Winter Night [antikvár]

Translator's Introduction Tour winter night all merciless and hopeless, the one that kills you in the end, the one that has no consideration of any human pith or earthly significance except to destroy all of us completely. . . . It's impossible to love in the middle of so much icy night and unhappiness." Jack Kerouac: The Town and the City The winter night Jack Kerouac refers to in his first novel is a North American version of the one Attila József charted and surveyed "hkc an ovmer/his property" in his 1933 poem. The coincidence signals a deeper Idnship, kindred sensibilities and sensitivities: both poets are preoccupied with the pain and sadness of existence, both are ever mindful of emptiness. Kerouac's is a more consciously Buddhist attitude than József's—although in the 1934 poem "Village" the Hungarian poet sees "emerald Buddhas in the devty grass" (thus granting toads the Buddhahood denied them by the Zen sajring). Farther down the road, Allen Ginsberg in his 1986 poem "Cosmopolitan Greetings" not only borrows a phrase ("molecules clanking against each other") but in a note graciously credits the source, Attila József. Indeed, József appears in another Ginsberg poem. "May Days 1988" names Attila József [sic] as one of the "80 volumes behind the headboard for browsing." The book referred to is my long out-of-print Attila József's Poems and Texts, pubhshed in Iowa City in 1976. Allen Ginsberg, to whose memory I offer this writing, generously promised an Introduction to Winter Night, and had the manuscript by his bedside during the final weeks of his life. So now the bereaved inheritor of this task can only go back to the title poem of Cosmopolitan Greetings and search for clues: stand up against governments, against God. And I hear Attila József answering, in his youthful poem, "With a Pure Heart": I am fatherless, motherless, godless and countryless . . .