Sixty-Four Poems

Endre Ady was born in eastern Hungary in 1877. Between 1906 and 1908, while plying to and from Paris as a correspondent for a Budapest daily, he published three volumes of startling verse that jolted Hungarian poetry into the 2oth century. His work was at once controversial, and contradictory: it was full of western, modernist, influence, but also spoke uniquely to the distant, eastern origins of the national soul. Ady would live tumultuously, and succumb to illness at 41, but not before becoming arguably Hungary's most important modern poet. Why does his work, even today, spring more readily to Hungarians' lips than that of any other modern writer? This bilingual selection addresses that question. It contains translations of 64 of his best-known poems by Dublin-born Budapest resident Donal Gordon, whose previous poetic translations have been from German, Greek, Italian and French.