hulit1-8, Exercise 1: Marai in three stages

Model answer (check the details):

1. Before exile: a successful middle-class novelist, essayist and journalist between the wars, writing polished prose about the bourgeois world he belonged to. Embers (1942) belongs to this period.
2. Exile: he left Hungary in 1948 as the communist state took hold, lived in Italy and then the United States, and wrote in Hungarian for a very small readership. His books were unwelcome at home for decades. He died in San Diego in 1989.
3. Rediscovery: after his death, translations in the late 1990s, notably into Italian and French, found a new audience, and his work returned to Hungary.

What the third stage shows: a literature in a small language can be known abroad before it is fully valued at home, and translators and publishers can revive a neglected writer. A reputation is not fixed at the time of writing.