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Picture of Gyula Kodolányi

Gyula Kodolányi

GYULA KODOLÁNYI (Budapest, 1942) Editor-in-Chief of Hungarian Review, is the author of 17 collections of poetry, scholarly and literary essays and poetry translations. He taught English and American Literature at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest (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 US. He taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara (1984–1985) and at Emory University in Atlanta (2004– 2009), and read his poetry in English widely in the US. In 1987, he was a founding member of the Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF). In 1990– 1994, he served as Senior Foreign Policy Adviser to Prime Minister József Antall. In 1992–1996 he was the Vice President of the Hungária Televízió Foundation, which created the Duna Television, a cultural satellite channel. In 2000–2005 he was an Adviser to President Ferenc Mádl. In 2012, he received Hungary’s Middle Cross with the Star and in 2005 the President’s Medal of Honour for his public and literary achievements. With the journal Magyar Szemle, he received a Prima Prize in 2003. In 2015, he was Prima Primissima Prize winner in literature. He is a member of the Hungarian Academy of the Arts. In 2016, he received the Janus Pannonius Prize for poetry translation, and in 2020 the prestigious Kossuth Prize.

“SURVIVING WITH HONOUR” – NOTES ABOUT GÉZA PÁSKÁNDI

The figure of Géza Páskándi will always remain for me the one I remember from Budapest in early 1974, shortly after his expatriation from Romania. Forty-one years old then, he could have been, in appearance, an artist from anywhere in Western Europe, in his black leather jacket and his black

POWER AND ACTION – BETWEEN BETTER AND WORSE

Looking Back on the Regime Change of 1990 – from 1996 Keeping the third part of my Hungarian Review interview series on the governmental work of 1990 on the back burner, in this issue, I have proposed to print one of my unpublished talks from 1996. It is a short

MESSAGES FROM W. SH. – FOR THE 450TH ANNIVERSARY OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

English Translations by Tony Brinkley and the Author SUMMER’S LEASE (18) ÖRÖKLÉT-BÉRLET   Eternal, örök, season’s ticket, summer’s lease, nyár ajándéka, a scrap of paper with its clouds, their green-blue-browns. Életet hoz, gives life. Lines dance, fan out, wheat- sheaves of fire-works, a crack, an opening inside me. Bundles of numbed sentences are stirring. When I

ON GERMANY, HUNGARY, AND NATO

Karl Lamers (born 1951), Deputy Chairman (CDU–CSU) of the Defence Committee of the Bundestag since November 2006, and President of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly since November 2010, visited Budapest on 5 October. He met Hungarian Foreign Minister János Martonyi, and was the keynote speaker at the 20th anniversary celebration of

A NOTE TO HEAD TONY BRINKLEY’S GOMORRAH

I am reading and re-reading Tony Brinkley’s Gomorrah. A long poem, which remains mostly oblique and mysterious when we read it for the first time. Palpably concrete in its images and sensations, yet mysterious. Yet we do read on. The surface is fascinating, yet we feel with certainty that there is