Attila József

The native form of this personal name is József Attila. This article uses Western name order when mentioning individuals.

Attila József
Attila József in 1924
Born	(1905-04-11)11 April 1905 Ferencváros, Budapest, Austria-Hungary
Died	3 December 1937(1937-12-03) (aged 32) Balatonszárszó, Kingdom of Hungary
Nationality	Hungarian
Genre	Poetry

Attila József (Hungarian: [ˈɒtilːɒ ˈjoːʒɛf]; 11 April 1905 – 3 December 1937) was a Hungarian poet of the 20th century.

Biography

Well, in the end I have found my home,
the land where flawless chiselled letters
guard my name above the grave
where I'm buried, if I have buriers.

Ime, hát megleltem hazámat (first stanza), translated by Edwin Morgan , Attila József

The son of Áron József - a soap factory worker of Transylvanian Romanian origin from Banat - and a Hungarian peasant girl - Borbála Pőcze - was born in Ferencváros, a poor district of Budapest. He had two elder sisters: Eta and Jolán. When Attila József was three years old he was sent to live with foster parents after his father abandoned the family and his mother became ill. Because the name Attila was not well known at the time, his foster parents called him Pista.

His mother died in 1919, aged only 43. After this, he was looked after by Ödön Makai, his brother-in-law, who was relatively wealthy and could pay for his education in a good secondary school. Later he applied to the Franz Joseph University – his dream was to become a secondary school teacher – but he was soon turned out when a man named Antal Horger determined he was unfit for teaching because of a provocative poem he had written (With All My Heart).

From this point on, he tried to support himself from the little money he earned by publishing his poems. He started showing signs of schizophrenia, and was treated by psychiatrists (now he probably would be diagnosed with borderline personality disorder). He never married and only had a small number of affairs, but frequently fell in love with the women who were treating him.

He died on 3 December 1937, aged 32, at Balatonszárszó, where he was staying at the house of his sister and brother-in-law. Crawling through the railway tracks, he was crushed by a starting train. There is a memorial to him not far from the spot where he died. The most widely accepted view is that he committed suicide, but some experts say that his death was by accident.

Poetry

Statue of József near the University of Szeged

Attila József is the best known of the modern Hungarian poets internationally. His poems have been translated into many languages and he is taught in world literature classes around the globe. Hailed during the communist era of the 1950s as Hungary's great "proletarian poet", his life, personality, and works are now being re-evaluated with the current celebrations of the centenary of his birth.

His first volume of poetry was A szépség koldusa (1922) (Beauty's beggar); at that time he was 17 and still in school. József studied privately for a year, and then entered the Franz Joseph University in 1924 to study Hungarian and French literature. With the help of a maecenas, Lajos Hatvany, he acquired a good education in Austria (1925) and Paris (1926–27), where he studied French literature and discovered the work of François Villon, the famous poet and thief from the 15th-century.

In 1925 József published his second collection of poems, Nem én kiáltok (It's not me who shouts). He was expelled from the university because of a revolutionary poem, Tiszta szívvel (With clear heart). With his manuscripts he traveled to Vienna, where he made a living by selling newspapers and cleaning dormitories, and then to Paris, where he studied at the Sorbonne. During this period he read Hegel and Karl Marx, whose call for revolution appealed to him.

József's works were praised by such internationally known Hungarian researchers and critics as Béla Balázs and György Lukács. In 1927 several French magazines published József's poems.

József's third collection of poems, Nincsen apám se anyám (1929) (I have nor father nor mother), showed the influence of French surrealism and Hungarian poets Endre Ady, Gyula Juhász and Lajos Kassák. The next year József joined the illegal Communist Party of Hungary (KMP). Döntsd a tőkét (Blow down the block/capital) (1931) was confiscated by the public prosecutor and in 1931 József's essay Literature and Socialism (Irodalom és szocializmus) led to indictment. However, in 1934, he was excluded from Hungarian Communist Party due to an unknown reason.

Külvárosi éj (Night in the outskirts), a mature collection of poems appeared in 1932. His most famous love poem, Óda (Ode), from 1933 took the reader for a journey around and inside the body of the beloved woman. József's last two books were Medvetánc (1934) (Bear dance) and Nagyon fáj (1936) (It hurts very much). With these works he gained a wide critical attention. Ideologically he had started to advocate humane socialism and alliance with all democratic forces. Only a few are aware of the fact that it was Attila József who first formulated the ars poetica of transrealism in his 1937 poem Welcome to Thomas Mann. József's political essays were later included in Volume 3. of his Collected Works (1958).

Publications

Memorial to Attila József in Balatonszárszó

Original works

• A szépség koldusa ("Beggar of Beauty"), 1922
• Nem én kiáltok ("That's Not Me Shouting"), 1925
• Nincsen apám se anyám ("Fatherless and Motherless"), 1929
• Döntsd a tőkét, ne siránkozz ("Chop at the Roots" or "Knock Down the Capital"), 1931
• Külvárosi éj ("Night in the outskirts"), 1932
• Medvetánc ("Bear Dance"), 1934
• Nagyon fáj ("It Hurts a Lot"), 1936

Published posthumously

• Collected verse and selected writings, 1938
• Collected verse and translations, 1940
• Collected works, 1958
• Collected works, 1967
• József Attila: Selected Poems and Texts, 1973 (introduction by G. Gömöri)

English translations

• Perched on Nothing's Branch, 1987 (translated by Peter Hargitai)
• Winter Night: selected poems of Attila József, 1997 (translated by John Batki)
• The Iron-Blue Vault: selected poems, translated by Zsuzsanna Ozsvath and Frederick Turner, Bloodaxe Books, 2000 ISBN 1-85224-503-4
• Attila József: Sixty Poems, translated by Edwin Morgan, Edinburgh: Mariscat, 2001 [1]
• A Transparent Lion: selected poems of Attila József; translated by Michael Castro and Gabor G. Gyukics, Los Angeles, CA: Green Integer 149, 2006 ISBN 1-933382-50-3

Tributes

• Exhibition of paintings "Je ne crie pas"/"Nem Kiáltok...!" ("I do not shriek") by Thibault Boutherin, a tribute to József's poem "Nem én kiáltok" ("No Shriek of Mine") and dedicated to SGG, in the Karolyi Foundation in Féhervárcsurgó (Hungary) August/November 2007.
• American band The Party recorded a country-folk version of Peter Hargitai's English translation of "Tiszta szivvel" ("With All My Heart") in 2004.

External links

• Winter Night: Selected Poems reviewed
• Meeting Attila József
• General Introduction
• Tableau – 2005 in the homepage of Laszlo Forizs
• Five poems of Attila József translated by László Fórizs
• Selected Poems in English (1)
• Selected Poems in English (2)
• Poems in English
• Attila József at Find a Grave
• Five poems
• Works by or about Attila József at the Internet Archive
• Works by Attila József at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)