Get to know Hungary’s great poets with this selection of poetry collection from Libri.
The Lost Rider
Corvinus
Presenting a collection of major Hungarian works of poetry, The Lost Rider: A Bilingual Anthology is a cross-section sampling of some of the greatest poets. Organized chronologically by birth year, the anthology dates from Bálint Balassi (1554) to István Kormos (1923). The left page in each spread is in Hungarian, while the right page is in English. This format applies even to the table of contents which gives the name of the poet, the years he lived and the poems included. Some of the poets represented are Balassi, Zr ín yi, Faludi, Vörösmarty, Petõfi, Szabó, and Ady among others.
Foamy Sky
Radnóti
Radnóti (1909-1944) was born into a Jewish family. After his marriage in 1935, he traveled to France, where he became involved with left-wing circles and established ties with the illegal Hungarian Communist Party. In 1943, Radnóti formally converted to Catholicism, yet he was deported to a Yugoslavian labor camp in 1944. As the Russian army approached, the entire camp was led on a death march through Hungary. Radnóti, unable to walk, was shot to death and buried in a mass grave. His last poems were found in his coat pocket when the grave was later exhumed. They have been translated by Zsuzsanna Ozsváth and Frederick Turner.
The Iron-Blue Vault: Selected
Poems & A Transparent Lion
Attila József
Regarded by many as Hungary’s greatest twentieth-century poet, Attila József was born in Budapest in 1905 and died, after apparently throwing himself under a train, in December of 1937. He lived a difficult life marked by severe poverty, loneliness, and depression, indicative the conditions of his native Hungary during an uncertain and turbulent period of the 20th century between the wars. Writing in intense emotional tones that swung between despair and hope, József invigorated old poetic forms with a new freedom, orchestrating his poems with fresh rhythmic patterns influenced by folk music’s rhythms as well as their metrics. But József was also influenced by Dadaist and other modernist ideas sweeping Europe, finding a voice that would synthesize the older cultural forms of Hungary with the new experiments of his time.
A Transparent Lion is a collection translated from the Hungarian with an introduction by Michael Castro and Gábor G. Gyukics. The Iron-Blue Vault: Selected Poems is a new collection of his writing with biographical information and critical essays included.
