Celebrated poet György Faludy dies at 95

Poet and literary translator György Faludy died at the age of 95 on Friday, his family announced on Saturday. Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány called Faludy "an artist of exceptional talents with an exceptional destiny."

Faludy first gained fame in the 1930s for his translations of poems by the 15th-century French poet Francois Villon. Faludy, a Jew, fled Hungary in 1938, due to the rise of the fascist Arrow Cross party. He went to France, then to North Africa and finally to North America. As a US soldier he fought the Japanese in the Pacific.

He returned to Hungary after the war, but was imprisoned in the notorious Recsk prison camp in 1949. My Happy Days in Hell, his 1963 account of his flight from fascism, then subsequent return to Hungary and imprisonment in Recsk, won him a wide international audience. In that book, he recalls writing a poem in blood on toilet paper with a straw taken from a broom.

Released from prison in 1956, Faludy left Hungary to live in Vienna, London, Florence, Malta, New York and ultimately Toronto, where he lived and taught for 20 years, becoming a Canadian citizen.

Faludy returned to Hungary in 1989 around the time that his works began to be published legally here. He was presented with the coveted Kossuth Prize in the 1990s.

Poet Sándor Kányádi said Faludy's interpretations of Villon's poems had created a new school of Hungarian poetry.

Historian, critic and essayist Ferenc Fejtő said Faludy was a unique phenomenon in Hungarian literature, as he had a talent for entertaining people.

Writer Tibor Gyurkovics, head of the Hungarian Writers Society, said Faludy's poems will always live among those written in Hungarian, and this is called immortality.

His funeral will be held at the Fiumei út cemetery on September 9.

The above story is just one of more than two dozen published today by Hungary Around the Clock, the most comprehensive source of daily English-language news about Hungary. For a free trial of HATC, click here. Hungarian news sources include Népszabadság; Magyar Hírlap; Világgazdaság; Napi Gazdaság; Magyar Nemzet; Népszava; Kossuth Rádió news and Hungarian television's nightly news broadcast.

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