EDITOR’S NOTE
A Few Thoug on Cra
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w ghts avings Thomas Cooper
If one does a Google search for “craving,” seemingly endless links pop up with everything from self-help tips on how to “kill” pesky hankerings to stern sermons on the perils of succumbing to our appetites. Cravings, then, are to be resisted, even feared (even slain)? Yet were one to strike a slightly different note by using the word “longing” or “yearning” instead of “craving,” very different connotations come to mind. Origen of Alexandria wrote on the longing for virtue, and the Psalmist wrote of how his soul thirsteth, his flesh longeth for God (or at least the sedulous translators of the King James Version seem to have thought the word longeth more suitable than, for instance, craveth). One may long, then, for virtue, even the divine, but what can one crave? What is it in the word craving that makes it seem alluring yet possibly perilous, possibly opprobrious? In this, the second issue of The Continental Literary Magazine, our contributors touch on this question and others. In an excerpt from her most recent novel, Hungarian writer Ágnes Gurubi looks at cravings as forms of both vulnerability and strength. In a short story about a group of ragtag schoolboys, Slovak author Silvester Lavrík reminds us that unlike so many of the indulgences with which we are tempted, cravings, at the very least are free, as even a group of kids with hardly a coin to spare can love, if from afar, exquisite beauties of the silver screen like Claudia Cardinale, Gina Lollobrigida, Brigitte Bardot, and Soňa Valentová. Yet while cravings may be free, desire nonetheless arguably always means a state of dissatisfaction. The word craving, one might suggest, sounds like an affliction. Is desire not always a sign of absence? It is perhaps telling that the English verb “want” also means lack. Author Lina Mounzer, writing out of Beirut, conjures a sense of nostalgia for idyllic—if admittedly fleeting— moments of a past when the future, which in the meantime has become her present (and Lebanon’s present), “remained mercifully unknown.” Hungarian novelist András Cserna-Szabó paints cravings as a symptom of loss in a story about an aging man who finds comfort in the colorful lore about great figures of the Hungarian past, a mix of myth and history. Living on the margins of society in a yurt where he can fancy himself a descendent of the mighty Huns
EDITOR’S NOTE
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Thomas Cooper
A Few Thoughts on Cravings
who made all of Christendom tremble, he is hardly able to understand the lingo used by the two crass youngsters who have come to buy his farmstead with the sacks of cash they have from drug dealings. Slovak poet Michal Habaj touches on the sensitive ways in which, with our cravings, we risk intruding on and even violating others. If cravings bring risk, then how might we free ourselves of them? One is perhaps tempted at times to fall into the comforting delusion that too much of a good thing will teach us forbearance merely through the unpleasant, sometimes nasty aftereffects. “If music be the food of love,” Orsino says, “play on, give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, the appetite may sicken, and so die.” Yet it is not entirely obvious that our appetites sicken after surfeit. American author David Galef shares a story which suggests we sometimes find ourselves in the grip of cravings we may little understand, while Hungarian poet Lili Hanna Seres (in delicate translation by Timea Sipos) lays bare the potential violence of cravings. But risks and potential violence notwithstanding, what are we without our cravings? As conceptual and performance artist Marina Abramović reminds us in an interview with Hungarian writer Dániel Levente Pál, one of our most essential cravings as humans is our craving for truth. Hungarian author Zsolt Nagy Koppány asks the unsettling question of what becomes of a relationship based on mutual desire when cravings die. “Routine,” Nagy Koppany suggests, “is the real monster,” and as his protagonist loses interest in his wife and his wife in him, cravings for sweets in huge quantities come to replace cravings for sensuality and love. Why, then, do we write, in innumerable blog posts and self-help books, of the need to kill our cravings? Are cravings not, at least at times, to be desired? Better not, like Tantalus, at least to crave the fruit than, like Camus’ Sisyphus, to have surrendered all hope? Rather dare than, like a muttering Prufrock, turn back and descend the stair? Futile, after all, is the wind to a heart in port.
first issue, we invite our readers to enjoy essays, articles, poems, and fiction by an array of writers from both sides of the Atlantic. ¶
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With this issue, The Continental Literary Magazine brings together a host of authors to share their thoughts on these questions and more. As with our
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INTERVIEW
Demo Has Becom Perve MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ LUMINOSITY PERFORMANCE 2 HOURS KW INSTITUTE, BERLIN 1999
© MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ COURTESY OF THE MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ ARCHIVES
48–49
ocracy Marina Abramović INTERVIEW WITH
me erse
INTERVIEWED BY DÁNIEL LEVENTE PÁL ON DECEMBER 27, 2021
INTERVIE
Internationally ren ce artist Marina A Hungarian writer a Dániel Levente Pál ranging from trend tions in the arts ov century to cravings torships and demo
/mɒrinɒ ɒbrɒmovit͡ ʃ/
Marina
ABRAMOVIĆ (1946, YUGOSLAVIA)
Marina Abramovic is a Yugoslav-born conceptual and performance artist and one of the defining figures of the art world for the past half century. She was a pioneer in the world of body art and performance art, and she did a great deal to bring performance art into the mainstream. She is particularly well-known for works which tested her own endurance and the limitations of her body and mind. In 2007, she founded the Marina Abramović Institute (MAI), a non-profit foundation for performance art.
