Kaddish for an Unborn Child

Kaddish for an Unborn Child by Imre Kertész

“… streicht dunkler die Geigen dann steigt ihr als Rauch in die Luft dann habt ihr ein Grab in den Wolken da liegt man nicht eng”

Celan: Todesfuge

“… more darkly now stroke your strings then as smoke you will rise into air then a grave you will have in the clouds there one lies unconfined”

Celan: Death Fugue[1]

A Note About the Author

Imre Kertész, who was born in 1929 and imprisoned in Buchenwald as a youth, worked as a journalist and playwright before publishing Fatelessness, his first novel, in 1975. He is the author of Looking for a Clue, Detective Story, The Failure, The Union Jack, Kaddish for an Unborn Child, and Galley-Slave’s Journal. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002. He lives in Budapest and Berlin.

A Note About the Translator

Born in England in 1947, Tim Wilkinson first began translating from Hungarian after living and working in Budapest during the early 1970s. He has translated a number of works of history, including Éva Balázs’s Hungary and the Habsburgs 1765–1800, Domokos Kosáry’s Hungary and International Politics in 1848–1849, and Viktor Karády’s The Jews of Europe in the Modern Era, as well as literary works by many contemporary Hungarian prose writers.

Kaddish for an Unborn Child