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A Journey Round my Skull
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PREFACE
In normal times the readers learnt from the writer what they were interested in, and not the other way around. Yet a strange thing has happened. I did not want to deal with my notorious illness. People will usually want to forget an embarrassing and dangerous experience they have survived. Well, people do, but not writers. I felt the urge to document the memory as strongly as my illness. It was like a second illness, one that I had to treat in order to be cured of the first one. As for the obligatory modesty that would hold me back from discussing myself, let me just say this. I do not care about my modesty. Only I can be modest, and not my opinion. My opinion cannot be modest just as Newton’s binomial theorem cannot be modest, stating the least modest opinion of the world by claiming to be universal. It seems this is true not only of our opinions but our experiences as well, when this experience is human and not exclusively individual. I shall leave it to readers to decide to what extent I managed to assert my innate patient’s indiscretion over my innate medical discretion. I must confess that I never would have written this novel if I had not read a comment in a newspaper of
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the far right accusing me of using my illness and the visit of the renowned brain surgeon to Budapest to advertise myself. It would be a rather cheap retort to ask the author of that comment to go through the whole experience of my trip to Stockholm together with the operation. Maybe then he would know if it was worth suffering for the sake of publicity. You can react two ways to such an accusation. You either completely ignore it, or you write an entire book about it. 1936, Budapest
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Glossary
PREFACE notorious hírhedt
innate veleszületett
urge késztetés
medical discretion orvosi diszkréció
to be cured of sg kigyógyul vmiből
to accuse sy of sg megvádol vkit vmivel
binomial theorem binominális tétel
for the sake of sg vmi kedvéért
embarrassing kínos
patient’s indiscretion páciensi indiszkréció
to treat kezel (betegséget)
far right politikai szélsőjobb
obligatory modesty kötelező szerénység
renowned híres
THE INVISIBLE TRAINS crossword puzzle keresztrejtvény
vertically függőlegesen
to annoy (fel)bosszant
agitated feldúlt
invariably mindig
maxim szállóige
horizontally vízszintesen
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to reconstruct sg kitalál vmit
to burden sy with sg terhel vkit vmivel conscience lelkiismeret
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About the Author Frigyes Karinthy (1887–1938) was a Hungarian journalist, dramatist, short story writer, poet and translator. He practically wrote in every possible genre, but was most prolific as a journalist, and published more than five thousand articles. Although he never received a college or university degree, he was always keen on new scientific findings, which is reflected in many of his works. His first literary success was The Way You Write (Így írtok ti), a volume containing stylistic parodies of his contemporary fellow writers published in 1912. He translated several well-known literary pieces of which the most famous is probably his version of Winniethe-Pooh. His friendship with Dezső Kosztolányi was legendary, and was the source of several humorous stories. He married twice and had two sons, Gábor Karinthy (poet) and Ferenc Karinthy (writer).
About the Title A Journey Round My Skull (Utazás a koponyám körül) is probably Karinthy’s most popular novel and tells the story of how the author found out about the tumour that developed in his brain, and the personal experiences, medical examinations and the subsequent operation he went through in 1936. Since the work might be read as a detailed case study it became popular amongst surgeons and physicians not only in Hungary, but abroad as well. A film adaptation of the novel was directed by György Révész in 1970 starring Zoltán Latinovits as Karinthy.
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