dispersed in the collective farms became an illustration of the national anecdotes of a particular era. This is also, as Lanzier said, the story of promise and deceit, “reflecting the most mediocre drama of communism.” In the meantime, the history of the failure of Hungarian socialist practice has turned the “potato-burning communist myth” into a lie of history, which directly constitutes the source of personal and institutional tensions in the novel. The novel, with astonishing criticism, points to the corrupt system of the collective labor farm life, and occasionally rings it in a false way.
It is indisputable that Russell’s novels are filled with a shocking sense of historical nothingness, a tendency that has long been striking in the context of the post-Cold War history. We look at some of the works of the early Soviet reforms, such as Rasputin’s “Fire”, Astafiev’s “Tragic Detective Story” and Atmatov’s “Crackdown”, which in a shocking and decisive way point to the dark side of the various spheres of Soviet society at the time, and the colour of exposure and criticism is indisputable.
In the midst of all this, China, which has been filled with anger at the same time, is also the day of the “rains” and “reflections” of literature. The new Enlightenment context, which is firmly encircled throughout the 1980s, will consider the criticism of the old system as a natural choice, and its influence has continued to this day. In the face of history, a generation of writers will always be lazy under the guidance of a huge writing habit, in the name of fiction, and continue to “build” those stunning historical “lies”. Historical “residents” constructed by knowledge, are deeply influenced by such literature. There, in a recklessly written kingdom, there is always a sense of hopeless historical criticism, and there is an uncertainty about the history of
For history, only after a reasonable distance is opened will the understanding of sympathy become increasingly possible, and dialectically discovering the rationality therein rather than blindly criticizing will also gain more space, which also provides us with the possibility to better clean up the legacy and debt of the revolution. It is against this background that we can make a more dialectical and complex interpretation of Laszlo's "Satanic Tango".
Written by / Xu
Editor/Miyako Liu Yaguang