We, the Twenty-five Letters of the Alphabet

Download or read book We, the Twenty-five Letters of the Alphabet written by and published by Macmillan Education AU. This book was released on 2004 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Hungarian 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-published 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 bourgeois I am a stinking proletarian; to the petit-bourgeoisie I am an evil anarchist and to the anarchists I am a cowardly petit-bourgeoisie. 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 left 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 Da-da movement that after 1916 swept through the art and literary circles of pre-war Europe. The poems, translated by his daughter Agnes Walder, now resident in Sydney, are for the first time published in English.