Anti-War Poems by Endre Ady Protesting the Great War (Accepted)

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Abstract (max. 250 words):
New translations of Hungarian poetry are presented with the idea of commemorating the one-hundredth anniversary of the Great War (now better known as WWI) with antiwar poems written during that calamity. Every participating nation turned out a lot of patriotic verses to fuel the flames, but Hungary (an unwitting colony in the Habsburg Empire at that time) had a few great poets who, from its beginning, protested against the war in their writings instead of fomenting it. Most prominent among them was Edre Ady (1877-1919), an artistic and political rebel even before the war, taking aim at the vestiges of feudalism in his native land. His style was greatly influenced by the French Symbolists with which he revolutionized the traditional poetry of his time. The originals of the submitted translations appeared in a volume of poems “Halottak élén” (Leading the Dead) in 1918 while the war was still raging, but many of the most vociferous poems date from 1914 and 1915 when the outcome was undecided; yet, clear-sighted as ever in his social criticism, Ady could see the beginning of the end of Western Civilization in the carnage unfolding in Europe. Thus these poems (in the presenter’s new translation) are offered here as historic documents, not only as literature although some of them have been published in leading literary journals such as Osiris, Consequences and others.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Paul Sohar came to the US as a ’56 Hungarian student refugee, has been writing and publishing in every genre, including seventeen volumes of translations from Hungarian, the latest being “The Conscience of Trees” (poems by Zoltán Böszörményi, Ragged Sky Press, 2018). His own poetry: “Homing Poems” (Iniquity Press, 2006), “The Wayward Orchard” (Wordrunner Press Prize winner, 2011) and “In Sun’s Shadow” (Ragged Sky, 2020). Awards: first prize in the 2012 Lincoln Poets Society contest, two nominations for Pushcart Prize and three translation prizes in Budapest. Magazines publications: Agni, Gargoyle, Kenyon Review, Rattle, etc.