For All This Here (dedikált példány) [antikvár]

K'íV'l 'i'l" Cm I !viíSiíiii I ' 1 'IPrefaceGyula KodolányiThis Enghsh collection of my poems has grown organically into book length over thirty-five years, largely springing from my friendships with American and English poets with whom I also translated poetry, both from English into Hungarian and from Hungarian into English. A more conscious effort to build a book of the poems translated into English subsiuned in late 1987, when my involvement with the fast budding new Hungarian democracy pushed aside many artistic and intellectual projects for many of my fellow artists and intellectuals in Hungary. A good part of this collection of translations stood ready for publication in 1988 as it is now, yet the idea publishing them together in a book on its own had to be put on the back burner for years. Though I WTOte a modern dance play for the Franco-Hungarian Jel Theatre Company in 1989, which was a symbolic parable on the Revolutions of East Central Europe, and while I also managed to find time for a number of dream poems during my consuming tenure as Senior Adviser to the Hungarian Prime Minister in 1990-94, regular writing activity had to be suspended for a long time. That was the predicament for many writers and ardsts in freshly liberated East Central Europe the most notable examples were those of dramatist Vaclav Havel, who became President of Czechoslovakia and then the Czech Republic, and filmmaker AndrzeJ Wajda, who became an active member of the new Polish Senate. I only resumed my deep involvement with poetry after formally leaving poliucs behind in 1995.Even then, the re-founding of the legendary general issues journal Magyar Szemle, and building cultural institutions for the new democracy remained for me in the foregr ound of activides. Yet, a new book of verse in 1997 signalled my re-awakened poetic urge, followed by a book of collected poems in 2002. It was in the spring of 2004, when my teaching semesters at Emoiy University in Atlanta ensued that I again began to think about rounding out these translations into a balanced collection. The genuine attention and rich response I received from American audiences during the following Emoiy years gave fresh impetus, and suggested that there was something in my translated poetr)' worth presenting perhaps in a book form. 1 owe my unabating gratitude for the encouraging climate provided at Emory at the time, betiveen 2004 and 2009, to such stewards of poetry as President William Chace and Special Collections Director Steven Enniss, and many inspiring colleagues and friends from Emoiy's other branches of learning. A lasting gift to me and my wife Mária (lka) Illyés was the friendship of Ronald and Marsha Keith Schuchard, who were the moving spirits of Emoiy's wonderful guest prograrmnes, through whom I met or was reunited with visiting poets like Seamus Heaney, Richard Wilbur, Paul Muldoon, J. D. McClatchy and many others. That scene also contributed to enriching for me the living traditions of Yeats, Eliot, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath fiom researching the Archives and Special Collections at Emoiy University.