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    Become a Message: Poems
    Become a Message: Poems
    Become a Message: Poems
    Ebook230 pages1 hour

    Become a Message: Poems

    By Lajos Walder

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    Arguably the most significant modern Hungarian poet, Lajos Walder was born in 1913 and died in 1945 in the Gunskirchen concentration camp, on the day it was liberated by the Allied forces. Exuberant and witty, poignant and severe, trenchant yet light-hearted, Lajos Walder's poems cut to the quick and stay with you. Reading them is like reliving an era long gone and, at the same time, learning to see our own world with new eyes. For Lajos Walder's "message" speaks to us as directly today as it did to his contemporaries almost a century ago: "... that apart from thieves and murderers // there are also human beings." For the first time, Lajos Walder's complete extant poetry is made available in English, superbly translated by the poet's daughter Agnes Walder, who also provides a beautiful afterword, and with a passionate foreword by Scots fellow poet Don Paterson.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUpper West Side Philosophers, Inc.
    Release dateSep 8, 2015
    ISBN9781935830337
    Become a Message: Poems
    Author

    Lajos Walder

    Arguably the most significant modern Hungarian poet, Lajos Walder was born in 1913 and died in 1945 in the Gunskirchen concentration camp, on the day it was liberated by the Allied forces. Exuberant and witty, poignant and severe, trenchant yet light-hearted, Lajos Walder's poems cut to the quick and stay with you. Reading them is like reliving an era long gone and, at the same time, learning to see our own world with new eyes. For Lajos Walder's message speaks to us as directly today as it did to his contemporaries almost a century ago: '... that apart from thieves and murderers // there are also human beings'. For the first time, Lajos Walder's complete extant poetry is made available in English, superbly translated by the poet's daughter Agnes Walder, who also provides a beautiful afterword, and with a passionate foreword by Scots fellow poet Don Paterson.

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      Book preview

      Become a Message - Lajos Walder

      Lajos Walder

      Become a Message

      Poems

      Translated from the Hungarian

      by Agnes Walder

      With a Foreword by Don Paterson

      Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc.

      New York / 2014

      Lajos Walder c. 1943

      ***

      Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc. provides a publication venue for original philosophical thinking steeped in lived life, in line with our motto: philosophical living & lived philosophy.

      ***

      Published by Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc. / P. O. Box 250645,

      New York, NY 10025, USA

      www.westside-philosophers.com / www.yogaforthemind.us

      All Poems Copyright @ 2015 The Children of the late Dr Lajos Walder

      English Translation Copyright © 2015 Agnes Walder

      Foreword Copyright © 2015 Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc.

      Afterword Copyright © 2015 Agnes Walder

      Smashwords Edition

      978-1-935830-33-7

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. For all inquiries concerning permission to reuse material from any of our titles, contact the publisher in writing, or the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. (CCC), 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, USA (www.copyright.com).

      The colophon is a registered trademark of Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc.

      The book is also available in print:

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Walder, Lajos, 1913-1945.

      [Poems. English] Become a message : poems / Lajos Walder ;

      translated from the Hungarian by Agnes Walder

      with a foreword by Don Paterson. pages cm

      Includes bibliographical references.

      ISBN 978-1-935830-30-6 (alk. paper)

