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| By: Associated Press |
| Published: September 3, 2006 |
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Poet and translator Gyorgy Faludy, considered one of Hungary's greatest literary figures of the past century, has died. He was 95.
Faludy, who fled the both the Nazis and the communists and whose works were banned in his home country for decades, died Friday in his Budapest home, his wife told state news agency MTI on Saturday.
Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany called Faludy "an artist of exceptional talents with an exceptional destiny."
"Gyorgy Faludy was considered a master, the last member of Hungary's 20th-century generation of poets to which all later generations compared and compare themselves," Gyurcsany said in a statement.
Born to a Jewish family in Budapest on Sept. 22, 1910, Faludy first gained acclaim in the mid-1930s for his freewheeling translations of the ballads of the 15th-century French poet Villon.
He left Hungary in 1938 fearing rising intolerance against Jews and hostility to his political views. He returned after World War II and was imprisoned in 1950 on false charges by Hungary's Stalinist regime in the infamous Recsk labor camp.
Faludy continued writing poetry even while at Recsk, with his fellow prisoners memorizing the verses as a mental exercise and to save them for posterity in case any of them survived the concentration camp.
Faludy and some 1,300 other survivors of Recsk were released in 1953, when the camp -- the existence of which was kept secret for years by the communist regime -- was closed down in the wake of Stalin's death.
Faludy left Hungary again in 1956 after that year's anti-communist uprising and spent the next 33 years in exile, first in Europe and later mainly in Toronto, Canada, where he obtained Canadian citizenship.
He returned to Hungary in 1989, shortly after the initial publication of his autobiographical novel "My Happy Days in Hell" in Hungary, where his works had been banned for decades.
First published in English in 1962, the book was considered a precursor to Alexander Solzhenitsyn's accounts of the Soviet concentration camps.
In a recent interview, Faludy fretted about the current state of literature and about how politicians instead of artists and intellectuals have become the dominant voices in public life.
"Seventy years ago, if people had asked me or somebody else to list a few poets who'd survive the 20th century, I could have listed 10 or 15 names. Now? Name a poet who will definitely be remembered a century hence? You can't, can you?" Faludy told Hungarian weekly magazine HVG.
"Around 350 A.D., people stopped reading. At the time of Marcus Aurelius, there were 88 libraries in Rome. Under Constantine the Great there was only one. I think we stand before a great crisis, which is consuming literature."
Faludy is survived by his third wife, Fanny Kovacs-Faludy. His son Andrew, born to his second wife Zsuzsa who died in 1963, lives in Britain.
Faludy will be buried Sept. 9 in Budapest's Fiumei uti cemetery. |
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