Skip to content
Search
SUBSCRIBE
  • CURRENT
  • POLITICS
  • PHILOSOPHY
  • CULTURE & SOCIETY
  • REVIEW
  • OPINION
  • INTERVIEW
  • DIASPORA
  • PRINT ISSUES
Menu
  • CURRENT
  • POLITICS
  • PHILOSOPHY
  • CULTURE & SOCIETY
  • REVIEW
  • OPINION
  • INTERVIEW
  • DIASPORA
  • PRINT ISSUES
  • About
Menu
  • About
  • CULTURE & SOCIETY

György Faludy — ‘The Happy Poet from Hell’

  • CULTURE & SOCIETY

György Faludy — ‘The Happy Poet from Hell’

Faludy (L) with General Kálmán Kéri, a former officer of the Horthy military, then of the Hungarian People's Army, serving as ranking member of the National Assembly in 1990. Kéri was unlawfully arrested in 1949, and became Faludy's fellow prisoner in Recsk.
Wikimedia Commons
Faludy, one of the greatest Hungarian poets and literary translators of the 20th century, never really found his place in any system; he sooner or later became a nuisance to everyone, and even if sometimes made compromises, always did so provocatively, originally and with talent.
  • László Bernát Veszprémy
  • — 25.09.2023

György Faludy is without doubt one of the most original, talented, and controversial Hungarian poets and literary translators. His work is acknowledged but also criticised, on both the right and the left.

Faludy was born on 22 September 1910, in Budapest, in a Jewish family. His original family name was Leimdörfer, and we also know his Jewish name, which was Joseph Dov ben Chayim. His father’s family came from what is Slovakia today (Nagybiccse, today: Bytèa), while his mother came from a well-established Jewish trading family in Western Hungary, the Biringers. After attending the famous Fasori Lutheran Secondary School, he went on to study in Vienna, Berlin, Paris, and Graz. Having seen much of contemporary Europe, he returned home and completed his military service in Horthy’s army as an officer between 1933 and 1934.

With the ascension of Hitler and Hungary’s shift to the far right, the young poet, who at the time was already famous for his unique reinterpretation of Villon, left for Paris, then Morocco and

finally the United States, even serving in the US Army in WWII.

Many of his relatives, who were left behind, became victims of the Holocaust: many of his mother’s relatives in the countryside, but also his younger sister, while his father died of starvation soon after the liberation of the capital city.

György Faludy as a soldier of the US Army. PHOTO: Petőfi Literary Museum

He returned to Hungary in 1946 and found work at the Social Democratic daily Népszava. One of his most controversial actions was his participation in the blowing up of the statue of Catholic bishop Ottokár Prohászka in April 1947. Prohászka was widely seen as a reactionary and an antisemite, even though his thinking was, in economic terms, markedly progressive at his time and he was also somewhat of a Christian Zionist. Another momentum that he recalled as a ‘low point’ in his career was his poem Nyolc szörnyeteg (Eight Monsters), published in Népszava on 25 September 1949, the same day when former Communist Minister for the Interior László Rajk and his associates (among them two Jews, Tibor Szőnyi and András Szalai) were sentenced to death in a show trial. Five other defendants were sentenced to prison—eight people altogether, hence the title, Eight Monsters.

The poem was a savage, frothing, almost maniacal attack on Rajk and his associates. Faludy wrote in several places in the poem of his own animalistic hatred, dehumanizing the politicians he criticized,

rejoicing at their death sentences, which he had obviously been informed of in advance.

In the poem, he likened Rajk, the ‘chief culprit’, to a ‘jackal in a robe’, a ‘murderer’, who ‘confessed coldly and haughtily’. Listening to Rajk, he wrote, he felt that ‘the ancient fish and the cavemen were ‘closer’ to him than the accused Communist politician. In the poem, he likened the accused to ‘eight rotten mummies’, who ‘lived a hundred lives’, but whose lives must ‘end now’.

It is interesting that in the poem, he likened the images of the Second World War, in which Rajk and his associates were also culprits in his view, to a ‘vision from hell’: the next three years of his life he later came to describe also as ‘hell’.

In 1950, Faludy was arrested by the secret police in a Hungarian version of the Stalinist purges, and sent to the ‘Hungarian Gulag’, the concentration camp of Recsk. In his memoirs, titled

My Happy Days in Hell, he likened the forced labour camp to ‘Hitler’s death camps’.