      1. Walder, Lajos, 1913-1945--Translations into English.

      I. Walder, Agnes, translator. II. Title.

      PH3351.W35A2 2015

      894'.511132--dc232015002777

      ***

      From your children to your children’s children

      ***

      Contents

      Foreword by Don Paterson

      1. GATHER AROUND YOURSELF

      2. I AM A WANDERER

      3. RIDING ON CLOUDS

      4. WE, THE TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS OF THE ALPHABET

      5. FAMILY CHARACTERISTICS

      6. INTERVIEW

      7. ARM IN ARM

      8. REVERENCE

      9. SHORT LYRICAL ORATION

      10. TELEPHONE

      11. THE HEAD

      12. HOROSCOPE

      13. ANIMAL TALE

      14. INFORMATION

      15. BUDAPEST

      16. LEGEND IN PROSE

      17. LAST HUMAN BEING

      18. AUTOBIOGRAPHY

      19. MOOKY

      20. TEN COMMANDMENTS

      21. ESSENTIALLY A REVISED EDITION

      22. JAZZ ANTHEM

      23. CIRCLE

      24. TRAVELING

      25. DUST CLOTH

      26. GROUP PORTRAIT OF MYSELF

      27. ODE TO A FREE VERSE

      28. A POET LIVES HERE AMONGST YOU

      29. TOPIC FOR AN EDITORIAL

      30. COMMEMORATIVE PLAQUE

      31. STUDY TOUR

      32. THE HUMAN

      33. REPORT

      34. FIRST PERSON SINGULAR

      35. DELICATE QUESTION

      36. WORLD HISTORY

      37. TYPEWRITER

      38. THE COIN

      39. THE SEEDSMAN

      40. OBLIGATORY SPRING POEM

      41. BUDAPEST DIVISION

      42. IN THE LAST FEW DAYS

      43. OVER THE SPEED OF 100 KILOMETERS

      44. BLOOD PACT

      45. LOST GENERATION

      46. MECHANICAL PRAYER

      47. HAPPINESS

      48. POEM OF THE UNEMPLOYED

      49. KEY POEM

      50. NOW I CONFESS

      51. AT THE TOMB OF THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER

      52. ACCOMPLICES

      53. PARLIAMENTARIANISM

      54. EXPEDITION

      55. MOMENTS

      56. AND IF IT SADDENS YOU

      57. ART GALLERY

      58. MUSIC FOR PROSE

      59. FAMILY EVENT

      60. PHILOSOPHICALLY PROFOUND POEM

      61. MEMORIAL SPEECH

      62. MR. SOMOGYI, OR THE EVERYDAY ODE

      63. I WAS ABOUT FIFTEEN YEARS OLD

      64. PEACE

      65. A POET, HIS SOUL IN WHITE TIE AND TAILS

      66. 100% POEM

      67. MANHOOD

      68. THE DREAM

      69. THE 10 000 001st LOVE POEM IN PROSE

      70. ORPHAN POEM

      71. TAKING A BIRD’S EYE VIEW OF MY LIFE

      72. I LIKE YOUNG, FIRM, ROUND BREASTS

      73. THE LAST SPECTATOR

      74. I SENTENCE MY SELF-ESTEEM TO LIFELONG LIFE

      75. WHOLESALING

      76. STAR

      77. I’M ONLY DISSIPATING ENERGY

      78. FOR TWO DOLLARS COME ON IN, SWEETIE

      79. EXCAVATION

      80. THE KNIGHT OF RHYME

      81. HIS HAIR WAS PROBABLY BLOND

      82. MATHEMATICS

      83. MEMBERS OF THE PARTY

      84. AT 7.20 P.M. THE ORIENT EXPRESS ROLLED IN

      85. I’M A KNOT IN THE PLANK OF SOCIETY

      86. ANSWER TO THE AGITATOR!

      87. IT’S NOT AS IF I WANTED TO BRAG

      88. THE SCHOOL CHILDREN

      89. THE LITANY OF VAINLINESS

      90. FOR A HUMAN I’M TOO MUCH OF A POET

      91. IT HAPPENED AT NOON TODAY

      92. THE FORTUNE TELLER

      93. WHEN GOD CREATED

      94. SELF-IMPOSED EXILE

      95. NEITHER EXECUTIONER NOR MARTYR

      96. TO ADHERE AIRTIGHT

      97. LIKE A CURSED EX-CROWN PRINCE

      98. COMING TO TERMS WITH THE IMPOSSIBLE

      99. HEADS OR TAILS

      100. BECOME A MESSAGE

      Translator’s Afterword

      Notes

      Acknowledgments

      Also available from UWSP

      ***

      Foreword

      Lajos Walder was born in Budapest in 1913, and died in 1945 in the Gunskirchen concentration camp, on the day it was liberated by the Allied forces. He had managed to graduate as a lawyer, despite the severe limitations on the number of Hungarian Jews allowed to pursue a university education. He was not, however, permitted to practice; instead he found work as a laborer in a factory. He continued to write and publish until the outbreak of the war, when he was recruited to a forced labor battalion. The details of Walder’s impossibly tragic end I won’t rehearse here; the reader is urged to turn to the afterword, where his daughter and translator Agnes Walder gives a moving account of his life.

      Lajos Walder is unlikely to be a name you know or even half-know. And yet we should know it. Walder reads as a contemporary poet, in the best sense; though the reader will first be struck by Walder’s refusal to play any of the familiar come-hither games of the modernist era (which have become so pervasive as to be invisible)—indeed before opening this book, they might first muster a sense of self strong enough to not be insulted by Walder’s utter lack of need of them. Nonetheless despite his insistence that poetry is a private matter, his voice is very far from indifferent, discourteous or cold. But it will speak the way it speaks, whether you are listening or not.

      This vocal independence is most clearly signed by the fact that Walder does what the hell he likes, when he likes, and in whatever voice he likes. One minute he’s shrinking the decades between author and reader to nothing, and in the next breath separating them by millennia. Who knows if Walder was aware of what was on the wind for him, but it seems to have dramatically sharpened and lengthened his perspective: every daily event seems to throw a historical, sometimes even a cosmological shadow. (His adventures in the space-time continuum are often very funny. Interview is a kind of science-fiction conversation with God; God had intended to get back to us and explain everything, or at least to the Neanderthal whose hand he was holding—but was momentarily distracted for a few million years.)

      Stylistically, Walder had a deep bag of tricks. His favorite is to run logically with an illogical premise, and for much longer than he should be able to get away with; like Cocteau, he knew how far to go too far. I can think of only a handful of other poets with the wit and nerve to pull that trick off—Francis Ponge, James Tate, and another writer he occasionally resembles, the great Scottish-Jewish surrealist comic Ivor Cutler. (In Animal Tale Walder reminds us that our reality is surreal enough; one merely needs to observe it clearly—in this case from the meat’s perspective.) Though sometimes one feels a keen pang for the poet he would have been, had he lived: Music for Prose shows his ability to extend what another poet might have left as a local metaphor into an organizing conceit; in doing so, he reveals the soul of the modern metaphysical he could well have

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