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May 04, 2004

HUNGARIAN LIT

Continuing in his role as the Guardian's reviewer of All Things Hungarian, Tibor Fischer looks at George Szirtes' (pronounced SEER-TAYSH) collection Leopard V: An Island of Sound .

Nevertheless, Szirtes and Vajda have done a splendid job in collecting the greatest hits of Hungarian literature in translation: Ted Hughes's rendition of Ferenc Juhász and János Pilinszky, Edwin Morgan's Sándor Weöres and Szirtes' own version of Gyula Illyés's "One Sentence on Tyranny". (Szirtes, a considerable poet in his own right, is to the best of my knowledge the number-one translator from Hungarian.) Much of the work has been available in previous anthologies (such as Szirtes's excellent Bloodaxe poetry anthology The Colonnade of Teeth ) or in the pages of the New Hungarian Quarterly, but this is the first primer of contemporary Hungarian literature that is likely to reach your bookshop.

Posted by TEV at 12:10 AM |

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