We, The Twenty-Five Letters of the Alphabet: English Translations from the Selected Poems of the late Lajos Walder

WE, THE TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS OF THE ALPHABET

English Translations from the Selected Poems of the late

LAJOS WALDER

The Hungarian poet Lajos Walder (1913-1945) who chose the pseudonym Vándor, or wanderer, first came to notice in 1932 when he introduced himself to the editor of Anonymous, a Budapest literary magazine, with the following words:

"My name is Lajos Vándor. I am a poet, a law student and a trainee worker at the knitting mills. To the proletarians l am a rotten bourgeois; to the bourgeoisie I am a stinking proletarian; to the petit-bourgeoisie I am an evil anarchist and to the anarchists l am a cowardly petit-bourgeois. And everybody is right, whatever they say about me. But I wrote a few masterpieces - these, the poets and les belles ames would call prose, and the prose writers and modern aesthetes would call poems. Take them and eat them, read them, and publish them; but first give me a cigarette because I left my cash register at home and I don't have four cents in my pocket to buy a single fag."

Walder's poems are an accurate expression of their times. Political tension and bizarre humour are juxtaposed in a manner concordant with the irreverent Da-da major movement that after 1916 swept through the art and literary circles of Europe.

The poems, translated by his daughter Agnes Walder are here published in English.

Macmillan Publishing 2004, hardcover