Janos Pilinszky: Passio
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János Pilinszky (1921-81) is one of the great European poets of an extraordinary generation: that of Paul Celan, Zbigniew Herbert and Yves Bonnefoy. Like them he grew up to a world physically and morally devastated by the Second World War and the Holocaust. Clive Wilmer translates from Hungarian in collaboration with George Gömöri, whom he first met in 1971. A Hungarian poet himself, George Gömöri belongs to the generation that felt Pilinszky’s influence.
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János Pilinszky (1921-81) is one of the great European poets of an extraordinary generation: that of Paul Celan, Zbigniew Herbert and Yves Bonnefoy. Like them he grew up to a world physically and morally devastated by the Second World War and the Holocaust.
Ted Hughes and János Csokits translated Pilinszky’s work. Hughes described his achievements and stature thus: ‘His ‘greatness’ … is not a greatness of imaginative and linguistic abundance. It has more to do with some form of spiritual distinction. The weight and unusual temper of his imagination and language derive from this.’
Clive Wilmer translates from Hungarian in collaboration with George Gömöri, whom he first met in 1971. A Hungarian poet himself, George Gömöri belongs to the generation that felt Pilinszky’s influence. Over the past forty years Gömöri and Wilmer have translated work by more than twenty poets, and introduced many British readers to the poems of Miklós Radnóti and György Petri.
Many of the poems here are taken from his second book, Harmadnapon, published in 1959.
Van Gogh’s Prayer
A battle lost in the cornfields
and in the sky a victory.
Birds, the sun and birds again.
By night, what will be left of me?
By night, only a row of lamps,
a wall of yellow clay that shines,
and down the garden, through the trees,
like candles in a row, the panes;
there I dwelt once and dwell no longer –
I can’t live where I once lived, though
the roof there used to cover me.
Lord, you covered me long ago.
Published: 1 November 2012
ISBN: 978 1 905208 15 9
Pages: 28
Praise for Clive Wilmer and George Gömöri
“Radnóti has emerged as the major poetic voice to record the civilian experience of World War II in occupied Europe. He is one of the very greatest poets of the twentieth century, and Clive Wilmer and George Gömöri’s versions are by far the best that exist in English.”
Dick Davis on Radnóti’s Forced March
“Petri has been fortunate in having Wilmer and Gömöri as translators, and we are even more fortunate in having his poetry in English. Very little Hungarian poetry has … been as convincingly translated as the two Petri collections Eternal Monday and Night Song of the Personal Shadow.”
August Kleinzahler on Petri’s Eternal Monday
Clive Wilmer (1945-2025) was a poet and scholar best known for his advocacy of the work of the Victorian artist and critic John Ruskin and of the poet Thom Gunn. He taught for 25 years at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where in 2012 he was made an emeritus fellow in English literature.
Wilmer began publishing poetry in the early 1970s, his first book appearing in 1977. Worple Press published four collections: The Falls (2000), Stigmata (2005), Urban Pastorals (2014) and Passio (2011), his translations of poems by János Pilinszky. His New and Collected Poems (2012) are published by Carcanet. Wilmer’s final book, Architecture & Other Poems, will be published by Worple Press in 2025.
An occasional broadcaster, Wilmer fronted BBC Radio 3’s ‘Poet of the Month’ programmes in the early 1990s and his interviews are published as Poets Talking (Carcanet, 1994).
An obituary by Peter Carpenter is published in the Guardian (8 April 2025).
