By the Danube
Joszef Attila
As I sat on the bottom step of the wharf,
A melon-rind flowed by with the current;
Wrapped in my fate I hardly heard the chatter
Of the surface, while the deep was silent.
As if my own heart had opened its gate:
The Danube was turbulent, wise and great...
When he wrote the beautiful poem, the”By the Daube” he didn’t know that some 80 -90 years later on, his statue will sit there “ On the bottom step that from the wharf descends " forever.
Seemingly skin and bones with a hollow face, but with a stubborn look in his eye, there is a young man sitting near the south end of the Parliament building, close to the bank of the Danube, just a few steps from the number 2 tram. one of the most famous Hungarian poets of the 20th century, Attila József (1905 – 1937) portrayed here realistically by sculptor László Marton (1925 – 2008).
Biography and work
Attila József is the best known of the modern Hungarian poets internationally. His poems have been translated into many languages and he is taught in world literature classes around the globe. Hailed during the communist era of the 1950s as Hungary's great "proletarian poet", his life, personality, and works are now being re-evaluated with the current celebrations of the centenary of his birth.
His first volume of poetry was A szépség koldusa (1922); at that time he was 17 and still in school. József studied privately for a year, and then entered the University of Szeged in 1924 to study Hungarian and French literature. With the help of a maecenas, Lajos Hatvany, he acquired a good education in Austria (1925) and Paris (1926–27), where he studied French literature and discovered the work of François Villon, the famous poet and thief from the 15th-century.
In 1925 József published his second collection of poems, Nem én kiáltok. He was expelled from the university because of a revolutionary poem, Tiszta szívvel. With his manuscripts he traveled to Vienna, where he made a living by selling newspapers and cleaning dormitories, and then to Paris, where he studied at the Sorbonne. During this period he read Hegel and Karl Marx, whose call for revolution appealed to him.
József's works were praised by such internationally known Hungarian researchers and critics as Béla Balázs and György Lukács. In 1927 several French magazines published József's poems.
József's third collection of poems, Nincsen apám se anyám (1929), showed the influence of French surrealism and Hungarian poets Endre Ady, Gyula Juhász and Lajos Kassák. The next year József joined the illegal Communist Party of Hungary (KMP). Döntsd a tokét (1931) was confiscated by the public prosecutor and in 1931 József's essay Literature and Socialism (Irodalom és szocializmus) led to indictment. However, not long afterward, he left the Communist Party.
Külvárosi éj, a mature collection of poems appeared in 1932. His most famous love poem, Óda, from 1933 took the reader for a journey around and inside the body of the beloved woman. József's last two books were Medvetánc (1934) and Nagyon fáj (1936). With these works he gained a wide critical attention. Ideologically he had started to advocate humane socialism and alliance with all democratic forces. Only a few are aware of the fact that it was Attila József who first formulated the ars poetica of transrealism in his 1937 poem Welcome to Thomas Mann. József's political essays were later included in Volume 3. of his Collected Works (1958).
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