Translated from Hungarian by David Wevill
Published 2022. Paperback, 74pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848618343 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

Originally part of the Penguin Modern European Poets series, this edition brings back into print David Wevill's translations of Ferenc Juhász (1928–2015), one of the major Hungarian poets of the post-war era. A man of humble origins, his work moved away from the strictures of socialist realism and began to use Hungarian historical themes, and, crucially, folk-myths, in his work. This culminated in the long poem, 'The Boy Changed into a Stag Clamours at the Gate of Secrets', which W.H. Auden described as the finest long poem ever written — although one should note that Auden had no knowledge of Hungarian. The myth at the back of this poem has common origins with the poems used in Bartók's wonderful Cantata Profana. As with many such myths, the central conceit seems to reach back into a pre-Christian past, where humans, animals and the whole natural world are of one piece.

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