Seeing Further

Description

In this Sebaldian autobiographical novel by a leading German author and translator, a narrator attempts to revive a run-down Hungarian movie theater—an unpromising endeavor that soon leads into a consideration of the building’s history and an homage to the power of the cinema, imperiled as it may be in our time.

While travelling through the Great Alfold, the vast plain in southeastern Hungary, the narrator of Seeing Further stops in an all but vacant town near the Romanian border. There she happens upon a dilapidated cinema. Once the heart of the village, it has been boarded up for years.

Entranced by the mozi, as cinema is known in Hungarian, she soon finds herself embarking on the colossal task of reviving it, entranced by what she calls “a dream in a glass coffin,” the preservation of the cinematic experience, “beautiful and undecayed like Snow White, in some people’s thoughts and memories, nourishing the fantasy of it reawaking.”

What follows is a history of place, told by the town’s few remaining inhabitants and uncovered in physical traces of the past left behind in the grand old building. Seeing Further illuminates the cinema’s former role as a communal space for collective imagining, a site rooted in ritual that has steadily disappeared. For Esther Kinsky, it nevertheless remains a place of wonder, a dark room that unfurls a vastness not beholden to the ordinary rules of time and space. Seeing Further is an homage to the cinema in words and pictures.Esther Kinsky is the author of six volumes of poetry and five novels. She has translated many notable English and Polish authors into German. Her novels River and Grove won numerous literary prizes in Germany. Her novel Rombo, published by New York Review Books in 2023, was awarded the W.-G.-Sebald-Literaturpreis in 2020 after its initial publication in Germany. In 2022, Kinsky was awarded the prestigious Kleist Prize for her oeuvre.

Caroline Schmidt has translated poetry by Friederike Mayröcker, as well as art historical essays, museum catalogues, and exhibition texts for Albertina in Vienna and Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, among others. Her translation of Esther Kinsky’s Rombo was published by New York Review Books in 2023.US

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