EW
Democracy Has Become Perverse
nowned performan Abramović and and translator l talk about issues ds and transforma ver the past half s for truth in dicta ocracies. /daːniɛl lɛvɛntɛ paːl/
Dániel Levente
PÁL
(1982, HUNGARY)
50–51
Dániel Levente Pál is a poet, writer, circus dramaturg, and director. He is the author of five poetry collections and two books of short stories. His writings have been translated into English, German, Portuguese, Spanish, Serbian, Romanian, Arabic, Turkish, Chinese, and Thai. Since 2016, he has been working for the Capital Circus of Budapest as a playwright and dramaturg. As a circus director, he won the Staféta Prize and the Special Prize of the 13th Budapest International Circus Festival.
Marina Abramović
On a cold winter morning in the midst of new precautionary lockdowns and new waves of new COVID variants, internationally famous conceptual and performance artist Marina Abramović was kind enough to set aside an hour or so to speak with me on Zoom about her work and her ideas on an array of issues, including cravings for truth in modern times, death, silence, and her visions of her legacy. Abramović is perhaps the single most recognizable performance artist of our time, and indeed she is arguably the artist who has done the most to make performance art the vibrant, provocative form of art that it is today. It was generous of her to suffer through the at times wearying task, all too everyday for many of us now, of taking part in an interview online, and I would like to take this chance to extend my personal thanks to her for having given us the opportunity to include her reflections in this issue. INTERVIEW
Marina, thank you very much for accepting our invitation. As you may know, The Continental Literary Magazine is a new literary quarterly with a focus on Central European literature and arts. It is an honor to have you here with us, both because you are one of the most discerning artists of our time and be-
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Democracy Has Become Perverse
cause you have roots in the region. Our current issue revolves around the theme of “cravings.” What do people crave in our times? What is your definition of “crave”? That is a very broad question, and there are so many different things that a human being can crave. I fear I run the risk of generalizing, so I will only speak on a personal level about what I crave as an artist and a human being. I crave truth. This is important, because I have always found that, in many ways in political society, given the way the news goes, the truth is hidden from us. We do not see the truth. Or we learn of it not when it is happening, but much later. Sometimes in history, we need 50 or more years to figure out that the news we were given was a lie. And then we look for the truth. For me, the craving for truth is a very important thing. The truth about everything, about relationships, politics, the universe, science, scientific discoveries, everything. Has this changed since you began your career or since the fall of the communist parties and the communist regimes in Central Europe? That is an interesting question, because when I lived in Tito’s time and before I left Yugoslavia, yes, in a way, the truth was hidden from us, but at the same time, we knew how to break laws. It was very clear. We knew that we would get four years in prison for a political joke. And we knew we would get six years for a political joke involving President Tito. There were clear rules concerning when you could take a dangerous step and make a mistake. As for the rest, everyone knew that politics was one thing and that what the newspapers were telling us was highly controlled, but we learned, at least in my country, to read between the lines. We learned that when there were long breaks when nothing was said, we had to interpret these moments and look for the truth, and we knew how to interpret them. Also, history was completely rewritten. My mother ran the Museum of Art and the Revolution in Belgrade. And there were huge photographs of Tito
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FICTION
Fall Ang
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len gels Silvester Lavrík
TRANSLATED BY JONATHAN GRESTY
FICTION
How can a boy be a a good communist, at Dano’s older sist In this short story b two schoolboy cous Samo, try to unders a world dominated party leaders, and /silvɛstɛr lɒvri:k/
Silvester
LAVRÍK (1964, SLOVAKIA)
Lavrík is a fiction-writer, dramatist, theater manager, publicist, commentator, and essayist. He was the artistic director of the Zlín Urban Theatre. He later became the director of the culture and arts-oriented Radio Devín. He tends to add a touch of fantasy to events from everyday life. By fusing senseless or irrational elements with the world of reality, he disturbs realistic proportions, while the absurdity highlights the characters’ loneliness and emotional emptiness.
