Attila József

Attila József was born in Budapest on 11 April 1905. His father, a soap-factory worker, left the family in 1908; the child was placed with peasants, then lost his mother, a laundress, at the age of fourteen. A cabin boy on Danube tugboats, he then studied in Szeged, from where a poem judged scandalous barred him from teaching, and then in Vienna. A member of the clandestine Communist Party from 1930, he was later rejected by it. He died on 3 December 1937 at Balatonszárszó, struck by a freight train.

In the catalogue 1

• PoetryNagyon fájAttila József · 1936not translated into EnglishLiteraturePublic domain