Nobel Prize winner in Literature writes in the only language that even the devil respects

They say every language holds a secret—and few hide as much as Hungarian. The only language the devil respects is, by far, Hungarian. That's right. The Evil One, with his cunning and multinational fluency, understands the meanings, lines, and nuances of hundreds of languages, dialects, and little dialects. But he stumbles, gets confused, and, if he's not careful, falls flat on his face when he hears a Hungarian phrase.

In Budapest, therefore, he finds himself vulnerable. The humans there have a tactical advantage: they can confuse him with incomprehensible words. Which, let's face it, is an excellent weapon of resistance.

It's no exaggeration. The Hungarian language is a linguistic Everest. Whoever dares to climb it discovers that its grammar seems to have been written by a distracted angel or a meticulous demon—there are differing opinions.

The pronunciation? A ballet of sounds that challenges even the most flexible languages. The plural doesn't behave like a plural, suffixes multiply like rabbits, and the verb seems to practice yoga: it bends, contorts itself, and always appears in a different place in the sentence. Learning Hungarian is like playing three-dimensional chess against someone who doesn't tell you the rules.

That being said, it makes perfect sense that a master of such untranslatable words has taken home the most coveted literary prize on the planet. László Krasznahorkai—a name that sounds like a conjuration!—has just been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. A Hungarian writer who constructs sentences the size of city blocks, full of twists, turns, abysses, and semantic fissures. Reading Krasznahorkai is like walking through a labyrinth of mirrors with a glass of water on your head—and reaching the end without spilling a drop.

The Swedish Academy justified the award by saying that his work is “compelling and visionary, reaffirming the power of art amidst apocalyptic terror.” And that's no hyperbole. His books have more tension points than a condo meeting with a fee increase. Susan Sontag called him a “master of the apocalypse.” Filmmaker Béla Tarr transformed his stories into long, slow, and hypnotic films—and was acclaimed worldwide.

One of them, Werckmeister Harmonies, was born from the novel The Melancholy of Resistance, published in Hungary in 1989 and only in the English-language market in 1998. The plot begins when a circus arrives in a small town carrying—you guessed it—a stuffed whale. Yes, a whale. Stuffed. If Franz Kafka had been in a good mood and Fyodor Dostoevsky had had a little too much coffee, perhaps they would have written something like that.

Krasznahorkai is 71 years old and was born in 1954 in the small town of Gyula, in the heart of communist Hungary. The son of a lawyer and a Ministry of Social Welfare employee, he deserted the military—abandoning his service because he couldn't stand the absurd orders—played piano in a jazz band, and studied literature in Budapest. His first novel, Satantango (1985), was an instant success in the country and was adapted into a film that lasted over seven hours (yes, seven!). The devil begs to try watching it to the end.

The writer's linguistic prowess goes beyond the dark themes. He publishes novels with only one period in 400 pages—as is the case with Herscht 07769, released last year in the United States. Imagine the reader, breathless, groping for commas like someone searching for oxygen in the desert, trying to find where a sentence ends. It doesn't end.

It's like running a marathon with your eyes. And yet, those who reach the finish line feel that every step was worth it. As he himself once said: "My sentences are long because the world doesn't fit into short sentences."

Krasznahorkai is not one of those who write to please algorithms or perform literary dances on TikTok. In a 2014 interview with The New York Times, he stated that he sought "an absolutely original style," free from literary ancestors. No recycled versions of Kafka, Dostoevsky, or Faulkner.

He wanted to be himself: a syntactic earthquake. And he succeeded. As he also stated: "I write to hear the silence that comes after the chaos."

Steve Sem-Sandberg, of the Nobel committee, highlighted his “epic, powerful and musically inspired style.” Musically inspired—perhaps echoing those nights when he played the piano while imagining a world about to collapse.

For Hungarians, seeing Krasznahorkai receive the Nobel Prize has a special significance. He is only the second citizen of the country to achieve such a feat, after Imre Kertész, who was awarded the prize in 2002. Hungarian, after all, is a language of few awards, but of unfathomable depths. When someone writes in it with mastery, it's as if they've tamed a dragon—and even forced the dragon to recite poetry.

There's something deliciously ironic about this: the most intricate language on the planet serving as a channel for literature that exposes the world in ruins, the collapse of certainties, the beauty that emerges from the cracks. Krasznahorkai doesn't write to comfort. He writes to unsettle, like someone pulling the rug out from under reality and asking: "And now, what are you going to do in freefall?"

In another of his pithy statements, he said: "The apocalypse is not an event, it's a state of mind."

In recent years, the Nobel Prize has sought to broaden its geographical and cultural scope. It has been won by South Korean writer Han Kang for *The Vegetarian*, Tanzanian writer Abdulrazak Gurnah, and French writer Annie Ernaux. Now it's the turn of a man who writes in a language spoken by fewer than 13 million people—and understood fluently, I dare say, by half of them. Hungarian is the language most like a safe: few have the key.

For those who think mastering a new language is like making a language learning app smile with little hearts, I recommend: try pronouncing Krasznahorkai correctly. Try understanding a Hungarian verb in the past perfect conditional. Try writing a love letter without sounding like you're summoning demons. If you succeed, the devil will rise and applaud you.

For now, the lesson from Budapest remains: even in the darkness of the apocalypse, art triumphs. Even in sentences longer than the lifespan of a streetlamp, literature breathes. And even when language is a wall, there are those who climb it to shout from above that human imagination is indomitable. Krasznahorkai is that cry. And Hungarian, that echo that not even the devil understands—and perhaps for that very reason respects.

(By the way: Krasznahorkai is pronounced like this in Portuguese — “Cráss-ná-hor-cái”.)