Poetry
Éposz Wagner maszkjában
Not translated into English
Lajos Kassák · 1915
Synopsis
Thirteen poems in free verse, only two of which have a title, written under the shock of the war that is beginning. The first part tells of the war in preparation and the lament of those who leave, while soldiers cross the city laughing and singing of the fatherland and their sweethearts. The second, a painful and ironic epic, invokes war, “master with steel claws”, and shows nameless soldiers, weary, with tangled beards, who dance with death, with no enemy and no victorious flags.
Context
The collection appeared in Budapest in April 1915; it is the author's first book of verse, and the same year he launched his first journal, A Tett, banned a year later for its opposition to the war. It is seen as the birth of the avant-garde movement in Hungary: the title announces an epic, but the book, in free verse, has no continuous narrative and no hero, and is akin to Walt Whitman and the German Expressionists. Kosztolányi, in the Nyugat, welcomed an honest and new attempt, whose only ornament was pain.
Who it is for
A short book of accumulated images, without rhyme or metre; no French or English translation of the collection has been located.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as the book that opens the history of the Hungarian avant-garde, and as a turning point in its author's work.
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