Faludy died at his home on September 1 at the age of 95.
?I will now tell a story about a great storyteller. About György Faludy, who, if we paid enough attention, told us the story of the entire 20th Century,? Minster of Education and Culture István Hiller said, introducing his eulogy to Faludy.
?It?s strange, but I feel as though, now too, he should say something. Maybe a hellish and happy tale, a new story from his inexhaustible repertoire. Something amazing, wry or mischievous. Something Faludyesque.?
György Faludy was born in Budapest on September 22, 1910. He emigrated to France in 1938 to escape fascism in Hungary. When the Nazis invaded France, he went to Morocco, and in 1941 he left for the United States.
Faludy returned to Hungary after the war. In 1950 he was imprisoned, on false charges in the infamous Recsk labour camp. He was released when the camp was closed in 1953.
After the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, Faludy fled to London, then to Florence and Malta. In 1966, he emigrated to Canada, where he taught for many years at the University of Toronto. He became a Canadian citizen in 1976.
Faludy returned to Hungary after the change to a multi-party democracy in 1989. He was awarded the Hungarian Republic?s Order of the Flag in 1991, the Kossuth Prize in 1994, the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 and the Golden Quill award in 2000.
Among Faludy?s best known works are ?Autumn Dew?, ?Prison Poems?, ?200 Sonnets?, ?Erotic Poems? and ?Notes on the Margin of the Age?. In 1962, he published an autobiographical account entitled ?My Happy Days in Hell?, which was banned in Hungary until after the change of system, but was widely read in translation abroad.
In his eulogy, Hiller likened Faludy to a time traveler sharing his experiences. ?If György Faludy started a sentence ?Then Attila came to the table??, then you could bet it was Attila József he was speaking about. For him, it was natural. As a young poet he was friends with Babits and he sat with Karinthy and Kosztolányi at the Central (Coffee House).?
Hiller also compared Faludy to a man in a spaceship, who watched the world spin beneath him and time pass while remaining in his own closed world.
?His own intellect, affirmation of life and saturated humour defended him from the grim 20th century. From the terror of the Holocaust, the enslavement during the Recsk years and the solitude of emigration. With a lifted head and a quiet cheerfulness, he suffered persecution, pain and homesickness. And if he had to start again, as if he often did, he started again. Then, shuddering with the wisdom of the survivors, he wrote to us in his works of how captivating the world is.?
