The American Library Association’s Banned Books week began on 25th September. This annual celebration of the ‘freedom to read’ raises awareness of attempts to remove particular books from schools, libraries, and other institutions, as well as official state censorship. The ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom compiles a database of ‘challenged books’ each year based on newspaper reports and information from the public – should you come across an attempted book suppression, you can report it online via the rather sinister Challenge Reporting Form…
Over here in Europe, this month also sees the centenary celebrations for one of Hungary’s most important twentieth-century poets, György Faludy (1910-2006). Faludy first became known for his translations and rewritings of Franςois Villon’s ballads in the 1930s, but the story of the publication of these and all his subsequent writing is bound up with a traumatic period in the history of central Europe. Faludy’s criticism of the totalitarian regimes in his native country resulted in multiple periods of exile and imprisonment during the 1940s and 1950s. In Hungary his books were burned by the ruling fascist Arrow Cross party in the 1940s, and pulped during the communist regime that followed. For many decades his work circulated in samizdat printings.
Faludy spent several years in the forced labour camp at Recsk, where he sustained the spirits of the other prisoners by giving lectures and readings, and composed poetry without any writing tools. After the revolution of October 1956, he settled in London, subsequently moving to Canada where he lectured at universities there and in the USA and Europe. He returned to Hungary in 1988, when at last his work began to be published openly. Even in 1985, the Preface to an English edition of the Selected Poems 1933-1980 stated ‘Another Hungarian periodical committed a kind of suicide last year when it published an essay pointing out how ludicrous it was that, although Faludy was beyond doubt Hungary’s greatest poet, none of his works could be printed or purchased in his native country’.
The works in Selected Poems 1933-1980, ed. and trans. Robin Skelton et al (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), make frequent allusions to books, conveying Faludy’s profound sense of the printed word as something simultaneously dangerous and vulnerable. With ‘In the Reading Room of the British Museum’ (London, 1967) Faludy celebrates the intellectual freedom of his regular Reading Room companions in a place ‘where factory whistles never sound, and money/ never talks – where silence hovers over worth’. These people, liberated by reading, will ‘on their deathbeds’ know ‘in silence what a billion men/will never know: that, living, they were alive’. In ‘Tibet’ (London, 1957) Faludy contrasts a peaceful domestic scene of reading and writing with the political events happening in the Far East: ‘Standing at monastery windows/ they are throwing out books’. These powerful images of destruction remind Faludy of his own country and its sufferings: ‘Wretched we who left Hungary,/ wretched those left behind’. The volume concludes with ‘Learn by heart this poem of mine’ (Toronto, 1980), in which he laments
[…]
books only last a little time
and this one will be borrowed, scarred,
burned by the Hungarian border guards,
lost by the library, broken-backed,
its paper dried up, crisped and cracked,
worm-eaten, crumbling into dust,
or slowly brown and self-combust
when climbing Fahrenheit has got
to 451, for that’s how hot
your town will be when it burns down.
Learn by heart this poem of mine.
The poem anticipates an apocalyptic destruction of humanity by itself, and the surprising final line – ‘You must forget this poem of mine’ – reminds us of the controversial issues of materiality that always surround the works of writers with views considered unsavoury by those in power. Sometimes even the human memory, Faludy suggests in this poem, is too dangerous a place for words to be preserved.