Review: Miklós Bánffy, The Monkey and other stories (Blue Danube, 2021), trans. Thomas Sneddon

Alexander Faludy explores an anthology of the great novelist's short pieces.

“I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one instead” is a quip attributed to Mark Twain. Just as it's harder for an artist to paint a portrait miniature than a full-scale piece so short stories present special challenges to writers. What a novelist has the luxury of whole chapters to do viz context, character and plot short story writers must fit into only a few pages, or even paragraphs.

Count Miklós Bánffy (1873-1950) wrote captivatingly on a grand scale (his 3 volume epic Transylvanian Trilogy) but also a minute one —as this collection shows.

The Monkey is a collection of nine stories written at dates between 1908 and 1946, but in their settings bridge a wider span of time. Helen in Sparta (1934) takes place in ancient Greece while The Infected Planet (1939) is filled with the brooding menace of the impending World War.

Thomas Sneddon translates Hungarian with exemplary smoothness. Bánffy was a polymath, fluent in many languages and subjects. It’s a joke among Bánffy’s translators that in order to do him justice one needs to be not only a linguist but also a hastily self-taught geologist and botanist. His works abound with symmetries between characters and their environments, some concealed, others self-disclosing.

In the Transylvanian Trilogy Bánffy employs extremely subtle clues to ‘unpack’ the traits of his protagonists: even the particular wine vintages accompanying a meal can provide commentary on the people consuming it. My dad noticed that device, but only because, besides being a lover of Hungarian literature, he was also a certified oenologist —he read Bánffy’ with a wine encyclopaedia at his elbow.

The compressed short story format means interpretive keys are more obvious here. Somewhere (1924) uses the device of a story within a story —a staging of Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors— to hint that, as will soon be revealed, nothing within the main plot is quite as it seems.

A deep lover of rural Transylvania’s flora and fauna it’s unsurprising that Bánffy often uses animal likenesses to accentuate people and plot. That’s obviously so in The Monkey —a charming mini spy-drama which gives the book its name. Similarly, in The Wolves (1908) the conduct of Transylvanian peasants who betray their defeated rebel leader to the Austrians bifurcates darkly with that of a canine pack which tears apart its chief once he’s injured and lame.

The Infected Planet allows us to eavesdrop on a committee of distinguished extra terrestrials as they discuss the peculiarities of human behaviour (especially viz aggression and ecocide) like zoologists analysing the activities of rival ant colonies living on, and from, iron rich soil.

“They gather in agglomerations, tens of millions strong then fire little lumps of iron at one another through iron tubes. It's a fascinating spectacle and causes quite a racket. We haven’t determined yet how it's done but one theory is that some explosive chemical reaction accompanies the excretion of their faeces.”

The ostensible humour comes from the alien scientists’ aberrant decoding of human actions. Yet the true satire is directed toward humanity itself, which can grasp neither the minuteness of its importance in the cosmos, nor the absurdity of its self-defeating behaviour as it poisons its surroundings.

Meanwhile Bánffy, or at least his translator, puns intricately with phonetic and conceptual linkages between the earth's natural iron (ferrous metal) and the ferocity of the humans who use it.

The English wordplay here mimics, in style, similar tricks used by Bánffy in Hungarian. Thereby Sneddon helps us grasp the mood of an original whose actual (Magyar) wordplay is impenetrable to outsiders.

Only a minority of the stories take place in what is, or once was, Hungary. Of these, the most striking is Somewhere which depicts the dispossessed Hungarian elite of Kolozsvár / Cluj contriving ingenious, and somewhat desperate, stratagems to cling to the vestiges of their gentility amid deepening poverty.

Danse Macabre (1928) is set near Paris in 1789. Yet, one senses the 10th anniversary of the upheavals in Hungary were in fact uppermost in Bánffy’s mind as he depicted a teetering monarchy and vengeful populace.

“We’ll wipe them out yet! Kill them! Yes, we must kill them all and then we shall have freedom!“

Those illusory words from a French radical were heard often enough in Hungary during the tumult of 1918-19. During that time Bánffy saw first, the monarchy crumble and then the orderly Social Democrat government of his first cousin, Mihály Károlyi, superseded by a wave of bloody Communist ‘Red Terror’.

Miklós Bánffy in 1916, Source: Wikipedia

Sneddon’s introduction describes Bánffy’s short stories as only “superficially straightforward” or, as one might otherwise say deceptively simple. Clear narrative resolutions coexist with psychological mystery.

The apparently jarring twist at the end of Lememame, set on a Great War battlefield, is incomprehensible until one notices its place in a diptych of reversals. The eponymous hero first tries to ‘turn the tables’ on his persecutor, Cioban, by tormenting his tormenter as the latter lies injured on a battlefield in today’s Ukraine.

Lememame leaves Cioban to die, yet true triumph only comes by showing mercy predicated on the hero’s mastery of inner passions. When Lememame torments Cioban, he’s quite literally at his level, crouching in the dirt. The closing reversal (arranging Cioban’s rescue) occurs as Lememame is cresting a hill —rising above his adversary.

Bánffy’s engrossing short stories require only minutes to read, but can take hours to unravel.

Miklós Bánffy, The Monkey and other stories (Blue Danube, 2021), trans. Thomas Sneddon.

Alexander Faludy