Become a Message: Poems
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Beschreibung des Verlags
Arguably the most significant modern Hungarian poet, Lajos Walder was born in 1913 and died in 1945 in the Gunskirchen concentration camp, on the day it was liberated by the Allied forces. Exuberant and witty, poignant and severe, trenchant yet light-hearted, Lajos Walder's poems cut to the quick and stay with you. Reading them is like reliving an era long gone and, at the same time, learning to see our own world with new eyes. For Lajos Walder's "message" speaks to us as directly today as it did to his contemporaries almost a century ago: "... that apart from thieves and murderers // there are also human beings." For the first time, Lajos Walder's complete extant poetry is made available in English, superbly translated by the poet's daughter Agnes Walder, who also provides a beautiful afterword, and with a passionate foreword by Scots fellow poet Don Paterson.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Walder (1913 1945) might be a little-known mid-20th century Hungarian poet, but that has little to do with his talent. Having only published two books, during the 1930s, Heads or Tails and Group Portrait, his complete works are now available in English for the first time thanks to translations by his daughter, Agnes. The impetus behind the endeavor is clear: the poems are unmistakably modernist in their concern with the mythic and metaphysical, at a time when industrial warfare had decimated Europe and threatened to do so again. But there is also a quiet solitude that permeates these pages. Nothing is too big or too small to be noticed, and this transcendence of self allows Walder to make grand gestures without sounding archaic or pompous: "I am the last ambassador/ and the last despot/ of ideology-free/ European literature." Walder endows smallness with heavy meaning, propelling the poems forward and giving them heft. One minor flaw is that, as this is a life's work, there is only the poetry to guide the reader; no annotations provide background or direction. But the poet's concern with humanity is clear. "Become a whispered message," Walder implores readers, because "apart from thieves and murderers/ there are also human beings."
