Search results for ""Author Zsuzsanna Ozsváth""

In the Footsteps of OrpheusThe Life and Times of Miklós RadnótiZsuzsanna OzsváthA powerful account of the life, art, and tragic death of a 20th-century Hungarian Jewish poet."Zsuzsanna Ozsváth bring[s] forth Radnóti's life, his thought, and his passion with a depth of insight that is rare in a scholar. Brilliant, penetrating, and passionate, Ozsváth's book sets a new standard of excellence in Holocaust studies. It is a must for anyone who would approach the dark flame that burns at the core of the Event." —David Patterson, University of Memphis Miklós Radnóti, a young Hungarian Jewish poet, was shot by Hungarian soldiers guarding him while on a forced march from Yugoslavia back to Hungary during the final days of World War II. When his body was discovered and exhumed nearly two years later, a small book of poems was found in his coat pocket. These poems, together with the rest of Radnóti's work, solidified his reputation as one of Hungary's greatest poets. Radnóti shared the experience of many Jewish artists and intellectuals in Central Europe during the early part of the 20th century, but his poetry brings out a particular and personal view of the Holocaust in Hungary. His work plays a unique role in the history of Central European culture as some of the most beautiful poems ever written in Hungarian, as a voice against the rise of totalitarianism, and as testimony to the destruction of Europe's Jews. Zsuzsanna Ozsváth places Radnóti within the context of the political and intellectual history of interwar Hungary, situating him as an artist who is both a Jew and a Hungarian patriot. Her sensitive translations from the Hungarian lend poignancy to this tragic and forcefully told story. This account of Radnóti's life and work explores the sources of the poet's inspiration and imagery and restores it to its extreme times and places.Zsuzsanna Ozsváth is Professor of Literature and the History of Ideas at the University of Texas at Dallas, where she is also Director of the Holocaust Studies Program. She is coeditor and cotranslator (with Frederick Turner) of Foamy Sky: The Major Poems of Miklós Radnóti and Attila Jozsef's The Iron-Blue Vault: Selected Poetry.Jewish Literature and Culture—Alvin H. Rosenfeld, editorContentsMyth and ConsciousnessPoetic Images: Socialist Art and Political CommitmentThe Pull of Contraries: Making of the PastVisions of Destruction, Lyrics of ResistanceIn Extremis: 1944

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Attila József is Hungary’s greatest modern poet. His extraordinary poetry is exhilarating in its power, transcending the scars of a difficult life. Born into poverty in 1905, deserted by his father and put out to fostering, József had a brutalised childhood, and tried to poison himself at the age of nine. Mostly self-educated, he was prosecuted at 18 for blasphemy in a poem, and expelled from university a year later for With a Pure Heart, a now celebrated poem which spoke for a whole generation. He is a genuine revolutionary poet, neither simple-minded nor difficult, though his thought and imagery are complex. A deeply divided man, his poetry has a robust physicality as well as a jaunty and heroic intelligence – Marxist in its dedication but fuelled in its audacity by both Freud and Surrealism. Diagnosed as schizophrenic, he underwent psychoanalysis, and yet continued to write magnificent poetry which – although darker – drew upon highly exacting and intricate structures and metres, and upon an eclectic but balanced framework of ideas. By 1937 he was almost destitute, financially and emotionally, and in deteriorating mental health. But he was still writing some of his most compelling work, compulsive guilt-ridden poetry whose glittering lyricism is at once personal and mythic, even while receiving shock treatments and heavy medication in a sanatorium. Finally, at the age of 32, he clambered onto a railway track, and a train broke his neck and cut off his right arm.

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The pure verbal energy characterizing Hungarian poetry may be regarded as one of the most striking components of Hungarian culture. More than 800 years ago, under the inspiration of classical and medieval Latin poetry, Hungarian poets began to craft a rich chain of poetic designs, much of it in response to the country’s cataclysmic history. With precision, depth, and great intensity, these verses give accounts of their authors’ vision of themselves as participants in history and their most personal experience in the world. Light within the Shade includes 135 of the most important Hungarian poems ranging from the fourteenth to the twenty-first century. Organized in chronological order, the poems are followed by an essay by Ozsváth providing the historical, biographical, and cultural background of the poets and the poetry. The book concludes with Turner’s essay on the special thematic and literary qualities of Hungarian poetry, as well as notes on translation practices. This essential volume exposes English-speaking readers to Hungarian poetry’s artistic achievement in history and culture, its evolutionary development as a tradition, and its significance within the context of world literature.

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The original tale of moral destruction, in a brand-new translation: Faust is a man torn between the urges of the living world and the significance of moral living. He feels nothing, he lives for nothing, and thus engages in a wager with Mephistopheles, the devil himself. Goethe’s master work shares the deep complexity of a human life, rife with pain, mistakes and dynamic complexity. With Faust, the lushly lyrical and philosophically brilliant drama on which the poet spent almost his entire life, Goethe solidified himself as a major literary figure whose work would transcend time and space to create the modern world. Now, this brand-new, dynamic translation demands we ask of our world: who will win, humanity or Mephistopheles?

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