Learn This Poem of Mine by Heart

Andrew Brooks was Assistant Editor of Ethos magazine.

George Faludy’s Learn This Poem of Mine by Heart contains sixty poems written between the late 1930s and 1980, as well as one speech. Faludy enjoys a considerable reputation among those who are able to read and appreciate the nuances of his writing in the original Hungarian. Unfortunately, although John Robert Colombo and seven other distinguished and well-known writers (Arthur Koestler and Stephen Vizinczey among them) labored over the translations, Learn This Poem all too clearly demonstrates that translation always involves some cost to the original — a problem Colombo laments in his Afterword. Although Vizinczey is in good company in calling Faludy “Hungary’s greatest living poet,” the English reader is not equipped to decide for him/herself. What emerges from a reading of these poems is not so much the sense of music which is, apparently, Faludy’s great strength, as the details of his individual-centred ideology, his highly idiosyncratic outlook on the world.

The poet spent years of his life in Nazi and Soviet prisons, and he detests totalitarianism of the Right and the Left. This is clear in poems like “Song of the German Mercenaries” and “Remembering the Old Family Farmhouse,” incisive and striking poems despite translation. However, Faludy feels just as strongly about the physical and spiritual destructiveness of Western capitalism, as Sonnet Seventy-Nine and the title poem, among others, show. The poet’s critical faculties are never suspended.

Dennis Lee’s translation of “White Mice” is worth a brief mention because in trying to put Hungarian into a familiar English idiom Lee makes the poem sound in many places like one of his own. That is a more familiar idiom to my ears, and although I don’t know whether what Lee does constitutes good translation, his efforts and all the others give a fascinating glimpse into the process.