ABSTRACT
Rather like Béla Bartók weaving the melodies and rhythms of Central-European folk music into his own intense, exacting compositions, Attila József (1905-1937) uses the sophisticated rhymes and meters of traditional Hungarian poetry to express themes that vary from the painfully personal to the humanistic concerns of many avant-garde writers of his day. József’s own experience of squalor and trauma (he was placed in a cruel foster home by his destitute mother, and he barely knew his father, who abandoned the family) made him sensitive to the acute suffering and poverty of other Hungarians. “With milk teeth,” he typically asks both himself and his semblable in one of the last poems written before his violent suicide, “why did you bite granite?” At the same time, the death-obsessed poet, who penned his epitaph at twenty-three and who elsewhere imagines a “blackening corpse coffined within [his] heart,” knows how to move beyond the strictly intimate, or the facilely political, and open up philosophical vistas looking out on the “last retreat of being” or on a “nothingness” that “flits and dances / as if it a something were.” The title of a generous Bloodaxe selection, The Iron-Blue Vault, derives from his odd perception, characteristically mixing cosmology, theology, social irony, and modern physics, that “in heaven’s iron-blue vault revolves / a cool and lacquered dynamo.”
