ABSTRACT
In an essay appended to The Night of Akhenaton, a selection of the poetry of Ágnes Nemes Nagy (1922-1991), the Hungarian poet argues that her work is situated in “a no-man’s land of the nameless.” It is a striking phrase which, more-over, points to analogous aspirations of other key twentieth-century European writers. Recalling Rilke’s remark about poets standing arrested at borders and grabbing at “nameless things,” this image of an unclaimed or uninhabited land—ambiguous or indefinite in character and perhaps extending between opposing armies—provides a graphic way of thinking about how certain poets have lingered solitarily in zones ignored or avoided by others. Some of those zones are perilous.
