flY of these poems, sometimes in slighdy diffe~nt 'ie:sions, have appe:m:d in rhe following :es. They are: The Hung3rian Pen, The American Pen, Mundus Arti:un, The New tg.2rian Qu:uterly, Con/ron:.:Jtion, UT Ret:jew, Marilyn, St.3.nd, The New Lugano Review. >n, The Paris ReL,jew. The Massachusetts Review, The American Ret--jew. Contemporary lTlerly, New utterS. Red \~e3t"er. The Gramucy Revitw, Nimrod, Westwa),s. The Spirit Moues Us, The Cali/ornia Quarterly, Blue Buildings, The Michigan Quarterly Review,

(stream. The Literary Review, Cutbank. The Christian Science l'rfonitor. The Kerryon iew. PN Review. Prism: Inrern3rional, ,""-fodern Poetry In Trans/ation, POe'cry/ LA. Kerryon ieu;,. Practices 0/ the Wind, Poetry Now, Graham House Review, Ploughshares. The SOllri Review, The Virginia Quanerly Review. Ar1 & Poet,-; Today (New De/hi), Visions, ·;con, The Malahat Review. H.2yden's Ferry Review. For permission co publish and co int my translations, J am gracefuJ co The Mag)'3t PEN Club.

publishcr wishes co thank The Soros Foundation, and th e Daycon Hudson Foundation a grant from Dayton's and Target Scores.

er by h~ Klee with thanks to the Kunst museum of Berne .

rograph of Jas<h. Kessler by

cographs of thc authors courtesy of Hungarian PEN.

¥right 1987 for this translation, by Jas<ha Kessler.

lee House Press books arc available to bookstores through our primary cibulor: Consonium Book Sales and Distribution, 213 East Fourth Street, Saint i, Minnesota 55101. Our books are also available through all major library ributors and jobbers, and through mosr small press distributors, including !kpeopJe, Bookslinger, Inland, Pacific Pipeline, and Small Press Distribution. For 10031 orders, catalogs or other information, write [0: Coffee House Press, Post ice Box 10870, MinneapoHs, Minnesota SS" 58.

rary of Congress Caealog Card Data

ZSUZSA BENEY

SANDOR CSOORI

ANDRAS FODOR

GABOR GORGEY

ANNA HAJNAL

GYULA ILLrtS

MARTON KALAsZ

CONTE N TS

A Broken Glass, 1

The Sunday Before Christmas, S

E.K.'S Will, S

Afternoon of Grand Old Men, 6

A Stranger, 6

The Print of Your Hand, 7

Maybe Elegies, 7

~membering Snow, 8

Summer, Haloed, 8

You Were Still the Sun's There, 9

Field Hospirai, 1945. 11 .

Your Body's Bread, 12

Anatomy of a Supper, l' Interview, 21

Some Notes on the Wind, 30

Images, 36

rYe Never Come Away, You Know, 37

May It Not Run Down, 38

Rains, 39

Tree [0 Flute, "0

That's All? I 41

Afterward, 43

Cannibal Furore, 43

In Dante's Whirlwind, .. On an Infant, .. My Old Man's Dawdling, 45

Ghost Psalms, 41

Hymn, 41

Impromptu, 48

~gacy, 49

Maiden, 50

Nearly Nameless, 52

The Age of Snow, 53

Time's No Grammar, 54

Up Against That Wall Everywhere, S4

-- -- - -

LAszLO KALNOCKY

LAJOS KASSAK

ANNA KISS

MIHALy LADM'YI

LASZU) NAG.Y

IMRE ORAVECZ

OTIO ORBAN

JANos PILlNZSKY

GYCRGY RABA

The Quarry, 56

The Glass Hat, 57

i2, S9 #2, 60

15,61 /6, 62

Miniatures, 64

Cosmic Tapestry, 69

For Example, 7J

Three Drawings. 73

No Denying, 74

Quierude, 75

Sketchbook, 76

A Headboard to Headboards, 78

Cognition, Language Poetry, 80

Hurrah For Trees!, 82

The Bdls ~ Calling For Me, 8.

The Little Jesus of the Barren, 95

The", Is No Southern Island, 97

9:00 A.M., 99

By Then You'd D",ssed, 100

A Summer on the Lake, 102

Certain Years, 103

Requiem, 104

The Face of Creation, 105

Apoaypha, 108

A Meditation, 110

Harbach 1944, 111

Three Poems, 112

In Praise of the Lowest Line, 113

The Passion According to Ravensbruck, 113

A Preface to Dying, 115

Epos, 116

Himalaya Days, 117

Going on Talking, 118

My Faces, 119

Night Meeting, 120

Srudy: A Hand, 121

The G",eks Are Blinding Polyphemus, 122

SANDOR RAKOS

GYCRGY SOMLYO

MARGIT SZECSI

]OSZEF TORNAI

ISTVAN VAS

III III

•• ENDRE VESZI

SANDOR WECRES

..

e;---. fJ'-1 Wv~ ~~

Bear Song, 114

Three Dostoievskian f...tasks, 126 1 And June .. .?, 13.

