In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

HungarY | 209 györgy Faludy (1910–2006) Of Hungarian Jewish origin, like Tibor Déry, Faludy became an immensely popular writer largely on the basis of two works: racy verse renderings of the fifteenth-century French balladeer François Villon (published in 1934 under the title Villon balladái and reprinted a number of times) and his autobiographical novel My Happy Days in Hell (1962; published in Hungarian only much later as Pokolbeli víg napjaim). Educated at the universities of Vienna, Graz, and Berlin, Faludy held radical liberal views that were incompatible with the political climate in Hungary in the years immediately preceding that country’s entry into World War II on the side of the Germans. Faludy, therefore, chose to leave his native land in 1938, first settling in Paris for a while and then, with the outbreak of war imminent, traveling to the United States on an invitation to a group of Hungarian intellectuals by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. During World War II, Faludy served in the American Army in the Pacific theater of operations, returning to Hungary only in 1946. Hostile to the new postwar Communist Hungarian regime, Faludy soon incurred its wrath and was arrested in 1949 on false charges of being both an American spy and a secret agent in the employ of Tito’s Yugoslavia. He was subsequently taken to the village of Recsk in northern Hungary , near the Mátra Mountains, where a forced labor camp operated for political prisoners between 1950 and 1953. In the three years that he spent in Recsk, Faludy tells us in his autobiography that he made the time bearable by telling stories to his fellow prisoners, reciting poetry, and talking to them about history and philosophy. After his release, he earned his living as a translator since other doors were then closed to him. After the outbreak of the Hungarian Revolution of November 1956, Faludy escaped to London where he became editor of a Hungarian literary journal. It was while in London that he wrote his most famous work, My Happy Days in Hell. It was translated into English by the well-known translator Kathleen Szasz and published in 1963 by Morrow in New York. In 1967, Faludy resettled in Toronto , where he lived for the next twenty years. A decade later, he became a Canadian citizen and two years after that was elected an honorary doctor of the University of Toronto where he regularly taught. In 1988, Faludy returned to Hungary, where the change of political conditions now made possible the appearance of long suppressed literary works and where he began publishing new poetry, including, in 1989, a collection of prison poems, Börtönversek, 1950–53: Az ÁVO pincéjében és Recsken (Prison Poems, 1950–53: In the Cellar of the Secret Police and Recsk). In 1994, he was honored with Hungary’s most prestigious literary award, the Kossuth Prize. His sequel to My Happy Days in Hell, Pokolbeli 210 | HungarY napjaim után (After My Days in Hell), was published in 2002. That same year, Faludy married the twenty-six-year-old poet Fanny Kovács, but he died four years later. A memorial park across from his former apartment in Toronto was built in his honor the year of his death. A bronze plaque bearing his portrait—the work of the Hungarian-born sculptor Dora de Pedery-Hunt—was placed in it. One of Faludy’s favorite poems, “Michelangelo’s Last Prayer,” which Faludy himself had selected, was carved on the plaque in English and Hungarian. The following excerpts from My Happy Days in Hell (New York: Morrow, 1963), 290–91, 377–78, 380–86, have been translated from Hungarian by Kathleen Szasz. The excerpts from Faludy’s Börtönversek, 1950–53: Az ÁVO pincéjében és Recsken (Budapest: Magyar Világ, 1989), 44–47, 58–60, 63–64, have been translated from Hungarian by Harold B. Segel. from My Happy Days in Hell It was never the proximity of death that I feared, but its inevitability. Having always been conscious of deadly danger, even in the safest situation, and having always trembled at the thought of death with the greatest cowardice, I could not experience much greater fear at any moment of my life. Until then I had never thought that it was possible to make a poem without pen and paper, but apparently they did not belong to the essence of poetry, not even to the ceremony...

Share