Kádár Eszter
Count Ferenc Békássy the forgotten Anglo-Hungarian poet
CONTENTS, INTRODUCTION
Contents
Előszó helyett
Introduction
Chapter 1. His Home, His Family Background and His Literary Upbringing
Chapter 2. His Essays, Translations, and Poems of His Own
Epilogue
Appendix
Personal data
References
Bibliography
Introduction
The death of a man is followed by his mourning.
When a child dies, it is a tragedy to the parents, especially when the mother has to burry her own son.
If a soldier dies, the nation feels sorrows for the tragedy of all the war victims.
The poet's death makes the nation feel the absence of a soul.
When young poets have died in the fight of the First World War, the pathos floated all over. The necrologues were full of sadness and the poetic values of the deads' work were recognised only from the side of loss.
In English literature Rupert Brooke is a well-known name. Some of his poems will be included in antologies. But his name is grown up into a special legend hence he was a young poet from whose friends' group he became a well-known one all over the word. But he died in the war.
Rupert Brooke and Ferenc Békássy were poets and friends at Cambridge King's College. They used to be members of the same group of intellects and they were killed on the two different sides of the same war in the same year. Those who die young inevitably become a legend. The same happened to Count Ferenc Békássy. His name is brightened by legend, too.
He was a bilingual poet, critic and essayist. His pieces were published soon after his death, but he has not become well-known either in Hungary or in England.
At the end of this millenary, more than 80 years later after these poets' death we try to support the idea, that the only reason of his oblivion has been his very early death.
In his biography we can find many reviews of the Hungarian editions from the second half of the 1910s, which were written soon after Békássy's death. These articles recognised the poet's talent, but they are rather full of sorrow for his early death. At the end of the '60s and '70s there were published some articles full of newly printed details of Békássy's manuscripts and letters. They are interesting and remarkable, however, these authors usually concentrated only on one of the features of Békássy's works.
In 1989 in the 'Hungarológiai Ismerettár' a remarkable study written by Zoltán Éder was published. This edition contains pieces of all kind of Békássy's work and a short biography, too, excluding the earlier published pieces in English.
In our present work we try to put the character of Ferenc Békássy and his work into the contemporary historical and literature trends existing in Hungary and England that time, and we try to reconstruct the image of a gifted young Hungarian educated in England and to find his personality behind the legend.
We would like to divide our work into two parts. First, we want to start with the poet's own story integrated into the history of his family and the history of our country (Békássy started his wonderful essay on Browning with the same structure). Secondly, we are going to give some nice examples of his work. We want to make the reader be familiar with Békássy's essays and poems; we would like to bring him close to the public by his ideas and thoughts in both languages.