The Magician's Garden and Other Stories

In the turbulent atmosphere of the first decades of the twentieth century, the Austro-Hungarian monarchy offers a striking picture of complexity: strange new energies, seething, restive, and rebellious, in every quarter of the Empire under the low clouds of a stifling order. Those were the times that produced Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, and Miroslav Krleža, the great Croatian writer. Géza Csáth, an early figure of Hungarian modernism, belonged to the same generation of artists. His talents were multifold, and he was active as a writer of fiction, drama, and essays, as well as art and music criticism. Despite his interest in literature and music, Csáth chose medicine as his profession. His work made the use of morphine fatally easy, and it led him to an early death. Yet the practice of medicine also gave his writing its cool, detached, ironic objectivity. And it was neurology, his specialty, that enabled him to seize upon the insights of the new art, psychoanalysis, and to use them with stunning effect. The Magician's Garden offers a selection of stories ranging from impressionistic, metaphoric, and even surreal pieces to straightforward naturalism. An entire world and time is implicit in this group of twenty-four of his best fictions. The illustrations are from the suite of drawings, Opium Dreams, by Attila Sassy ("Aiglon"), a contemporary whose work Csáth knew. Sassy's work is a fascinating example of Art Nouveau in Hungary. The manuscript version of The Magician's Garden won a Translation Award for 1978, from the Translation Center in New York City.