Sándor Csoóri, a leading contemporary Hungarian poet, essayist, and scriptwriter, has been called “the genius of discontent” and is considered to be one of the most prominent artistic spokespersonsfor the Hungarian people during the pastfour decades. He is the author of thirteen volumes of poetry and five volumes of essays. Recipient of the Attila Józef Prize in Poetry, he also won the prestigious Kossuth Award, Hungary’s greatest honor for achievement in artistic and scientific work.
Poetry
Summer 1996
Remembering an Old Street
Curved little street: tossed out melon rind. Your cobblestones: black seeds, flies swarm all over you. Your synagogue’s forehead: a stuffed calf s forehead. Your little Jews’ earlocks are curly, […]
Poetry
Summer 1996
Hung Over
From the Hungarian. Always hung over with worry, with the green fur of postponed rage in my mouth, hung over from myself and from you, with crevices under […]
Poetry
Winter 1992
No Kin of Yours, Just a Friend
Poland: lightning-struck Christ statue, the July sunlight patrols your blackening wounds and flies again kiss your bones. I sulk for you, as though I, too, lay felled in some foul-smelling […]
Poetry
Winter 2000
Morning Awakening
From the Hungarian. Good morning,—I greet you when you open the doorand with my greeting the smellof elderberry and of thyme and of a hundred herbpours into your room.Look, the […]
Poetry
Summer 1996
If I Had Believed
From the Hungarian. If I had believed the whispers, the winds, the prophecies raised in a cradle, this night would not be so long, this wall would not be rotting […]
Poetry
Winter 1992
Somebody Consoles Me with a Poem
From the Hungarian. Can you hear it? Somebody’s reading a poem to me over the telephone, he’s consoling me for my dead, for myself, he’s promising a snowfall on my […]