György Somlyó was born in Balatonboglár on November 28, 1920. His father was the poet Zoltán Somlyó, but, until the age of ten, he was raised by his mother Margit Boglár?s parents. In 1930, he moved to Budapest and attended the Bolyai Secondary School in Budapest?s district V.
His first poem, written for Attila József?s death, was published in 1938 and his first volume of poetry entitled ?Against the Era? came out a year later. His first volume of translations ?Scottish Ballads? was published in 1943.
He was subjected to forced labour for several periods between 1941 and 1944.
Somlyó attended the Péter Pázmány University in 1940-43 and 1945-46 but did not graduate. He then studied philosophy, literature and folklore at the Sorbonne in Paris from 1946 to 1948.
After returning from Paris, he worked for the National Theatre as script editor in 1948-49. Afterward he became head of the readers? department at the Hunnia Film Factory in 1949-50. In 1950?53 he was editor of the poetry column at the literary journal Irodalmi Újság. He was awarded the first Attila József Prize in 1951. He received the prize again in 1954 and 1966. Between 1954 and 1955 he was head of department at Hungarian Radio. In 1957, he had a son, Bálint.
In 1962, he received a scholarship from the Károlyi foundation to spend a month in Vance. He became the secretary of the poetry department at the Hungarian Writers? Association in 1965 and attended the poetry biennale in Knokke-le-zoute. In the same year, his first volume of poetry in French was published by Seghers in Paris under the title ?Souvenir du Présent?. He organised international poetry festivals in Budapest in 1966 and 1970. He founded the multilingual magazine ?Arion? in 1966 and remained editor-in-chief until 1987.
His second volume of poetry in French was published in 1974, entitled ?Contrefables?. In 1977, he became member of the editorial team for the Parisian literary magazine ?Poésie? and in 1978, he was elected member of the Mallarmé Academy in Paris. Somlyó was a guest at the International Writing Programme at Iowa University in the USA in September-December 1981 and was made Honorary Fellow of Writing.
He was awarded the Officier dans l?Ordre des Arts et Lettres in May 1984 and was chair at the international poetry biennale in Liége in September. In 1986, he spent six months in Paris with the assistance of a grant from the French government. It was here his third volume of poetry in French, entitled ?Que cela?, was published.
He received the Tibor Déri Award and the Forintos Prize for translation in 1987. Somlyó retired in 1988, but became a founding member of the Széchenyi Library and Art Academy in 1992. He was awarded the Lajos Kassák Prize in 1992, the Ady Memorial Prize in 1994 and the Gyula Illyés Prize in 1994. The Chilean government granted him the Gabriela Mistral Memorial Prize in 1996, and in the following year he received Hungary?s highest award for artists, the Kossuth Prize. Somlyó also received the Jelenkor Publishing House?s Book Prize in 2000, the Milán Füst Award in 2001 and the Pablo Neruda memorial plaque in 2004.
His selected poems in 2000 were published with the following introduction:
?To quote the words of a younger fellow poet, László Bárdos, ?Somlyó is the apostle of modernity, of Rimbaud?s theory, ?to be modern, throughout.?? His oeuvre is almost completely characterised by the artistry of form he ?inherited? from the poets of the Nyugat, but which he, in fact, made convenient for his needs through a set of translations (e.g., the Paul Valéry translations). He especially delights in the sonnet and the antique Greek forms which he only leaves for the sake of the few prose poem volumes, such as ?A mesék könyve? (The Book of Tales). Among the Hungarian poets, he found his masters in Lőrinc Szabó, Milán Füst and Lajos Kassák, in the more distant past, in János Arany. After World War II, he came close to the poets of the Újhold, then, following brief enthusiasm for the Stalinist system and the subsequent crisis, by the end of the 1950s he found his mature voice, a poetry of constant inner contemplation and playful variety.?
Somlyó belongs to the modern stream of Hungarian and world literature. His friend and critic, Béla G. Németh writes, ?we hardly have another contemporary poet whose books are so full of allusion, motivating references and mentioning of names as are his: from the Chinese to the Greek and Latin classics, from the Middle Ages to the present, and not just from the poetry of the great western languages, however frequent they might be, but from the Greek Kavafy to the Russians.?
Some of his most notable translations into Hungarian include works by William Blake, William Wordsworth, Paul Valéry and Emily Dickinson.
To read Somlyó?s poetry in English, visit http://www.hungarianquarterly.com/no151/050.html
For further information on Somlyó?s work, visit http://www.hunlit.hu/somlyogyorgy,en
Source: Hungarian Press Agency (MTI), Digital Literary Academy (DIA), Hungarian Book Foundation (HUNLIT)
