(No such great things awaited Hungarian writers of the next generation: we were booted out by absolute nonentities.)

Nyugat was a real periodical; that is, not merely a rallying point for first-rate writers, but a point of crystallisation and a force of integration in what might be called the new, modern movement. If we wish to attach labels we can say that Kosztolányi was a member of the first Nyugat generation, a representative of l'art pour l'art, a writerly writer; Homo aestheticus, as he called himself, in opposition to the Homo moralis. Courageously and coquettishly he chooses the “babbling surface” as opposed to the “silent depths.” “Oh, sacred, clowning emptiness!” he cries out, in his “Song of Kornél Esti,” above all to his friend, the morally serious Babits, who grew more critical of Kosztolányi in later years.

Kosztolányi does not seek his own authentic face, but the authentic mask. He continually lives through roles and is close to classical decadence. The dandy is the last flowering of heroism in our age of decline, says the great dandyologist Baudelaire. Kosztolányi is a classical dandy, strict and severe.

He is multicoloured and ineffable, like a rainbow. There is nothing accidental about his shifting between genres. Critics at times heatedly debate whether he was primarily a poet or a prose writer, and whether his many-sidedness was an advantage or a disadvantage. I think it was neither the one nor the other, but simply a fact. In poetry he is the virtuoso, the child dizzied and shaken by all the wonders of the world. In prose he is precise, at times already an anxious anticipator of the nouveau roman, an adult facing up to the facts of the world.

He writes longer prose pieces from 1920. For him the twenties are the years of the novel: Nero, the Bloody Poet, Skylark, The Golden Kite, Anna Édes.4 In 1924 he publishes a volume of verse entitled The Complaints of the Sad Man, rhyming with, answering and continuing the successful volume of 1910. This is a time of arrival. His reputation grows both at home and abroad. He becomes acquainted with Thomas Mann, who–as Hungarians never fail proudly to point out–writes a preface to the German edition of Nero.

Hungary has always had a great tradition in literary translation (the attentiveness of small nations–to themselves). Kosztolányi's achievement in this field is significant, his utterly exceptional sense of form almost predestines him for this. His translations include A Winter's Tale and Alice in Wonderland, to mention only two of the English references.

At the end of his life the virtuoso Kornél Esti stories appear, and the great late poems of the volume Reckoning. The “Meistersinger spun from the magic of poetic play and fate, imagination and tears” dies a difficult death from cancer of the larynx in 1936.

A parlament a falra ment (Parliament hall has gone to the wall). First of all, of course, my poor translator goes to the wall, indeed, bangs his head against it, tearing out his hair. But such is life: hard. My life is hard, so was poor Kosztolányi's, why should the translator be the one to get off lightly? Yet even irrespective of the meaning of this sentence (that parliament hall has gone to the wall), one can appreciate its manifold beauty, rhyme and symmetry. This sentence formed the foundation of my children's political education. The Hungarian parliament, that unbelievable and–to Hungarian eyes–beautiful, if arguably intolerable, pseudo-Gothic building, at once announces the age of the young Kosztolányi, the incomprehensible self-confidence and ambition of the beginning of the century and the undeniable emptiness of its intentions. Driving past this building, all I had to do was point and the children would merrily whoop, “Parliament hall has gone to the wall.” In those days, anything more about the Hungarian parliament, or our so-called socialist democracy, simply wasn't worth knowing.

Kosztolányi was perhaps the world's greatest rhymer, or master of rhyme. The Hungarian language is particularly well suited to this circus stunt, indeed it is hardly even a matter of bravado. Hungarian, unlike other languages, to this day treats rhyme, that cheap and dubious element, as a generally accepted and usable possibility.

I would even venture to say that it was Kosztolányi who did most to make the Hungarian language what it is today. To change a language visibly, perceptibly, at the everyday level, is something very few writers ever achieve. Kosztolányi changed the Hungarian sentence. The Hungarian language anyway stands in a dramatic relationship to the sentence. Our language, as Babits wrote, “doesn't roll along on such well-worn wheels, doesn't think in place of the writer.