Fallen Angels
a good Christian, and still get a peek ter in the bath? by Silvester Lavrik, sins, Dano and stand desire in d by patron saints, Raquel Welch. /d͡ ʒonɒtn greːt͡ ʃi/
Jonathan
GRESTY
(1965, UNITED KINGDOM)
132–133
Gresty is originally from Cheshire in the UK and graduated from Durham University in 1987. He has been living in Slovakia for nearly thirty years and currently teaches at Prešov University and translates primarily literary texts from Slovak into English. In 2021, his translation of Jana Bodnárová’s novel Necklace/Choker was published by Seagull Books. In the same year, IKAR Publishing released the Slovak version of his novel Stranger’s Coat.
“You’ll end up in hell, you Antichrists,” Granny Zuzana would scold the boys whenever they did anything wrong. Putting four more buchty into the pot to steam, she’d inevitably notice that two from earlier had disappeared. “They’re lively lads,” Grandad Martin would say, smiling genially. “Antichrists like you, more like,” retorted the old woman, fired up by housework and a holy anger which genuinely upset the boys. In that state between sleep and wakefulness, they would often get her face mixed up with the Virgin Mary‘s. And they were sorry they weren’t as good as Jesus; Granny Zuzana deserved better grandsons. How it hurt and exhausted her to get angry like that! Fighting with the devil that tempted them was more than she could manage. Dano and Samo loved their Granny Zuzana, not just for her steamed buchty, but for other things, her strawberry mousse, for instance. And they were much less afraid of hell than of her anger. Which made it two to one in favor of crime: how could they not succumb to temptation? They had to rely a great deal on God’s grace – and even more so on their grandmother’s goodness of character. According to her, hell was full of horned ruffians, their long tongues hanging out, their every move noisy clatter. “We know!” the boys cried in unison. “Grandad has told us all about it!” A person will get used to what he knows. Dano and Samo tried hard to avoid their grandmother’s wrath; after all, Grandad Martin had whispered to them that you can’t resist a force of nature. A moment earlier it had come to light that they’d torn down a swallows’ nest in the barn. And they were altar boys! Before going to sleep they would kneel by their beds and look up at the picture of an angel escorting two children across a dilapidated bridge high above a deep gorge. They always washed their hands and crossed themselves before eating, even in the school canteen. When they did something naughty, they tried their best to keep Granny in the dark. When it somehow got back to her that they had stolen a tube of yellow tempera from school or pulled the pigtails of their classmate Jana G., they promised they would confess to it in church and never do it again. They went to school on time, were attentive during lessons, and never answered back in class. When the time came, they became pioneers; later they made their vows, swearing to love and defend their socialist motherland.
FICTION
Y
Silvester Lavrík
Fallen Angels
“They have their version of things, we have ours,” she said in response to all their questions. She never asked why they did the naughty things they did. “She might find out what she needn’t know,” said Grandad with a wry smile. Dano and Stano always confessed, though; otherwise their regret would consume them. And so, she found out they had torn down the nest full of swallow chicks because they wanted to train them like parrots and thought it best to start while the birds were still young. Tears of remorse dripped into their wild strawberry mousse when they explained how they’d taken the tempera from Mrs Píšová’s cupboard because the chicks weren’t very yellow. “Hens’ eggs and chicks are yellow thanks to green grass,” the old woman reminded them, though they all knew how boring it was to watch those stupid little creatures graze. “You’ll still end up in hell,” Granny said, waving her hand dismissively when they promised they would be good. “Antichrists!” she added and wailed together with them. Uncle Demčák, school caretaker and stoker, was the person they most associated with the Antichrist. The hell their grandfather described was much like the school boiler room: underground, chipped concrete steps leading down to a rusty door covered in coal dust; inside all noise, dust, darkness and rust with chains, tongs, spades and forks hanging from the walls; its only window partially covered by dusty old portraits of grim-looking men whom Dano and Samo could not identify: were they former stokers or prominent sinners who had burned to death in the huge cast iron boiler? Uncle Demčák lazed on a pile of beer crates. “Come here, you two Antichrists,” he bawled whenever they appeared. “Why did you pull Jana’s pigtails?” he demanded when they complained of the smacking they’d get at home. “Because she sits in front of us.” “And did both of you pull them?” “Of course,” they nodded as one. “There are two of us and she’s got two pigtails.” “Yes, but there’s just one of her.” Time would pass before the boys understood this mysterious remark of stoker, caretaker and sexton in one. Uncle Demčák had chosen Dano and Samo as his proteges because they were the most reliable altar boys. The candles were always lit and the missal open at the right page. “Watch closely,” he told them in the sacristy as they prepared the ornaments for Mass together with the bread and wine which in a few minutes
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