yörgy Dragomán is a Hungarian author and literary translator. He was born in Târgu Mureş (Marosvásárhely) Transylvania, Romania. In 1988, his family moved to Hungary. He attended high school in the western Hungarian city of Szombathely, then college in Budapest, getting a degree in English and Philosophy. He has received various literary awards for his writings, such as the Sándor Bródy prize. His first novel, Genesis Undone, was published in 2002. He is also translate works by Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, Ian McEwan, Ivrine Welsh and Mickey Donnelly into Hungarian. But he has become famous because of his second book, The White King, which received very favorable reviews from many influential newspapers, such as The New York Times. The White King has been translated to at least 28 langugages It is a collection of loosely connected stories told by an 11-year old boy waiting for his father to be released from politically motivated imprisonment. The name of this boy is Djata. He recounts a year of predictably boyish pursuits: playing truant, pulling pranks, digging for treasure, collecting model soldiers and reluctantly donning scratchy suits to please his mother. His straight-talking vignettes recall the spirited, knee-scraping adventures of William Brown, Huckleberry Finn and Pip. But, of course, a child protagonist isn’t guaranteed an easy ride: in Twain and Dickens there is a palpable tension between the childish world of imaginative freedom and the adult world of darkness, violence, injustice and greed. In The White King, that tension is stretched to breaking point. For its narrator Djata, the horrors of the adult world are everywhere.
This disturbing, compelling, beautifully translated novel (the first by the Hungarian György Dragomán to be published in English, and winner of the Sándor Márai Prize) is set in an unnamed totalitarian, communist regime, based on the nationalist, Stalinist, poverty-stricken Romania of the 1980s where Dragomán grew up. In the first chapter Djata remembers his father’s departure: as “the doc” is helped by two men into a grey van, he tells his son that he is off with his colleagues to conduct some urgent research. Then, months later, the same men visit Djata and his mother at their flat: “Hey, son, do you still believe we’re your father’s colleagues?’ I didn’t say a thing, but I felt my body turn cold, like in gym class after a timed run, when you have to lean forward because there’s no other way to catch your breath. The silver-haired man then said. ‘I’ll have you know that we’re not your father’s colleagues, we’re from the state security service, and your father’s been arrested for conspiring against the state … your father is shovelling away clear across the country at the Danube Canal. Do you know what that means, he asked. It means he’s in labour camp, and scrawny as he is, he won’t be able to take it for long.” Djata clings to the conviction that his father will one day return, but in the meantime he must engage in the business of growing up, and of survival, in a rural town where children are treated like metal in a forge – there to be moulded, poured, beaten into shape. The fatherless Djata encounters several anti-father-figures, who are Brothers Grimm-like in their grotesqueness. Coach Gica is the football coach so sadistic that “he wasn’t allowed to coach the Ironworks adult team but could work only with us 11 and 12-year-olds”. Gica builds a machine that fires sand-filled balls at players’ heads and beats his star goalkeeper to a bloody mess when he refuses to play. Pickaxe is a labourer whose face is scarred by smallpox: in a cruel trick his bullying co-workers persuade Djata that the monstrous figure is actually his dad, disfigured and unrecognisable. Assumed rules of childhood are suspended: sports matches are fixed so that state-favoured schools win, and war games spill into genuine violence. When his mother needs money, all Djata’s lovingly catalogued possessions – “my lead soldiers, my Matchbox collection, my gum wrappers, my tennis racket” – are voluntarily sacrificed. Djata’s voice is clear and close: you can sense him looking you in the eyes as he speaks. He is brave, resilient and observant, at times touched with insight beyond his years; but he is, naturally, just as often led by selfish urges and insatiable curiosity. His discovery of girls, through his classmate Iza and a pornographic film-reel, is both funny and universal: even in these crushing conditions, Dragomán seems to be saying, boys will be boys. As one character remarks: “Life goes on.” There is hope not only that life goes on, but that freedom is somehow preserved. The title comes from a game of chess in a state official’s apartment, in which Djata cheats, stealing the ivory king to use as a “commander” in his game of soldiers. Unsporting perhaps, but it feels like a symbolic triumph: communism’s signature game of manoeuvre and kidnap is rudely disrupted, and the anarchic imagination escapes victorious.
