The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Hungarian Nabob, by Maurus Jokai

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Title: A Hungarian Nabob

Author: Maurus Jokai

Translator: R. Nisbet Bain

Release Date: April 3, 2007 [EBook #20978]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A HUNGARIAN NABOB ***

Produced by Steven desJardins and Distributed Proofreaders

WORKS OF MAURUS JOKAI

HUNGARIAN EDITION

A HUNGARIAN NABOB

_Translated from the Hungarian_

_By_ R. NISBET BAIN

NEW YORK
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY

Copyright 1899 by Doubleday & McClure Co.

PREFACE.

This noble novel, now translated into English for the first time, was
written nearly fifty years ago. On its first appearance, Hungarian
critics of every school at once hailed it as a masterpiece. It has
maintained its popularity ever since; and now, despite the manifold
mutations of literary fashion, in Hungary as elsewhere, has reached the
unassailable position of a national classic.

It is no light task to attempt to transplant a classic like "Egy Magyar
Nabob." National tastes differ infinitely, and then there is the
formidable initial difficulty of contending with a strange and baffling
non-aryan language. Only those few hardy linguists who have learnt, in
the sweat of their brows, to read a meaning into that miracle of
agglutinative ingenuity, an Hungarian sentence, will be able to
appreciate the immense labour of rendering some four hundred pages of a
Magyar masterpiece of peculiarly idiomatic difficulty into fairly
readable English. But my profound admiration for the illustrious
Hungarian romancer, and my intimate conviction that, of all continental
novelists, he is most likely to appeal to healthy English taste, which
has ever preferred the humorous and romantic story to the
_Tendenz-Roman_, or novel with a purpose, have encouraged me to
persevere to the end of my formidable task.

I may add, in conclusion, that I have taken the liberty to cut out a
good third of the original work, and this I have done advisedly, having
always been very strongly of opinion that the _technique_ of the
original tale suffered from an excess of episode. This _embarras de
richesse