Ferenc Juhász
Ferenc Juhász (1928–2015) was raised in Bia, a village near Budapest. After the Second World War he published his first poems and was hailed as a prodigy of Hungarian poetry. While book-length collections appeared in 1954, 1955 and 1956, Juhász’s reputation as a major 20th century poet rests on Struggle with The White Lamb (1964), which contains ‘The Boy Changed into a Stag Cries Out at the Gates of Morning’, called by W. H. Auden, a very different poet, one of the great poems of our time. Selections of Juhász’s work were published almost simultaneously in English in 1970 by Penguin and Oxford University Press. Juhász’s central ambition is to be a modern epic poet, to write books of the universe. The recurring experience moving his writing is a fascination and horror over the forms and processes of life on both microcosmic and macrocosmic levels, the cells and the stars, which he describes with unparalleled mastery. He has received several Hungarian and international prizes, among them the Kossuth Prize.
