In a bucolic land / Szilárd Borbély ; translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Borbély, Szilárd, 1964-2014, author.

Contributor:

Mulzet, Ottilie, translator.

Series:

New York Review Books poets

New York Review Books : Poets

Standardized Title:

Bukolikatájban. English

Language:

English

Hungarian

Subjects (All):

Borbély, Szilárd, 1964-2014--Translations into English.

Borbély, Szilárd.

Borbély, Szilárd, 1964-2014.

Genre:

Translations.

Poetry.

Physical Description:

137 pages ; 18 cm.

Place of Publication:

New York, NY : New York Review of Books, [2021]

Summary:

"Szilárd Borbély's is one of the most searching and powerful poetic voices to emerge in the twenty-first century. In a Bucolic Land was Borbély's final work, completed but left unpublished at the time of his premature death in 2014. At the heart of the book are poems in which Borbély returns to his 1960s childhood in a tiny impoverished town in northeastern Hungary. Conditions were brutal, as the poems attest, even as, shifting between present and past, they are also invested with a strange shimmering sense of myth and eternity. The book opens and closes with two elegies for Borbély's teacher Lajos Szuromi in which the poet meditates on the nature of language and speech and on the adequacy of words to speak of and for the dead. Ottilie Mulzet's English translation conveys the full power of a writer of whom László Krasznahorkai has said, "He was a poet-a great poet-who shatters us.""-- Provided by publisher.

"Szil̀rd Borb̌ly spent his childhood in a tiny impoverished village in northeastern Hungary, where the archaic peasant world of Eastern Europe coexisted with the collectivist ideology of a new Communist state. Close to the Soviet border and far from any metropolitan center, the village was a world apart: life was harsh, monotonous, and often brutal, and the Borb̌lys, outsiders and "class enemies," were shunned. In a Bucolic Land, Borb̌ly's final, posthumously published book of poems, combines autobiography, ethnography, classical mythology, and pastoral idyll in a remarkable central poetic sequence about the starkly precarious and yet strangely numinous liminal zone of his youth. This is framed by elegies for a teacher in which the poet meditates on the nature of language and speech and on the adequacy of words to speak of and for the dead." Back cover.

Contents:

Machine generated contents note: 1. When

1.1. [Mourning Verse, on the Death of Lajos Szuromi]

2. To Something

2.1. The Deucalion Collective Farm

2.2. Vienna-Blue, Flies

2.3. The Peasant Fates

2.4. The Calf-Eyed

2.5. The Gray Hair of the Graeae

2.6. Dionysus and the Cocks

2.7. Arcadian Pasture, Angel of Twilight

2.8. Ariadne in Old Age

2.9. Echo on the Veranda

2.10. Mercury at the Boundaries

2.11. Hermes, the Thief God

2.12. Proteus at the Psychiatrist's

2.13. Icarus in the Housing Project

3. End

3.1. Mourning Verse, on the Death of Lajos Szuromi

APPENDIX: TWO POEMS

Pegasus, Wings

Circe, Pig's Heart.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references.

Other Format:

Online version: Borbély, Szilárd, 1963-2014. In a bucolic land

ISBN:

9781681375915

1681375915

OCLC:

1240413745

Publisher Number:

99989752756