Description
Book SynopsisGyörgy Petri (1943-2000) belonged to the generation of Hungarian poets who grew up after the uprising of 1956. He made his name in the West as the most uncompromising and outrageous of his country’s dissident authors. At home he was as often praised for his strangely disquieting love poetry, which is harsh, erotic and disenchanted. But all his poems are marked by his biting humour and bluntness of language. After the fall of Communism, Petri’s wit and his natural anarchism were aimed at a wider range of public targets, yet his new poems also seem more private. Many are intellectual puzzles, sceptical about identity and the sureness of emotional attachments. The poetry written by Petri before the collapse of Hungary’s Communist régime was published by Bloodaxe in 1991 in Night Song of the Personal Shadow: Selected Poems, also translated by George Gömöri and Clive Wilmer. Eternal Monday was a new selection, mostly written since 1989, and was shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize.
Trade ReviewPetri is a lyrical poet who has deliberately gone sour… His love poems are his finest work: sad, dry-eyed, even cruel, but spiced with a bitter tenderness…He is the voice of his generation. To understand him is to understand the declining years of European Communism and to sharpen our eyes for intimate half-truths of our own. -- George Szirtes * Times Literary Supplement *
It is a long time since a major verse satirist has emerged in any European language. That is what Petri is, and he combines an almost Juvenalian savagery with a striking range of techniques and genres. His bile is the product of injustice and moral outrage. He is funny, angry, sexy, morbid, disillusioned and wildly intelligent. -- Clive Wilmer
Table of Contents9 Foreword by Elaine Feinstein 12 Introduction by Clive Wilmer I. To 1974 20 Collapse 21 You Are Knackered, My Catullus 22 By an Unknown Poet from Eastern Europe, 1955 24 To a Virtuous Lady 25 I Am Stuck, Lord, on Your Hook 26 News Bulletin 27 Stairs 28 To S.V. 30 From the Songs of the Doleful Lover 31 Now Only 32 Gratitude II. 1974 – 1989 34 Eternal Monday 37 Gloss on a Discussion 38 It Would Be Nice to Translate Mallarmé 39 Tick-Tock 40 The Fading Consciousness of Casanova 42 Apocryphal 43 To Be Said Over and Over Again 43 S.K. 44 The Under-Secretary Makes a Statement 46 Night Song of the Personal Shadow 47 Sweetness 48 Me 49 Horatian 50 Sometimes the Sun Comes Out 51 Black Christmas 52 In Memoriam: Péter Hajnóczy 56 Christmas 1956 58 Christmas of ’65 60 Rhapsody 61 The Walk 62 Revenge 63 Electra 64 To Imre Nagy III. Since 1989 66 Cemetery Plot No. 301 67 Cold Peace 68 Morning Coffee 69 Sisyphus Steps Back 70 Daydreams 71 Smiley’s Christmas 72 Something Unknown 73 Elegy (‘When you are out…’) 74 Ideas and Dance-Music Records 76 Self-Portrait 1990 77 Epitaph 78 Credit Card 79 Mud 80 Options 81 Our Loves 82 Nonono 83 Only Mari’s Remained 84 Bosnia 85 The Nothing Going On 86 Pop Song 87 from The Great Journey 90 A Recognition 93 Notes
