New Left Review I/37, May-June 1966

Nicolas Krasso

Attila Jozsef

Readers will remember that in nlr 24 we published translations of two poems by the Hungarian poet Attila József, and provided there a short account of his life. We now present another poem, ‘Consciousness’. It was first published in 1934, one year after József was expelled from the illegal Communist Party of Hungary for his opposition to the left-wing sectarianism of the Party’s policy in the year of the triumph of Nazism. By the time he came to write this poem he was unbearably isolated in a country which was politically more and more dominated by Fascism, and which was becoming intellectually more and more parochial. Three years later, in 1937, he committed suicide; but at the moment of writing ‘Consciousness’ he was making a tremendous effort to concentrate his emotional and intellectual powers on finding a modus vivendi in a situation that was to him completely absurd.

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