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Gesa Csath was a Hungarian writer, critic, musician, and medical doctor. One of Sigmund Freud's first followers, he became interested in the effects of narcotics and developed an addiction to opium. After fighting in WWI, in 1919 he killed his wife and committed suicide. He was 31 years old. Jascha Kessler is a poet, writer, and translator. His translation of Traveling Light by Kirsti Simonsuuri won the Finnish Literary Translation Centre Award in 2001. He has held a Fulbright Fellowship to Italy, where he was also Fulbright Professor of American Literature. He is currently Professor Emeritus of English and Modern Literature at UCLA. Charlotte Rogers came to the United States in 1939 from Romania and studied at the National College of Education in Evanston, Illinois, and at UCLA. She later worked as a freelance translator. Besides English, she spoke Hungarian, Romanian, French, and German.
This striking collection from Csath (1887-1919) introduces readers to the physician, writer, and musician's fertile imagination... Throughout, Csath demonstrates a thrilling and unnerving commitment to amoral presentations of dark subject matter. Csath's matter-of-fact depictions of cruelty are sure to alienate some, but others will find them wild and audacious. Regardless of how it lands, this is a fearless work. --Publishers Weekly Csath's short stories are and extraordinary, uneasy mixture of sentimentality, sadism, and sexual repressions--nasty tales, not dissimilar to some of the fictions of the contemporary United States and United Kingdom, both countries in which the collective dream has, latterly, also broken down under the impact of too much reality. During Csath's lifetime Sigmund Freud, the scrutineer of dreams, built up the enormous hypothesis of the unconscious in Vienna, the greatest city of the empire, which encompassed Hungary, Csath's homeland, more and more uneasy. It is difficult to read Csath, a specialist in 'nervous disorders' himself, without thinking of Freud's analysis of the subtext of human experience.... [An] opium addict and therefore a specialist in dreams, [Csath] wrote short stories comfortless as bad dreams, sometimes decorating them languorously with art-nouveau impedimenta of lilies, lotuses, and sulphurous magic, at other times relating them in the cool, neutral language of the case-book. He was also a doctor. No real contradiction here; the medical profession not only offers a free access to narcotics but often, since it involves considerable exposure to human suffering, implicity invites their use. --From the Introduction by Angela Carter
