FOREWORD BY EDWIN MORGAN
While Hungarian music enjoys a high international reputation, Hungarian poetry is known only through the work of a few outstanding representatives such as Attila József, Miklós Radnóti, Sándor Weöres János Pilinszky and Agnes Nemes Nagy. Yet it is precisely their poetry that Hungarians treasure most, arguing that the isolation of the language has resulted in neglect of its writers.
This anthology aims to demonstrate the justice of this argument by presenting the work of the most important Hungarian poets born after the turn of the century, starting with the major figure of Lorinc Szabó, born in 1900. Some of the poets included, such as György Faludy and Victor Határ, have worked mostly in exile; others, for example Sándor Kányádi, are members of Hungarian minorities living outside Hungary's present borders. Those working in Hungary itself include the middle generation of Ottó Orbán and Zsusza Takács, and younger poets with international reputations such as György Petri, known for his sharp satires and ironic elegies, and Zsuzsa Rakovszky, with her passionate and closely observed poems of everyday life.
'The Hungarians have a body of 20th-century poetry to rival any, and The Colonnade of Teeth, which runs from the early master Attila József to new poems from a generation born in the fifties, makes a book any poetry lover would savour with delight. If there is a thread which links such disparate voices, it is the ability to rouse a sense of richness even when the world is harsh' - ELAINE FEINSTEIN, Poetry Book Society Bulletin
GEORGE GÖMÖRI was born in Budapest. After leaving Hungary in 1956, he travelled and taught in the USA, and since 1969 has been teaching Polish and Hungarian at the University of Cambridge. He published five collections outside Hungary before his sixth appeared there in 1990. With Clive Wilmer he has translated many Hungarian poets. In 1993 he won the first Salvatore Quasimodo Memorial Prize for Poetry, and in 1995, the Italian poetry prize 'In the Footsteps of Ada Negri' (Lodi). He lives in Cambridge.
GEORGE SZIRTES' seven collections of poetry have won various honours, including the Geoffrey Faber Prize and the Cholmondeley Award. His most recent collections are Bridge Passages (1991) and Blind Field (1994), both from OUP. He edited Ottó Orbán's The Blood Song of the Walsungs (1993) and Freda Downie's Collected Poems (1995) for Bloodaxe, and his translation of Zsuzsa Rakovszky's selected poems, New Life (OUP, 1994), won the European Poetry Translation Prize in 1995. He lives
in Norfolk and teaches at the Norwich School of Art.

Title: The Colonnade of Teeth: Modern Hungarian ...

Publisher: Bloodaxe Books

Publication Date: 1997

Binding: Paperback