Today, 135

Marginalia, 136

Nlimesis, 138

Angel with Horn, 140

The Hoverer, 141

Ars Poetica, 144

Psalm, 144

Solar Eclipse, 1.5

Ten Thousand Nations, 146

The Names of the Idols, 1.6

Anacreontic, 148

A Night Without Light, 1.8

Equinoctial, 149

Forum Romanum, ISO

History of Lh: A Communication, 150 Idling, 151

Just This, 152

Once Mo"" 153

Ports, JSJ

Tambour, 156

The Ladder, 1S7

The Lion, 1S8

This Too is Ars Poerica, 1S9

Dceaming of the Cascle, 161

A D",am of Roaming, 16'

A Poem on Theater, 16$

A Strange Ciry, 166

A Vision, 166

As Though It Had Never Been, 167

At Sixty, 167

Contraries, ItU

Crossed Wires, 169

Earthquake, 170

A Dream, 171

Eternal Evening, 171

Ephemeral, 172

Excerpts From the Modern Tragedy, In Game, 17~

Bleak, 174

lvluctering, 175

In the Beginning, 175

Noise in Darkness, 176

Almosc a Sonnec, 176

Stray Dog, 177 The Owl, 177 Rain, 178

Sonnet Manque, 178

Prologue co "The Boacman in the Moon", 179

Up and Down, 179

Providential, 180

The Gale of Teelh, 180 The Plain, 182 Thule, 182

Upwards, 183

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE

On my firsc visic CO Hungary, in 1'72, I was accompanied everywhere by Julia Kada, a woman in her lace 20'S, who had been assigned CO me by che Magyar Poets, Essayim, and NoveliSts, Ihe Magyar PEN Club. She was Ihen a recenc graduate student in Anglo-American Literature. She is a first-rate English speaker and a lover of lilerature. I was full of innocent queries aboul Budapest, its architeaure and history, and some of them may well have been embarrassing or even unfair. She often answered with a deprecatory giggle, "I've already told you: this is a comic operetta . COUntry from the early ice cream age!" Probably Ihis young woman from a working class background was using that tag from Some nightclub satirist to avoid any comparisons between her tiny nation of ten millions and what she thought an American poet stood for as the representative of a massive, serious and advanced effi­ciency - our nation of over two hundred fifty million ... and a world language. Still, Ihe Magyar poetS are neilher frivolous nor lightweights. And poetry was our lask: every day for three hard hours during most of Ihal month of July. Hungarian poetry is roored in a complex social and polirical hiSlory reaching back aboul a Ihousand years. A hiSlory difficull for some­one from the Wesrern Hemisphere 10 grasp, and one that remains baffling and problemaric for Ihe Hungarians Ihemselves.

Whal had laken me 10 Hungary? Chance. I had long hankered aher the poems of Endre Ady and Artila Jozsef; bUI the language, nOl being Indo­European, is impenetrable, one feels, without prolonged stUdy and residence in Hungary. And of course, there were "the events of 1'J56," as they are refer­red to today. The uprising had caused a certain amount of excitement among some poets here, and there were suddenly poeu-in-exiIe among us. I had written my only sestina, "Budapest, 1'J56," in response to those fearful days of Oerober and November 1956. (lr appears in my firS[ book of poems, Whatever Love Declares, and in translation into Hungarian, in Gloria Victis, a volume that gathered the poems written in many languages about the uprising.) I had also been sem a dozen or so poems by one of the emigre poelS, and wilh the help of a studenl at UCLA, I had aanslaled them in 1962·63. (They appeared in From the Hungarian Revolution, ediled by David Ray, Cornell Universiry Press, 1966.) Then, in Seplember of 1971, I spoke al Ihe 381h Inlernalional PEN Congress in Dublin: AI Ihe end of Ihal week, and afrer Ihe banquel in Ihe hall of the National Library, I found myself car­ried off 10 my friend Anlhony Kerrigan's flal in Fitzwilliam Square, where a small group continued Ihe patry. Among Ihose guestS was Laszlo Kery, head of Ihe English Deparnnenl al Budapesl Universiry. There was lalk uncil the small hours. To resolve our questions, Kery challenged us to visit