[biography] - [quotes] - [publications]
"... without parental supervision I skipped school
and played in the streets. In the third-grade reader, however, I found
some interesting stories about King Attila and so I threw myself into
reading. These stories about the King of the Huns interested me not
only because my name is Attila but also because my foster-parents at
Öcsöd used to call me Steve. After consulting the neighbours, they came
to the conclusion, in front of me, that there was no such name as Attila.
This astounded me; I felt my very existence was being called in question.
I believe the discovery of the tales about Attila had a decisive influence
on all my ambitions from then on; in the last analysis it was perhaps
this that led me to literature. This was the experience that turned
me into a person who thinks, one who listens to the opinions of others,
but examines them critically in his own mind; someone who resigns himself
to being called Steve until it is proved that his name is Attila, as
he himself had thought all along."
Mortal dweller, may your mother (from The Last of Seven, trans. by Zsuzsanna Ozsváth and Frederick Turner)
Without Hope All you arrive at in the end Myself, I try to look about My heart sits on the twig of nothing, (Translated by Edwin Morgan)
"Well, in the End I Have Found Well, in the end I have found my home, It will take me like a collecting-box, Or an iron ring engraved For many years I was alone. It was like that, empty, the way I lived: In that whole whirlwind of my life Spring is beautiful, summer too, (Translated by Edwin Morgan)
"For József reality is like a river, like the Danube
with its cargo of melon-rinds and paper-parings like moons, and apples
like planets. Its ideal forms are not static and eternal geometries
outside it, but more like the pillars of fire and smoke in the book
of Exodus that go on before us within the real world, leading us into
the future, transforming themselves according to the conditions of the
time. ... For József the poet was an avatar of the ancient shaman-bard:
a healer, a psychopomp, an explorer of new knowledge, the community's
instrument of consciousness for apprehending its own dark realms of
the spirit."
[biography] - [quotes] - [publications]
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