György Faludy

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György Faludy

György Faludy (born September 22, 1910 in Budapest , Austria-Hungary , † September 1, 2006 there ) was a Hungarian writer .

Life

Faludy attended the Protestant Fasori Gimnázium in Budapest and studied at the universities of Vienna, Berlin and Graz. In 1938 he emigrated because of his Jewish origins and moved to Paris and later to the USA . He came back in 1946, as a Social Democrat, he led the destruction of the statue of Bishop Prohaska in Budapest; later he was persecuted by the communists himself and spent three years in the Recsk labor camp . In 1956 he emigrated again, lived in London , Florence , Malta and from 1967 to 1988 in Toronto . In 1987 the director Lívia Gyarmathy shot the documentary The Poet George Faludy ( Faludy György, költő ). A year later he returned to Budapest and lived there until his death.

Faludy, who was most recently revered as a “poet prince” by his compatriots, became popular in Hungary primarily through his erotic poems and his adaptations of the ballads by François Villon from the 1930s. The audience was also fascinated by his eccentric lifestyle: he lived with the former US ballet dancer Eric Johnson for 36 years and married the then 26-year-old Hungarian photo model Fanny Kovacs in 2004, with whom he has since published jointly; u. a. the volume of poems "With the right of love" ( A szerelem jogan ). The two posed for the Hungarian edition of Penthouse magazine. A photo by Ádám Urbán with the title “The poet and his muse”, which shows the aged poet with his naked young wife, was awarded as Press Photo of the Year in Hungary in 2004 in the category “Image of Society”.

reception

In the German-speaking world, Faludy's work, who wrote most of his books in Hungarian and English, remained largely unknown. In particular, the poems so popular in Hungary remained untranslated, while a selection was published in the USA in 1985 (Selected Poems, 1933–1980). There were only a few, less successful translations into the German language, e.g. B. by Erasmus von Rotterdam (Societäts Verlag, 1973), Merry Days in Hell (Rütten & Loening, 1964) and Tragedy of a People (Europa Verlag, 1957).

Works

  • Anthology of World Poetry, 1938
  • Tragedy of a People, 1957
  • My happy time in hell, 1962
  • Karoton, 1966
  • Erasmus from Rotterdam, 1970
  • In Hell's Courtyard, 2006

literature

Web links