Silver Pirouettes

Born in 1910, György Faludy lived through almost all of 20th century and witnessed many of its major events. In the 1930’s he was already an established poet in Hungary, but at the advent of WW II he had to escape Budapest because of his Jewish origin and socialist politics. Traveling through France and North Africa he eventually ended up in the US where he joined the Army and served in the Pacific. After the war he spurned the offer of US citizenship and went back to liberated Hungary; an ardent socialist, he was eager to help build a new, democratic country on the rubbles of the War. But soon the Stalinist regime arrested him as an American spy and kept him at the infamous Recsk forced labor camp until Stalin’s death in ’53 when the camp was dismantled. During the 1956 Hungarian Revolution he fled the country again and started a new life of exile, first in England and then in Canada until the collapse of Communism in 1989 when he was finally able to go back to Hungary where he was showered with prizes. He continued to write and give public readings till he died in Sept, 2006, which doesn’t stop his poetry from remaining as contemporary and relevant as ever. Even the New York Times observed his passing in an obit. Faludy was an overnight sensation at the age of twenty-five with his very personal take on Villon in his Hungarian translations, especially when he expanded on them with his own Villon pastiches. His masterly use of traditional forms filled with contemporary language and up-to-date social concerns remained the hallmarks of his poetry for the rest of his long creative life. It is impossible to convey the spirit of his poetry in a translation that totally ignores the form, the armature for his poems, but concentrating on form alone can easily distort the message. The latter was always a focal point of his poems, and in that he was an unusual modern poet: he always had something to say. He was not a purveyor of mood pieces, a builder of images for their own sake; neither was he an uncritical preacher of political positions like many of his contemporaries who sought to discharge their perceived obligation to society by brandishing the latest slogans and conspiracy theories, East and West. And whenever he found himself drawn by a poem into any of those genres, he would always manage to raise his head above the poetic flow and reach for the life preserver of a critical comment. He let himself be overwhelmed by passion only in his torrid love poems, but even there his mind remained an interloper peeping in the window. This selection of Faludy’s poems offers a little journey of discovery in his poetic landscape which takes us from Faludy the realist thinker with a critical view of history—and whose desperate tone is tempered by unflagging humanism—to Faludy, the poet, animated by his irrepressible spirit, who lived life to the fullest to his last day, marrying at the age of ninety a woman sixty years younger, eating and drinking and smoking as he liked, and most of all, writing his poetry that combined his love of life and all humanity with historical depths and a sense of wonder. His ability to resonate with his and other cultures of all ages lent a transcendental quality to his poetry, and now that he’s dead it puts him among the immortals of world literature.