The Song Of The Cosmos: Selected Poems

These translations by Piette and Lehoczky form a five-year long project with an ambition to translate a significant selection of the poems of the modernist, socialist, working-class Hungarian poet, Attila Jozsef (1905-1937), one of the most celebrated and loved poets of the 20th century in Hungary. He lived a poverty-stricken, passionate and unstable life as a wanderer, a bohemian, a poet, a thinker, a non-conformist, a hobo and a lover until his untimely death by suicide, struck by a train, in Balatonszarszo on Lake Balaton, aged only 32. His poetry is surrealist, existentialist, Villonesque, tough-minded, quasi anarchist, deeply drenched in Hungarian folklore and the folk song, passionate, lyrical, elegiac, marked by his solitary wandering, his keen observation of the lives of the people, by his psychoanalytically inflected gaze into the unconscious, into the mind and body of lovers, his philosophical focus on dialectic and social injustice. The lyrics, free verse and formal, in an astonishing number of experimental forms, range from the metaphysical to the memoir, have filiations to French medieval, post-symbolist and surrealist poetry, fuse Nietzsche, Marx, Hegel and Freud in daring raids on the inarticulate, sing with haunting vernacular and ancient beauty and rise to extraordinary heights and flights of the imagination, yet are always grounded in the real, in the concrete particulars of the metropolis, the dark streets of the underclasses of this world.