Thank you Janet and Gregory, my loyal readers on Translation, and especially Tim.
To All,
I'm somewhat abashed by this thread, but the chance to introduce Jozsef to the fine readers and writers here overwhelmed my modesty. I am merely a translator, and an inadequate one. I will allow Tim to lead this thread, i.e. as to whether further poems will be posted. I'll offer some comments from the late Martin Seymour-Smith, from his The New Guide to Modern World Literature.
"The doomed hero of modern Hungarian poetry, regarded by some as a greater poet than Ady, is Attila Jozsef (1905-1937). He was born in Budapest, and grew up in atrocious poverty. He is justly called a proletarian poet; but, influenced by Ady, he surpassed the older man both in his understanding of foreign influences and in his assimilation of them to an astonishingly original, and yet absolutely Hungarian, style. The strain of life, and chronic poverty, eventually became too much for him; he became mentally ill, and committed suicide by jumping in front of a train. His assimilation of folk poetry, and transformation of it into something new and his own, has rightly been compared to what the composer Bartok did with folk music. He became a member of the communist party -- illegal under Horthy's regime -- but, unable to live with any set of dogmas, was soon expelled. The authorities also persecuted him. He was an urban poet; but the rural world, which he intuitively understood and responded to, exists in his poetry like a dream.
"It is usually glibly asserted that Jozsef was 'schizophrenic' , and so he might have been diagnosed -- in which case the diagnosis was wrong. He was suffering from an affective disorder (a less misleading and more comprehensive term for what was and sometimes still is called manic-depression): there is no psychiatric evidence of schizophrenia, whose victims more often produce word-salads than poems. Most important: there is no evidence of behavior other than mood-congruent in Jozsef. Clearly his suicide in late 1937 was the result of acute-depression, and the feelings of guilt which usually accompany it (he thought he would be a burden on his sisters). His poems, like those of Bacovia and Campana, are often the product of 'mixed states' , in which mania and depression blend (in countless ways, often granting terrible insight but always causing terrible pain). But Jozsef was fairly robust and sardonic for a man so badly buffeted -- as his letter to Babits asking for money, after he had attacked his poems in a fit of boastful mania, demonstrates. Toward the end he wrote: 'Thirty-two years ago - to be more exact, at 9 pm on 11 April 1905, according to the prison records - after a judicial detention of nine months, I was sentenced to lifelong correction in a workhouse, on counts of treason, spying, abusing confidences, indecent exposure, inexcusable laziness, perpetual creation of scandals, and psychopathic tergiversation. My appeal against sentence having been turned down, I was moved to the world of the recidivists. The authorities hid the ineffectual nature of their investigations by putting in evidence obtained under torture - turtue which, I can testify, lasted for an eternity. I swore my innocence vainly; the court accepted the findings of the investigations and the confession under duress as the basis of their decision'. Anyone who takes this ironic and comic statement as evidence of schizophrenia is a dolt. In schizophrenia the personality fragments and withdraws; Jozsef's did not.
"Jozsef's father, a soap-factory worker, left his family and went to Rumania; his mother was a washer-woman. By enormous effort he was able to enter thwe University of Szeged, but he did not complete his education: he was expelled because a fascist professor, Antal Horger, took exception to his poems; such names should be remembered - but one forgets rhem. His youthful poems, full of promise, appeared in Nyugat (West). The rest of the story is one of increasing difficulty, punctuated by bursts of poetic activity and attempts to rescue himself from his wilful narcissism and nihilism. But the poetry he created was entirely his own. Influenced by surrealism, it was no more surrealist than that of Lorca, a poet with whom he is sometimes compared - not for his musical qualities, but for the idiosyncratic nature of his poetic world. His strength is that he succeeded in creating an absolutely self-sufficient poetic world: a perfect expression of his inner state, which itself reflects his country's helplessness between 1920 and 1925. His poetry resembles Magyar folk poetry in form and rhythm, but its content frequently reflects his reading of Marx and Freud. Existing translations of Jozsef are not altogether adequate, for they give little idea of his achievement in the realm of language. It has been said that he is not translatable."
Best,
Michael Slipp
[This message has been edited by Mike Slippkauskas (edited July 04, 2006).]
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