Foamy Sky

Fülszöveg

Miklós Radnóti was one of Hungary's greatest twentieth-century poets. Born in Budapest on May 5, 1909, he was murdered by members of the Hungarian armed forces in Abda, a small West-Hungarian village, on an unknown date between the sixth and tenth of November, in the year 1944. The time that lies between his birth and death, however, marks not only his life but also the darkest age of history: an age of unparalleled massacres and world wars. Entrapped by the Holocaust, he suffered unspeakable deprivations and died a horrifying, anonymous death. But he left a singular achievement behind: poems of the utmost beauty and rarity that both express and illuminate the culture in which they appear. With surpassing grace, sweetness, power, and sensory accuracy, many of them convey moods and perceptions quite untainted by the horrors; others offer firsthand accounts of wholesale murder. As a whole, they reveal the wide range of Radnóti's poetic imagination and his compulsion to give... Tovább

Fülszöveg

Miklós Radnóti was one of Hungary's greatest twentieth-century poets. Born in Budapest on May 5, 1909, he was murdered by members of the Hungarian armed forces in Abda, a small West-Hungarian village, on an unknown date between the sixth and tenth of November, in the year 1944. The time that lies between his birth and death, however, marks not only his life but also the darkest age of history: an age of unparalleled massacres and world wars. Entrapped by the Holocaust, he suffered unspeakable deprivations and died a horrifying, anonymous death. But he left a singular achievement behind: poems of the utmost beauty and rarity that both express and illuminate the culture in which they appear. With surpassing grace, sweetness, power, and sensory accuracy, many of them convey moods and perceptions quite untainted by the horrors; others offer firsthand accounts of wholesale murder. As a whole, they reveal the wide range of Radnóti's poetic imagination and his compulsion to give testimony to an existence at the edge of, and at last engulfed by, the Holocaust. In this way, they play a unique role in the history of culture: masterworks of twentieth-century poetry, they are documents of destruction as well. Through them Radnóti subverted the horror of anonymity and made a major contribution to world literature as well as our understanding
of the Holocaust.
Zsuzsanna Ozsváth and Frederick Turner have also translated a large selection of poems by Attila József, one of the great Hungarian poets of the twentieth century {The Iron-blue Vault, Bloodaxe Books, 1999). Zsuzsanna Ozsváth is Professor of Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas, Dallas, and is an accomplished translator of works from Hungarian and German. Frederick Turner is Founders Professor of Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas, Dallas. He is the author of 20 books, a poet, interdisciplinary scholar, aesthetician, essayist, cultural critic and translator. Vissza