Istvan Lakatos Essay, Research Paper

Istvan LakatosIstvan Lakatos, who has died aged 75, was not a political animal, yet he was one of the few contemporary Hungarian poets who seriously suffered for their political convictions. A classicist by temperament, his involvement with the free press of the 1956 Hungarian revolution resulted in his imprisonment in the wake of its suppression by the Soviet Union. After the second world war, Hungary was briefly ruled by a democratic coalition, which allowed Hungarian literature to flourish until the final communist takeover in 1949. Many periodicals sprang up, including one in which most of the new talents published. Ujhold (New Moon) was the launching board of many poets, and it was the youngest member of that group, Lakatos, who caused a minor sensation by winning the prestigious Baumgarten Award in 1949, at the age of 22. Lakatos was born into a middle-class family in a small town south of Budapest, and was educated at a local grammar school. In 1944, he found himself in a capital under siege. This was a crucial moment: his first book, At The Portico Of Hell And Other Smaller Poems (1949), consists mainly of a long, descriptive poem in hexameters, which gives an apocalyptic picture of Budapest during the month-long Red army siege of 1944-45. Mingling naturalistic episodes with visionary, expressionistic imagery, Lakatos strikingly captured the siege’s atmosphere; in later years, he could not surpass the success of that first major work. In 1949, all independent literary reviews were closed down. As he completed his studies in Latin and Hungarian philology at Budapest University that year, Lakatos might have been able to maintain himself by part-time teaching and translating from Latin, Italian and German. At any rate, in 1955 he emerged as one of the initiators of a reformist discussion group, the Petõfi Circle, the activities of which prepared the ground for the 1956 revolution. Lakatos did not appear to play a major part in public discussions, but he re-emerged that October when a poem, Ode to Youth, written in metric stanzas, was printed in the first independent revolutionary newspaper Igazság (Truth) – and earned him a sentence from 1957-59 for “counter-revolutionary incitement”. In his cell, he embarked on the translation of Virgil’s Aeneid. Lakatos’s patient work came to fruition in 1962 with the best Hungarian Aeneid to date; in 1963 came the Eclogues, and, in 1967, the Georgics. That year too, Virgil’s Collected Works appeared in his translation in the Helicon Classics series, with an improved version of the Aeneid. This was followed by other translations, and Lakatos even tried his skill at parts of the Mahabharata, the Ramayana; in 1988, he translated into Hungarian the entire Bhagavad-gita. With the mellowing of the regime of Janos Kadar came other opportunities: in 1986 Lakatos, together with Balazs Lengyel and Agnes Nemes Nagy, was allowed to resume the publication of Ujhold, as a semi-annual. As a poet, he brought out the selection Pictures Of A Passion (1972), and Blue Butterfly (1981); The Garden Of Paradise, his collected poems, with some prose writings, had to wait for publication until 1993. Last year witnessed a rebirth of his poetic powers, and his thin book of poems, Singed By Love In Old Age, won critical accolades. In the 1980s, Lakatos began to write his memoirs, Well, What Sort Of A Dog Is This?, with vivid vignettes of friends and acquaintances of his youth, which were continued in the mixed prose and verse collection Flowers Of The Darkness (1987). After the Graves Award (1982), he won the Attila József Prize (1983) and, after the communist regime fell, both the Soros Prize Of Lifelong Recognition (1992) and the Kossuth Prize (1995). In 1992, he was a founding member of the Széchenyi Literary Academy and, between 1995 and 1998, a member of the presidium of the Hungarian Writers’ Association. As a critic, his most coveted commission was to edit a new selection of the Hungarian Poets Of Seven Centuries (1966), though the results were somewhat controversial. Some of Lakatos’s poems were translated into English by Istvan Totfalusi, in the Anthology Of Living Hungarian Poetry (Budapest, 1997), and by Nicholas Kolumban, in The Science Of In-Between (Budapest, 1999). He is survived by his wife. · Istvan Lakatos, writer and poet, born April 26 1927; died May 6 2002