Lajos Walder, 1943
We, The Twenty-Five Letters Of The Alphabet
English Translations From the Selected Poems Of Lajos Walder.
Translated from the Hungarian, with an introduction and notes by his daughter, Agnes Walder.
ISBN:1876832029. Med. 8vo. 160 pages. Portrait frontispiece, with original typescripts and manuscript produced in facsimile. Hardcover with dust jacket. A$50.00
The poet Lajos Walder (1913-1945) - who chose the pseudonym 'Vandor', (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 Vandor. I am a poet, a law student and a trainee worker at the knitting mills. To the proletarians I 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 I 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 Ieft 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 Dada movement that after 1916 swept through the art and literary circles of Europe. In the words of Gabor Thurzo "Lajos Walder ('Vandor') has neither ancestor nor partner in Hungarian literature. He is a poet, without a doubt a lyricist through and through, yet one whose every line and every poetic breath is pure heresy, pure rebellion against the accustomed forms of poetry."
His first book 'Heads Or Tails' was published by 'Anonymous' Magazine in Budapest in 1933, when he was twenty years old. Five years later, in 1938, his second volume of poetry, 'Group Portrait' was published by Cserepfalvi of Budapest. There were to be no further publications in Lajos Walder's lifetime: after 1938 the works of Jewish artists could not be published in Hungary. Lajos Walder was one of only a handful of Jewish students able to enter university, where he excelled and graduated as a Doctor Of Law in 1937. In 1939 the Jewish Laws came into effect in Hungary, and Jewish professionals were barred from practising their professions. In the course of the war, what followed was forced labour and the death camps at Mauthausen and Gunskirchen. Within hours of the liberation of Gunskirchen by the advancing American forces, Lajos Walder died as a result of exhaustion and starvation at the age of thirty-two.
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