Victim of the Holocaust, the Lost Poet Of Dada, a selection of the work of
Lajos Walder is now available for the first time in English.
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. Portrait frontispiece, with original typescripts and manuscript
produced in facsimile. Hardcover with dust jacket. A$50.00
Melbourne: Macmillan, 2004. ISBN:1876832029. Med. 8vo. 160 pages
Lajos Walder 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lifetime: after 1938 the works of Jewish artists could not be published in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 practicing 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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