My father taught me to read when I was four, and I never stopped. But reading, to me, promptly suggested emulation: writing verse, mostly love poems to older women. At six, I wrote them to Gabriela, the pretty, fourteen-year-old upstairs neighbor, who paid scant attention to them or their author. My father was Hungarian; my mother, a member of Yugoslavia’s Hungarian minority. We lived in Belgrade, the capital of both Serbia and Yugoslavia, and I was a fiery Yugoslav patriot. This despite the fact that my parents had me learn German as my first language from a German nanny, so as to start me out along cosmopolitan lines; that my second language was Hungarian, which they spoke around the house; that Serbo-Croatian was only my third, picked up from the other kids in the street.

So much to set the scene for my boyhood reading. Sad to say, though, I can’t remember my very first reading at all. My father loved books, and fine—though not custom-made—bindings; their being kept behind glass furthered their prestige in my eyes. My earliest recollections of reading focus on German and Hungarian poets. The German ones were in various anthologies, where my preference was for second-raters such as Ludwig Uhland and Felix Dahn, though I also enjoyed some of the more standard anthology pieces by Goethe, Schiller, Heine, and the rest. But it was not until much later that I discovered Rilke, George, and Hofmannsthal. With Hungarians, I inherited my father’s taste for