György Petri

Foreword by Elaine Feinstein

Shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize

György Petri (1943-2000) belonged to the generation of Hungarian poets who grew up after the uprising of 1956. He made his name in the West as the most uncompromising and outrageous of his country’s dissident authors. At home he was as often praised for his strangely disquieting love poetry, which is harsh, erotic and disenchanted. But all his poems are marked by his biting humour and bluntness of language.

After the fall of Communism, Petri’s wit and his natural anarchism were aimed at a wider range of public targets, yet his new poems also seem more private. Many are intellectual puzzles, sceptical about identity and the sureness of emotional attachments. The poetry written by Petri before the collapse of Hungary’s Communist régime was published by Bloodaxe in 1991 in Night Song of the Personal Shadow: Selected Poems, also translated by George Gömöri and Clive Wilmer. Eternal Monday is a later selection, mostly of poems written after 1989.

'Petri is a lyrical poet who has deliberately gone sour… His love poems are his finest work: sad, dry-eyed, even cruel, but spiced with a bitter tenderness…He is the voice of his generation. To understand him is to understand the declining years of European Communism and to sharpen our eyes for intimate half-truths of our own.' – George Szirtes, Times Literary Supplement

'It is a long time since a major verse satirist has emerged in any European language. That is what Petri is, and he combines an almost Juvenalian savagery with a striking range of techniques and genres. His bile is the product of injustice and moral outrage. He is funny, angry, sexy, morbid, disillusioned and wildly intelligent.' – Clive Wilmer