LAST POEMS: GYULA ILLYÉS IN TRANSLATION
LAST POEMS: GYULA ILLYÉS IN TRANSLATION

Summary/Abstract: For me Charon’s Ferry, Bruce Berlind’s beautiful translations of Gyula Illyés’ poetry, is also a remarkable selection of last poems. Why call them “last poems” or read them in that way? If last poems form a genre – and Harold Bloom suggests that they do – this does not require that the poems be the last that their authors may have written. I can write a last poem at any age. I can write many last poems over many years. A poet, Bloom says, begins to write last poems when “lastness” for the poet becomes an active “part of knowing,” when in the light of this event and its compelling imaginative impulse, “the the” (as Stevens calls it) changes meaning. “When was it one first heard of the truth? The the,” Stevens asks.

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