Suburban Night and Other Poems

Attila Jozsef is internationally acknowledged as an important poet of the first half of the 20th century, and has been widely translated from Hungarian into all major European languages, as well as Russian and Esperanto. No other Hungarian poet could identify with, and take on the cause of the downtrodden and destitute as he did. His depth of feeling and humaneness is nothing less than searing, emphatically crying out for justice and a fairer deal whereby the world can be put to right. "Suburban Night and Other Poems" is a new interpretation by Ivan Kovacs of Jozsef's verse into English. In Kovacs' own words "we need to agree on what is to be considered an ideal or good translation, which surely cannot be anything other than a poem that loses neither the intended meaning nor the emotional impact of the original. Another contributing factor for the successful translation of poetry is, of course, when the translator happens to be a poet in his or her own right. It is with the understanding of these factors that I undertook the translation of poems by Jozsef, and not just because Jozsef's poems are so near to my heart. For me they have such an abundance of "soul" that I could not help but be inspired to try and recreate them in English".