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Faculty

Gyula Kodolányi Senior Visiting Scholar 101 Rich Building Emory University Atlanta, GA 30322  404-727-1074 (Office) 404-727-4672 (Fax) gkodola@emory.edu Spring 2009 office hours: Thursday 2-4 p.m. and by appointment

Gyula Kodolányi (1942) is the author of several collections of poetry, scholarly and literary essays and translations. His first collection of poetry, The Sea and the Wind Endlessly, published in 1981, was awarded the Mikes Kelemen Prize by Hungarian writers in exile, as most remarkable Hungarian book of the year. In 2002 he received the Attila József Prize for Literature and in 2005 the President's Medal of Honor for his public and literary achievements.

Kodolányi taught English and American Literature at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest in 1970-1989. He received research and teaching fellowships from the British Council, the American Council of Learned Societies, CIES and The German Marshall Fund of the U.S. He has taught at the University of California in Santa Barbara (1984-85) and at Emory University in Atlanta (2004-), and read his poetry in English widely in the U.S. He has translated extensively literature from and into English. He has participated in Hungarian politics and public life since the late 1970s, being drawn at that time into the budding Hungarian opposition movement. In 1987 he was a founding member of the Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF), which won parliamentary elections three years later and formed Hungary's first democratic government since 1948. In 1990-94 he served as Senior Foreign Policy Advisor to Prime Ministers József Antall and Péter Boross, on U.S. And European relations.

Since that time, he has continued both his political and his literary activities, advising Hungarian President Ferenc Mádl (2000-2005), and editing a political and intellectual bimonthly, Magyar Szemle (Hungarian Review) in Budapest.

Since March 2008 he has been a Member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts in Salzburg, Austria.

At Emory, as a Senior Visiting Scholar, Kodolányi has taught interdisciplinary courses on East Central Europe and Hungary, with focus on literature, film and politics.

I LABOUR IN THE EXISTENCE FACTORY
For the 70th birthday of Géza Ottlik

I celebrate the blossoming of acacias
- some years twice – and I would pick up each
thrown out bottle, as if nothing else
hurt my eyes, I’d let letters, the metered ones,
wait a few days on my desk, with my fist
I’d rub a round hole on the frosted bus window
in order to see through (and I’d never
regret the effort). I flip through pages of consumer
complaints, but never enter a complaint or
a poem there. “Out of silence,
the novel will arise,” I encourage myself
while quietly taking a shower, I am after the human
complexity of this place. Possessing this map
in my own pores, I am walking to the rhythm of unsuspecting
traffic lamps, and I will reveal all these maps
when meaningful writing resumes. There is
so much joy to notice, “a pugnacious
little nose,” “huge chestnut trees,”
spontaneous exchanges of smiles,
and at daybreak light not yet adulterated. In brief:
“life is, in spite of everything,
more grandiose than it appears to human reason.”

1982

English version by Clayton Eschleman and the author
New Hungarian Quarterly, Budapest

WHAT IS NOT MINE (Ami nem az enyém)

Slowly bidding adieu to the world, I fall back in love with it––an impersonal passion. To the velvet-skinned siren I send messages only in thought, while I sit alone listening to the crickets. From her memory person evaporates, and I receive enough bliss from her gaze turned now into evening, a black pebble from the dear shore, the washing waves. She has become all this. From all this she had become a goddess once, and now she regains her essence as crickets‚ chirping, this impersonal passion, and in my dreams she still visits sometimes as the girl with glasses, the stranger, who once snatched me up like an infant and flew me on with herself to India, at a time when I was crucified by so many unripe deaths.

This is what she has become, the washing waves, the chirping of crickets: world. What is not mine, what I love with an impersonal passion. What is mine.

2000

Translated by the author and John Ridland
To Topos/Poetry International, Oregon