Guest of the ilb 2002
Zsolt Láng was born in 1958 in Satu Mare, Romania,
where he belongs to the Hungarian minority. He grew up bilingual
and writes narrative literature, dramas and essays in Hungarian.
In 1984 he completed his studies in Engineering at the Technical
University in Cluj-Kolozsvár and worked for the next five years as a
teacher. Since 1990 he has been working as editor of the
literature magazine 'Látó' which comes out at regular intervals in
Romania. Zsolt Láng’s debut novel, 'Perényi szabadulása',
published in 1993, takes up an old Hungarian legend, the story of the
Perényis family, which Láng re-interprets.
In 1994 'A Pálicakaember élete' was published, a novel which, in
miniature-like chapters, illuminates various spontaneous scenes in
which the protagonist gets involved as quickly as he is able to
re-emerge, baffled and in an ironic way so much the wiser. This
character is in type akin to those precocious and clumsy figures
familiar to the reader of Christian Morgenstern’s satirical writings.
Except that the anonymous hero, who through the goodness of his
heart sets his own traps, is more poetical, far more dreamy than, say,
Morgenstern’s Palmstrom. Whereas there the action is set in a
narrow-minded world which proves to be Palmstrom’s downfall, we have
here a mixture of pragmatic naivity and poetic wisdom. Láng’s
books are not attributed a self-ironic tone for nothing.
After countless single publications Zsolt Láng has, since 1997, been
working on his trilogy 'Bestiarium Transylvaniae' in which all his
earlier works are arranged to give a new meaning. Among these are
the early collections of short novels as well as a volume of essays
published in 1995 in which the author takes social and contemporary
topics to an abstract level and gives them a poetical setting.
Following the example of the romantic idea of universal poetry in which
both the border between the individual genres and the border between
individual works disappears, Zsolt Láng goes in search of complete
literary oneness. In the first volume of the trilogy Láng sets
the story in the Transylvania of the 16th century, basing it on the
legend of the 'Bestiaria', a collection of fearsome birds. Taking
up the thread of the encounter with these birds, Láng tells the story
of the common love of two men for one woman, of the Mephisto-like Baron
Sapre and his opponent, Friar Peter. Linked with a chronicle of
the conquest of Transsylvania and the religious conflict connected with
it, the story unfolds in a setting that is far-reaching and
mystical. Throughout this work there is, therefore, the great
contrast between unreal and logically real elements, between the purely
fictitious and the concrete references in the essay-like
sections. The classical narrative method is interrupted
elaborately and artistically by subtexts.
In 1999 his drama 'A rúkmadár' received its premier. His works have been translated into several languages.
© international literature festival berlin | 
