Dancing Embers [Paperback]

Sandor Kanyadi (Author), Paul Sohar (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 2002

The first comprehensive volume, in English, of the work of Hungarian poet Sándor Kányádi, the country's nominee for the Nobel Prize, sampling many facets of his oeuvre. SMOKE Smoke has been the sign of human settlement ever since Prometheus' defiant act, ever since people settled down to roasting, torching, scorching and cremating, ever since human history began its smoldering. The pale blue smoke of campfires and the black smoke of plunder, burning stakes, and crematoria; they both have stained the sun and its starry vault in this accustomed homey hue. Puffing on a cigarette I'm sitting high up on a hill, watching limpid supper smoke weave its way from the valley across the reclining sunrays; but it's the sickening fume of burning brains that tickles my memory for taste and smell. Could they be burning books somewhere?

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

*Starred Review* For nearly a century, history has not been kind to the Transylvanian Hungarians. After World War I, Transylvania was given to Romania, which made its people second-class citizens. When the iron curtain fell, the dictator Ceausescu bulldozed Transylvanian villages in his campaign to suppress ethnic minorities. Nor is present-day Romania indulgent; Greek Orthodox cathedrals have colonized historically Protestant majority-Catholic minority Transylvania. So the impending darkness in Transylvanian Hungarian Kanyadi's otherwise often capering, witty poems is entirely understandable. It is hard to think of another poet of his caliber who is as dour but also never morbid. Kanyadi is as bleak as T. S. Eliot, and translator Sohar aptly says of the long "All Souls' Day in Vienna" that it is "'The Waste Land,' if you will, transplanted to . . . a different cultural context." But whereas lightness in Eliot mostly comes from the classical and Elizabethan-Jacobean stage, Kanyadi draws on the energy of folk music and rural work and uses folklike, homely metaphors to get his lines to sparkle and lilt, however mournfully. Thanks to Sohar's determination to keep as much as possible of the regular rhymes and meters that are so natural, he says, to all Hungarian poetry, these translations dance, and they keep dancing when they shift into free verse. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

From the Publisher

This book samples Kányádi’s oeuvre in a comprehensive way so as to let the reader see the many facets of this important poet. Paul Sohar has not only been polishing his translations but also disseminating them in the US, UK, and Canada for the past few years to high acclaim.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 180 pages
• Publisher: Twisted Spoon Pr (October 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 8086264041
• ISBN-13: 978-8086264042
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.9 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,630,796 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)