My name is Steve Dodson I’m a retired copyeditor currently living in western Massachusetts after many years in New York City. (Via wood s lot.)Ĭommented-On Language Hat Posts (courtesy of J.C. You can read George Szirtes’s translation of the poem here, and listen to the author read it in Hungarian at this YouTube post.
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#Tyranny in a sentence trial#
This strange story, with its morbid and grotesque turns and spanning thirty years, is nothing else than that of a show trial that had been initiated against a poem… It was in this address that, for the first time, someone representing the official political line claimed in public that the poem was in fact about “the indisputable historical calling of socialism-the fight for the totality of freedom and against all kinds of dictatorship” and it was not up to Illyés, nor the poem, that in 1956 it “had become a weapon in the hands of those triggering and inciting violent emotions and of harbingers of hopelessness.” The school was opened with an address given by György Aczél, a member of the Political Committee of the HSWP, and the Party’s cultural overlord. Two years after the poet’s death, on 31 October 1985, in the small village of Ozora, where he had spent part of his childhood, a newly built school was named after him. It was copied in different versions and passed from hand to hand in secret.
![tyranny in a sentence tyranny in a sentence](https://image.slideserve.com/1030127/more-hook-sentences-l.jpg)
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In the meantime, the poem acquired a historic patina and a place in the public mind on a par with Sándor Petőfi’s “National Song”, a poem that had played an inflammatory role in the 1848 Hungarian revolution and subsequent war of independence. Indeed, anyone purveying the poem in any form or through any channel could expect the police to take action against them, especially in the aftermath of the revolution. …the “non-existent” censorship of “existing socialism” made it impossible for the poem to be republished, whether in a newspaper or a review, or in Illyés’s own books, including various editions of “collected” poems. The Hungarian poet Gyula Illyés (in Hungarian order, Illyés Gyula) was widely considered one of the greatest living Hungarian poets before his death in 1983, and his 1950 poem Egy mondat a zsarnokságról (“A Sentence About Tyranny”), immediately suppressed, was passed around in a Hungarian version of samizdat, as Mátyás Domokos explains: