An apple is an apple 
August Kleinzahler
- Eternal Monday: New and Selected Poems by György Petri, translated by Clive Wilmer
György Petri (or Petri György, as he would have been called in Hungary) was born in Budapest in 1943 to a family with a Serbian and Jewish background. A year after Petri’s birth, in 1944, Hungary joined the Axis powers with disastrous result. The war impoverished the country and brought in its wake the Stalinist regime of Mátyás Rákosi, who was briefly replaced by Imre Nagy (the subject of a moving Petri poem), only for him to be followed the next year by the quisling János Kádár, who arrived back in Hungary in 1956 along with the Soviet tanks.
Subscribers to the print edition can log in to view the entire article. For information about subscribing to the London Review of Books click here. This article is available for purchase online. Buy this article.
August Kleinzahler’s latest collection is Sleeping It Off in Rapid City; he lives in San Francisco.
Other articles by this contributor:
Snarly Glitters · Roy Fisher
Too Bad about Mrs Ferri · wiseguys
Diary · The Doomsday Boys
print layout
tell a friend