His days were marked with heavy labour, beatings, starvation and suffering. He could not write down his poems, so he memorized them, line by line, repeating ‘a hundred, five hundred, a thousand lines daily. From prison I emerged with a book of poems in my mind,’ he recalled. In September 1953 he was released, with an apology and a threat that he was not to speak of his experiences, or he would face repercussions. Of course, he did speak about them, and his memoirs became a must read not only for right-wing critics of the Communist system but also for disillusioned leftists and liberals.

A portrait of Faludy by László Várkonyi (after 1953?) PHOTO: MTI

He left Hungary again in 1956, settling this time in London. There he edited a strongly anti-Communist journal, the Irodalmi Újság (Literary Newspaper). Later, he moved to Canada, where he remained for more than two decades, living in Toronto and receiving Canadian citizenship in 1976.

Today, a square is named after him, the George Faludy Place just across 25 St Mary Street, where he lived for 25 years.

As he put it, he never felt as free in his entire life as when a citizen of Canada.

Faludy returned to Hungary in 1989, and was awarded the Kossuth Prize, one of the highest state awards for artistic accomplishments, in 1994.

The poet was also open about his bisexuality. He spent 36 years of his life with a male US ballet dancer in his emigrant years. However, he was also married three times. His last wife, Hungarian Fanny Kovács was 66 years his junior when he married her in 2002. Provoking his critics, who questioned whether real attraction was possible when there was such a huge age gap between the spouses, they published half-naked pictures of themselves—again, a characteristic move for a poet who never really found his place in any system, who sooner or later became a nuisance to everyone, and who, even if sometimes made compromises, always did so provocatively, originally and with talent.

László Bernát Veszprémy, journalist, historian. After completing his MA in Holocaust history at the University of Amsterdam, he worked at the Jewish cultural monthly Szombat between 2016 and 2018. In 2017, he became a research assistant at the Veritas Research Institute for History and Archives, and in 2019, the Hungarian-Jewish Historical Institute at the Milton Friedman University in Budapest. Previously, Veszprémy was deputy editor-in-chief of Neokohn.hu, the largest Hungarian-Jewish news portal, and currently, he is the editor-in-chief of corvinak.hu, the popular science journal of Mathias Corvinus Collegium. He is also working towards completing his PhD at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. His dissertation specializes in the field of political theory and Jewish history.
  • Tags: Austria, Canada, communism, controversial, emigration, forced labour camp, George Faludy, György Faludy, Horthy era, literary translator, My Happy Days in Hell, poet, Recsk, show trial, Toronto, United States, US army, Villon

READ NEXT

Thomas Molnár (left) and Russell Kirk with their wives in New York in 1965.

The Contexts of Thomas Molnar — A Conference in Budapest

Zoltán Pető 06.12.2023
Kossuth drives up Broadway on 6 December 1851.

Lajos Kossuth: a Hungarian Hero Celebrated in America

Márton Losonczi 06.12.2023
A Budapest bus driver dressed as Mikulás in one of the traditional Mikulás Buses on 4 December 2022.

Mikulás, the Hungarian Santa Claus

Lili Zemplényi 06.12.2023

CITATION

Hungarian Conservative is a quarterly magazine on contemporary political, philosophical and cultural issues from a conservative perspective.

ABOUT

TERMS & CONDITIONS

PRIVACY POLICY

LOG IN

CONTACT

[email protected]

© Hungarian Conservative 2023

  • Privacy Policy
  • General Privacy Policy
  • Terms & Conditions

Made by DIGITALHERO

  • CURRENT
  • POLITICS
  • PHILOSOPHY
  • CULTURE & SOCIETY
  • REVIEW
  • OPINION
  • INTERVIEW
  • DIASPORA
  • PRINT ISSUES
  • CURRENT
  • POLITICS
  • PHILOSOPHY
  • CULTURE & SOCIETY
  • REVIEW
  • OPINION
  • INTERVIEW
  • DIASPORA
  • PRINT ISSUES
Search

About

SUBSCRIBE

Tired of browsing?

Choose the Hungarian Conservative newsletter. Sign up for free – cancel anytime.

By signing up, you consent to receive our newsletter and allow Hungarian Conservative to use your data for marketing purposes. You can unsubscribe at any time.