For All This Here (dedikált példány)

Fülszöveg

This book of Gyula Kodolányi's 'Englished' poems is a remarkable testament to a long-time political activist and public intellectual who managed to preserve his poetic soul through challenging and dangerous times. He notes that his work is 'entirely out of joint with the poetries fashionable in our days,' for it is in part 'Modernist and traditional in form' and 'often esoteric and arcane.' For British readers, his full-bodied engagement with Shakespeare is revelatory, for he portrays a flesh-and-blood writer, who similarly survived times that were 'out of joint.' For American readers, his fascination with the rogues and rebels who founded and defined the new world of America reveals his continuing struggle to define his own homeland of Hungary, as it makes and re-makes itself. The wonderfully hallucinogenic Diary of Noah Webster sheds light on the contradictions between the great lexicologist's nationalistic desire for a new American language (his great dictionary) and the... Tovább

Fülszöveg

This book of Gyula Kodolányi's 'Englished' poems is a remarkable testament to a long-time political activist and public intellectual who managed to preserve his poetic soul through challenging and dangerous times. He notes that his work is 'entirely out of joint with the poetries fashionable in our days,' for it is in part 'Modernist and traditional in form' and 'often esoteric and arcane.' For British readers, his full-bodied engagement with Shakespeare is revelatory, for he portrays a flesh-and-blood writer, who similarly survived times that were 'out of joint.' For American readers, his fascination with the rogues and rebels who founded and defined the new world of America reveals his continuing struggle to define his own homeland of Hungary, as it makes and re-makes itself. The wonderfully hallucinogenic Diary of Noah Webster sheds light on the contradictions between the great lexicologist's nationalistic desire for a new American language (his great dictionary) and the personal antagonisms of a fiercely individualistic and selfish scholar. His complex and colorful portrait of John Smith, founder and namer of New England, suggests not only the wonder of the bucaneer's landing in Jamestown but also the greed and corruption of so many involved in the great adventure. Most compelling is his poetic account of staying at D.H. Lawrence's mountain-top ranch in Taos, New Mexico, where the tubercular artist, 'even while burning in the fire of consumption,' enacted his role as Phoenix, rising from the flames. While at the ranch, Kodolányi stayed in one of the discarded cabins used by the Los Alamos scientists who invented the atomic bombs which incinerated thousands (as he wryly comments, they all now 'belong to the university').
Ronald Schuchard
General Editor, The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot Vissza