The Night of Akhenaton: Selected Poems

by Ágnes Nemes Nagy, George Szirtes (Translator)

Hungary’s Ágnes Nemes Nagy (1922-91) is one of Europe’s major modern poets. Her poems are clear and packed at once, monumental yet crystalline in their thought and organisation. The vast pressures of her nation’s troubled history find their equivalent in human feeling, voiced through the extraordinary compressed power and explosive formality of Nemes Nagy’s poetry. Her subjects include nature, myth and the vastnesses of geological time, but her manner is epic, tragic and epigrammatic. Co-editor of New Moon, the most important literary magazine in Hungary after the War, her own work was banned and the magazine closed in the 1950s, but both have had a lasting effect on later generations. Too distant, too unbending, too disdainful of popularity to be a popular writer, she was neverthless acclaimed as the most important Hungarian poet of the postwar period, and her influence has been as much a moral force (to do with integrity and intellectual passion) as a matter of range and technique. This selection contains poems from all periods of Nemes Nagy’s output, from the 1940s to work written immediately prior to her death. It includes poems from her Akhenaton cycle where she grapples most intensely with history, responsibility and justice, carving a new theology or cosmology out of these desperately fissile forces. Identifying with the Egyptian boy-king, she looks to invent a necessary god; recalling the energies of the 1956 Uprising, she tries to ?nd rituals to articulate them – as her wild, wild thought is carved into large, clear, rational forms.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published December 31, 2004

About the author

Hungarian poet, writer, educator, and translator.
She was born in Budapest and earned a teaching diploma from the University of Budapest. From 1945 to 1953, she was employed by the education journal Köznevelés; from 1953 to 1957, she taught high school. After 1957, she devoted herself to writing.

Following World War II, Nemes Nagy worked on a literary periodical Újhold (New Moon); the editor was critic Balázs Lengyel, who she later married. The magazine was eventually banned by the government of the time. In 1946, Nemes Nagy published her first volume of poetry Kettős világban (In a dual world). In 1948, she was awarded the Baumgarten Prize. During the 1950s, her own work was suppressed and she worked as a translator, translating the works of Molière, Racine, Corneille, Bertolt Brecht and others.

Reviews

[Justin Labelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dense but beautiful poetry.
Nagy explores time and the subjective experience.
She incorporates classical characters and locations but infuses them in current daily life.
This is contemplative poetry and the accompanying essay is instructive and eu opening.

[Des Bladet · Rating 5 out of 5]

Masterpieces, it says here and I don't dispute it, of Hungarian modernism.

[Gabriel · Rating 3 out of 5]

given that szirtes is a native hungarian speaker and corresponded directly with nagy i'm sure this is more faithful in some ways, but having read maxton's translations first this just feels neutered and prosaic. maxton's translations are a harrowing cascade of thoughts and images frozen into arrangements so oblique and disjointed that their conduction of potent emotion feels almost like luck. szirtes' translations convey the same content, but if this was my only exposure to nagy's poetry i would think she was pretty unremarkable

[R.L. Swihart · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just started reading. I've known about her for some while (and have read snatches here and there), but I'll reserve my "rating" of the entire book till later.

My favorite poem in the volume is "Concerning God."