Seems to be a day to report deaths. When my mother was a young woman,in the 1930's she and her sister were huge fans of a romantic young poet in Hungary - Gyorgy Faludy....
When I eventually wound up in Toronto, I had the honor of becoming friends with the expatriate poet George Faludy! A number of his fellow prison inmates (poitical prisoners) had also wound up in Toronto. We spent many incredible nights filled with Hungarian conversation, poetry and wine with these remarkable men and women. George at that time was living with a devoted (male) partner. In his younger days he was THE poet of love in Hungary, with young women hanging on his every word (and other areas, I'm sure). He wrote famous love poems to his wife and other lovers (of both sexes, I believe). He wound up his life in Hungary with a gorgeous (Playboy gorgeous) young wife -- I mean YOUNG. A great poet, a larger than life person. He died in Budapest on Saturday. His life was the stuff of drama - many dramas.
An Obit (excerpted):
Hungarian poet Gyorgy Faludy dies aged 95
By Sandor Peto
BUDAPEST (Reuters) - Hungarian poet Gyorgy Faludy, a legend of resistance to the rise of Nazism and Communism, died at the age of 95 at his home in Budapest, national news agency MTI said on Saturday.
The poet, known to many in the West as George Faludy, played a role in Hungary's 1956 anti-communist uprising and would have been a key speaker at a conference to celebrate its 50th anniversary later this month.
Faludy won international fame with his interpretation of Francois Villon ballads in the 1930s and his autobiographical novel "My Happy Days in Hell" in the 1960s, which related his escape from fascist Hungary and his return, and imprisonment, in a country under communist rule.
He fled Hungary twice: first in 1938, when as a Jew he was threatened by the growing power of Nazism, and the second time after Soviet tanks crushed the 1956 uprising.
Like fellow-Hungarian anti-communist writer Arthur Koestler, Faludy wandered the world, living in France, Algeria, the United States, the United Kingdom and Italy.
Toronto, where the poet, a former nominee for the Nobel prize for literature, lived for over 20 years, will inaugurate a George Faludy Park near the poet's former home on October 3.
Faludy returned to Hungary the second time at the end of the 1980s, following the collapse of communism in central Europe.
He lived in central Budapest with third wife Fanny Faludy-Kovacs, more than 60 years his junior, until his death on Friday.
His face framed by long grey hair often appeared on Hungarian television screens as a symbol of a country leaving behind a century of dictatorships and entering a new era as a European Union member.
"My aunt cut her neck with a razor blade. The rest died in the war in gas chambers. My sister floats upon the icy Danube," he wrote in one of his poems about the horrors of the 1940s.
After returning to Hungary following the Second World War, he was sent by the country's new communist government to a concentration camp in Recsk in 1949 for three years.
In the camp where many people were killed and tortured, Faludy organised literature courses to keep up the spirits of the prisoners.
In "My Happy Days in Hell", he recounts writing a poem in blood on toilet paper with a straw pulled out from a broom.
"He lived everywhere, met everybody and was ousted from everywhere," the invitation for the celebrations of Faludy's 95th birthday last year said, MTI reported.
