Die Aussiedlung

Die Aussiedlung is a singular book about captivity. A book of the covenant, forged with fierce independence: a book about the mysterious ability of human beings to bind themselves to one another in the face of devastation, when everything else is falling apart. Visky tells this story in a daring language: a language that is willing to risk itself, with a bated breath, with faltering breath, with the penultimate breath. … ‘Human beings’, Visky writes, ‘are created in such a way that they cannot hear their own hearts.’ This sentence could also describe the beginning of translation. And Tankó not only listened to the heartbeat of this novel, but also into the duration of silence—into that half-eternity that follows it.

One rarely comes across books in which story and language merge into a higher whole as they do in András Visky’s novel Die Aussiedlung. After decades of searching, the author identified the fragment as the adequate form for the fate of his family in 1950s Romania (the father, an oppositional pastor, imprisoned, the mother deported to the Bărăgan Plain with her seven children). In 822 sentences without full stops, Visky transforms years of duress and deprivation ‘in the nothing of the camps’ into a hymn to love and freedom. A central role is played by the Bible (‘our only home’) from which the mother reads every day and whose fourfold scriptural meaning is given a fifth by the children’s imagination. ‘Everything stands and falls with the voice of silence’, says the 658th sentence. In Timea Tankó’s marvellously fluent translation, with its sure-footed rendering of tone, Die Aussiedlung resonates soundly, from the ‘clatter of bureaucratic jargon’ to the ‘silence between the heartbeats’. —Hannes Langendörfer 

András Visky (born 1957 in Târgu Mureș) is a playwright and director who lives and works in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. In 2022, after decades of writing plays, poems and essays, he published his first and only novel, Die Aussiedlung. This book caused a stir on Hungary, where it is now in its fifth printing.

Timea Tankó (born 1978 in Leipzig) spent her childhood in Hungary and Germany. She studied French, Spanish and cultural studies. Since 2003 she has been working as a literary translator from Hungarian (including works by Ádám Bodor, Andor Endre Gelléri and István Kemény) and French. In 2021, she won the Leipzig Book Fair Prize for her translation of Apropos Casanova by Miklós Szentkuthy.

** The quoted excerpts in the jury statements were translated into English by HKW.