Költészet

 

  • BENEY Zsuzsa: Between Words and Silence
    • Fordította: Mark Griffith
    • Kiadó: Mare's Nest Publishing, London
    • Kiadás éve: 1999
    • Oldalszám: 200
    • Although Zsuzsa Beney (1930) is best known in Hungary as a poet, it is her 1993 book of seven essays 'Between Words and Silence' which is her first book to have been translated into English. Essays with titles like 'Between Autumn and Winter' and 'Between Dawn and Morning', her short but elliptical text itself hovers between poetic and prose writing in style. The book is an extended meditation on border-lines and transitions, and Dr Beney's meticulous, teasing thread of thought slowly embroiders itself into an intricate texture of repeating yet subtly varying motifs. The book comes to resemble the mirrored labyrinths and the 'cobweb-like' pattern of streets in the 'unknown city' she returns to throughout the essays. Intellectually and spiritually ambitious, Zsuzsa Beney's 'Between Words and Silence' is an extraordinary introduction to the isolated otherness of Hungarian literature.
  • CSOÓRI Sándor: Waiting and incurable Wounds
    • Fordította: Len Roberts
    • Kiadó: Mid-American Review
    • Kiadás éve: 1999
    • Sándor Csoóri (1930) is the leading Hungarian poet of the post-World War II generation. His poems, both public and private, have made him the conscience and teacher of his country, a chronicler of the vast tragedies and small triumphs of his people. Memories of war intrude at unexpected intervals throughout his work to punctuate his existential sense of moral responsibility, creating a strongly ambivalent note regarding the society he surveys. Never reluctant to examine greed or hypocrisy, his poems seek a sense of moral equilibrium in the midst of social chaos. The influence of Lorca and Eluard added a deft surrealistic stroke to his technique, resulting in a poetry rooted in daily experience that nevertheless includes sudden flights of imagination and the power of his unfailing faith in revelatory imagery. Although he often draws on the nightmarish history of life under totalitarian regimes, he finds redemption through simply and accurately defining the particular hardships of his age, and through finding, against almost overwhelming odds, the sublime hope that comes only to the patient and the honest. Besides writing some of the most original and influential social and political poetry of his time, Csoóri also writes love poems of remarkable tenderness and vulnerability as well as poems of deep introspection.
  • ILLYÉS Gyula: What You Have Almost Forgotten. Selected poems
    • Fordította: William Jay Smith
    • Kiadó: KORTÁRS Kiadó Kft.
    • Kiadás éve: 1999
    • Oldalszám: 156
    • Gyula Illyés (1903-1983) is one of Hungary’s greatest poets of the 20th century. Throughout his life he drew inspiration, as did Béla Bartók from his Hungarian roots. Like Robert Frost in New England, Illyés came from the common people. He gave the land a voice both in his poetry and in his memoir of peasant life, People of the Puszta, the translation of which into many languages brought him world renown.
  • JÓZSEF ATTILA: Perched on Nothing’s Branche
    • Fordította: Peter Hargitai
    • Kiadó: White Pine Press, Buffalo,
    • Kiadás éve: 1999
    • The trajectory of József’s life was a sad one. Ghosted by frequent nervous breakdowns, hounded by left wing extremists, at the mercy of a failed love affair, he took his own life in 1937, at the age of 32. It was poetry that kept József alive. It was poetry that provided him rich personal rewards, even when he had barely enough money to sustain himself from day to day. All of his poems are cries from the heart, outlets for his surprisingly apt imaginery. While some dictionaries define him as "the finest Hungarian socialist poet of the 20th century", to contemporary readers József will seem apolitical, more closely associated with bittersweet lyricism. In a startingly candid curriculum vitae he composed not long before he threw himself under he wheels of a train Attila József recounts the dry facts of his life. The Vitae, his own account of his life is included here. Perched on Nothing’s Branch contains exactly 40 poems, most of them brief, sharp, but invariably built on a scaffolding of arresting images. The poems are ageless, mirroring the human condition and focussing on humankind’s existential loneliness.
  • JÓZSEF ATTILA: The Iron-Blue Vault. Selected Poems
    • Fordította: Zsuzsanna Ozsváth and Frederic Turner
    • Kiadó: Bloodaxe Books, London
    • Kiadás éve: 1999
    • Oldalszám: 160
    • Attila József (1905-1937) is Hungary’s greatest modern poet. His extraordinary poetry is exhilarating in its power, transcending the scars of a difficult life. A deeply divided man, his poetry has a robust physicality as well as a jaunty and heroic intelligence. "Every part of his nature seems to cooperate in each poem. But the truly arresting thing is the last-ditch urgency under which happens...Bleak options, eternal perspectives, cleanly confronted...the insatiable, unconsolable howl of his exposure to what had happened and continued to happen, weirdly counterpointed by a strange elation, a savage sort of elation or even joy" - Ted Hughes
  • KÁNYÁDI Sándor: 45 Poems
    • Fordította: István Tótfalusi
    • Kiadó: MAECENAS KÖNYVEK Budapest Könyvkiadó Kft.
    • Kiadás éve: 1999
    • Oldalszám: 144
    • Sándor Kányádi (1929) is undeniably the most popular, most widely read Hungarian contemporary poet. His new, English book contains forty-five poems. Each of them is almost childishly simple yet shockingly powerful. The voice is original and clear as that of the folk-songs. The poems can be read in both Hungarian and English.
  • PETŐFI Sándor: John the Valiant
    • Fordította: John Ridland
    • Kiadó: CORVINA Kiadó
    • Kiadás éve: 1999
    • Oldalszám: 152
    • Sándor Petofi’s spirited folk epic János Vitéz has been virtually unknown to English readers since it first appeared in 1845. This is the first full translation in rhyming English verse, with an introduction which sketches Petofi’s life and his place in the Hungarian consciousness. The present translator fell in love with the story in 1987 when he saw the János Cellar murals in the Erzsébet Hotel in Budapest. He worked for seven years with the text, aided by literal translations and suggestions from Hungarian friends and writers, to capture the spirit and tone of the original. The poem has often been illustrated but never more stunningly than in the thirty remarkable drawings prepared especially for this edition by Peter Meller, who fled Hungary in 1956 for a career as an art historian in Italy and later in Santa Barbara.
  • PETRI György: Eternal Monday
    • Fordította: György Gömöri and Clive Wilmer
    • Kiadó: Bloodaxe Books, London
    • Kiadás éve: 1999
    • Oldalszám: 100
    • "It is a long time since a major verse satirist has emerged in any European language. That is what Petri is, and he combines an almost Juvenalian savagery with a striking range of techniques and genres. His bile is the product of injustice and moral outrage. He is funny, angry, sexy, morbid, disillusioned and wildly intelligent." - Clive Wilmer György Petri belongs to the generation of Hungarian poets who grew up after the uprising of 1956. He made his name in the West as the most uncompromising and outrageous of his country’s dissident authors. At home he was as often praised for his strangely disqueting love poetry, which is harsh, erotic and desanchanted. But all his poems are marked by his biting humour and bluntness of language. Since the fall of communism, Petri’s wit and his natural anarchism have been aimed at a wider range of public targets, yet his new poems also seem more private. Many are intellectual puzzles, sceptical about identity and emotional attachments.

 

 

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