The Adventures of Sindbad

“What you have loved remains yours.” Thus speaks the irresistible rogue Sindbad, ironic hero of these fantastic tales, who has seduced and abandoned countless women over the course of centuries but never lost one, for he returns to visit them all—ladies, actresses, housemaids—in his memories and dreams. From the bustling streets of Budapest to small provincial towns where nothing ever seems to change, this ghostly Lothario encounters his old flames wherever he goes: along the banks of the Danube; under windows where they once courted; in churches and in graveyards, where Eros and Thanatos tryst. Lies, bad behavior, and fickleness of all kinds are forgiven, and love is reaffirmed as the only thing worth persevering for, weeping for, and living for.

The Adventures of Sindbad is the Hungarian master Gyula Krudy’s most famous book, an uncanny evocation of the autumn of the Hapsburg Empire that is enormously popular not only in Hungary but throughout Eastern Europe.

Gyula Krudy (1878–1933) was born in Nyiregyhaza in northeastern Hungary. His mother had been a maid for the aristocratic Krudy family, and she and his father, a lawyer, did not marry until Gyula was seventeen. Krudy began writing short stories and publishing brief newspaper pieces while still in his teens. Rebelling against his father’s wish that he become a lawyer, he worked as a newspaper editor for several years before moving to Budapest, where he, his wife, and two children lived off the money he made as a writer of short stories. In 1911 he found success with Sindbad’s Youth, the first of his books recounting the exploits of his fictional alter ego. Krudy’s subsequent novels about contemporary Budapest, including The Crimson Coach (1914) and Sunflower (1918; available from NYR B Classics), proved popular during the First World War and the Hungarian Revolution, but his drinking, gambling, and philandering left him broke and led to the dissolution of his first marriage. During the late 1920s and early 1930s, Krudy suffered from declining health and a diminishing readership, even as he was awarded Hungary’s most prestigious literary award, the Baumgarten Prize. Forgotten in the years after his
death, Krudy was rediscovered in 1940, when Sandor Marai published Sindbad Comes Home, a fictionalized account of Krudy’s last day. The success of the book led to a revival of Krudy’s works and to his recognition as one of the greatest Hungarian writers.

George Szirtes is a Hungarian-born English poet and translator. He received the T. S. Eliot Prize for Reel (2004), and his New and Collected Poems were published in 2008. As a translator of poetry and fiction he has won a variety of prizes and awards, including the European Poetry Translation Prize and the Dery Prize.