Publisher's Synopsis
Ottó Orbán (1936-2002) had his baptism of fire as a child in Hungary under German rule, and war was one of his abiding themes: whatever the subject he demands it be tested in the crucible of wartime Hungary. His dizzy, argumentative poems are alive with danger, humanity and his own inimitably grim high-spirits. Born in 1936, Ottó Orbán saw his father taken off to prison in 1944, and was sent to an institute a year later, where he made his name as a child-prodigy poet. By the 1970s he had changed from the wunderkind to the enfant terrible of Hungarian poetry. Having translated Allen Ginsberg's Howl, Orbán was regarded for a while as Hungary's own Beat poet, but in his long career he also translated Chaucer, Auden, Dylan Thomas and Robert Lowell into Hungarian, and was an acknowledged master-craftsman. He was an extremely versatile writer, and wrote with some virtuosity in a variety of styles, but arguably his greatest achievements were with the prose poem and the 14-line unrhymed (often dactylic) "sonnet", in which he admitted his debt to Lowell and Berryman. But Orbán never really sounds like any other poet. Suffering from a debilitating disease in his later years, Orbán was writing with a devil-may-care freedom, yet his poems grew graver and more human. This is the first edition of his poetry to appear in English. Edited and introduced by George Szirtes, the poems are selected from eleven collections published between 1965 and 1992. The translators include George Szirtes, Edwin Morgan, John Bátki, Jascha Kessler, Nicholas Kolumban and William Jay Smith. It is published by Corvina in Hungary.
