A moving, posthumous collection of elegies and eclogues that meditate on nature, landscape, and history, by a great Hungarian poet.

Szilárd Borbély spent his childhood in a tiny impoverished village in  northeastern Hungary, where the archaic peasant world of Eastern Europe  coexisted with the collectivist ideology of a new Communist state. Close to the Soviet border and far from any metropolitan center, the village was a world apart: life was harsh, monotonous, and often brutal, and the Borbélys, outsiders and “class enemies,” were shunned. In a Bucolic Land, Borbély’s final, posthumously published book of poems, combines autobiography, ethnography, classical mythology, and pastoral idyll in a remarkable central poetic sequence about the starkly precarious and yet strangely numinous liminal zone of his youth. This is framed by elegies for a teacher in which  the poet meditates on the nature of language and speech and on the adequacy of words to speak of and for the dead. Ottilie Mulzet’s English translation conveys the full power of a writer of whom László Krasznahorkai has said, “He was a poet—a great poet—who shatters us.”

"Szilâard Borbâely's is one of the most searching and powerful poetic voices to emerge in the twenty-first century. In a Bucolic Land was Borbâely's final work, completed but left unpublished at the time of his premature death in 2014. At the heart of the book are poems in which Borbâely returns to his 1960s childhood in a tiny impoverished town in northeastern Hungary. Conditions were brutal, as the poems attest, even as, shifting between present and past, they are also invested with a strange shimmering sense of myth and eternity. The book opens and closes with two elegies for Borbâely's teacher Lajos Szuromi in which the poet meditates on the nature of language and speech and on the adequacy of words to speak of and for the dead. Ottilie Mulzet's English translation conveys the full power of a writer of whom Lâaszlâo Krasznahorkai has said, "He was a poet-a great poet-who shatters us.""--

“[Borbély’s] poetry is epoch-making.” —Péter Nádas

“Szilárd Borbély was one of the best and most original poets and novelists of his generation—and Ottilie Mulzet is a wonderful translator of his work.” —George Szirtes

“[Borbély] is considered one of the most important figures in contemporary Hungarian literature, having had an immense impact on the transformation of Hungarian poetry in the last decade, strongly influencing the conceptualization of poetry’s social role and linguistic-thematic possibilities. . . . Borbély’s poetry, prose, and essays try to bring the readers closer to the lives of those who cannot speak of their trauma or suffering. They can be uneducated and poor villagers, survivors of the Holocaust, women grieving after a miscarriage, or victims of terrible aggression. Through Borbély’s texts we readers become increasingly less cruel-hearted.” —László Bedecs, Asymptote