TE23 Double Feature

The Hangman’s House (novel excerpt) Andrea Tompa Translated from Hungarian by Bernard Adams

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It wasn’t the photograph of one-ear above the blackboard in the classroom, as, with his floppy bow tie and sleeked-back frizzy hair, he had smiled benignly down for fifteen years from Monday to Saturday upon studious youth— the A3 prints weren’t on sale in shops, but organizations could obtain them from a central distributor, there was no way that they could be had for money, it seemed that it would have been impossible to attach a monetary value to them—nor was it his twoeared photograph on the front pages of textbooks, riddled by pencilor compass-points, routinely adjusted to the form of swallow, devil, Lenin, dracula or clown in drawings of great variety and sometimes considerable talent—classes handed down 339

[Learn more about Andrea Tompa’s nove, The Hangman’s House, on the March 27, 2022 episode of Women in Translation on Trafika Europe Radio, right here .]

Andrea Tompa