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    Vase of Pompeii: A Play
    Vase of Pompeii: A Play
    Vase of Pompeii: A Play
    Ebook93 pages58 minutes

    Vase of Pompeii: A Play

    By Lajos Walder

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    On his sixtieth birthday, Monsieur Lebordin, a world-renowned scholar and antiquities expert, suffers a heart attack while alone in his one-room apartment in Paris, and is visited by the mysterious stranger Angela, who, as we find out in the course of the play, is not at all who she appears to be ... As Lebordin reminisces about his life—his loveless marriage and failure as a father, opportunities missed and roads not taken, the price of professional success—it is the Vase of Pompeii that moves center stage: brought to him years ago by a young and beautiful American millionairess to be authenticated, it embodies the gift of love he rejected and the life he did not live ... Set in 1930s France, "Vase of Pompeii" is a Symbolist masterpiece, social commentary (applying as much to our own time as to pre-war Europe) masquerading as bourgeois tragedy.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUpper West Side Philosophers, Inc.
    Release dateFeb 10, 2017
    ISBN9781935830405
    Vase of Pompeii: A Play
    Author

    Lajos Walder

    Arguably the most significant modern Hungarian poet, Lajos Walder was born in 1913 and died in 1945 in the Gunskirchen concentration camp, on the day it was liberated by the Allied forces. Exuberant and witty, poignant and severe, trenchant yet light-hearted, Lajos Walder's poems cut to the quick and stay with you. Reading them is like reliving an era long gone and, at the same time, learning to see our own world with new eyes. For Lajos Walder's message speaks to us as directly today as it did to his contemporaries almost a century ago: '... that apart from thieves and murderers // there are also human beings'. For the first time, Lajos Walder's complete extant poetry is made available in English, superbly translated by the poet's daughter Agnes Walder, who also provides a beautiful afterword, and with a passionate foreword by Scots fellow poet Don Paterson.

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      Book preview

      Vase of Pompeii - Lajos Walder

      Lajos Walder

      VASE OF POMPEII

      A Play

      Translated from the Hungarian

      by Agnes Walder

      Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc.
      New York • 2017

      Lajos Walder c.1943

      ***

      Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc. provides a publication venue for original philosophical thinking steeped in lived life, in line with our motto: philosophical living & lived philosophy.

      ***

      Published by Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc. / P. O. Box 250645,

      New York, NY 10025, USA

      www.westside-philosophers.com / www.yogaforthemind.us

      Originally published in Hungarian as Pompeji Váza in Pompeji (Budapest: Maecenas, 1990)

      Copyright © 2016 The Children of the late Dr Lajos Walder

      English Translation Copyright © 2016 Agnes Walder

      Translator’s Preface & Afterword Copyright © 2016 Agnes Walder

      Smashwords Edition

      978-1-935830-40-5

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. For all inquiries concerning permission to reuse material from any of our titles, contact the publisher in writing, or the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. (CCC), 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, USA (www.copyright.com).

      Designed by UWSP.

      Cover art based on Die Bucht von Neapel, C. H. Kniep, 1787.

      The colophon is a registered trademark of Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc.

      The book is also available in print:

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Names: Walder, Lajos, 1913-1945, author. | Walder, Agnes, translator.

      Title: Vase of Pompeii : a play / Lajos Walder ; translated from the

      Hungarian by Agnes Walder.

      Other titles: Pompeji Vaza. English

      Description: New York : Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc., 2017.

      Identifiers: LCCN 2016033486 (print) | LCCN 2016043358 (ebook) |

      ISBN 9781935830375 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781935830405 ()

      Subjects:  LCSH: Walder, Lajos, 1913-1945--Translations into English.

      Classification: LCC PH3351.W35 P613 2017 (print) | LCC PH3351.W35 (ebook) |

      DDC 894.511232--dc23

      LC record available at https: / / lccn.loc.gov / 2016033486

      ***

      CONTENTS

      Translator’s Preface
      Vase of Pompeii
      Translator’s Afterword
      Also available by Lajos Walder
      Available & forthcoming from UWSP
      From your children to your children’s children
      That’s why poets so often resort to writing plays.
      —Joseph Brodsky

      TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE

      "You must try to work always, under any circumstances."

      Dmitri Shostakovich

      Lajos Walder (1913-1945), my father—poet, playwright and attorney-at-law, whose Hungarian pseudonym was ‘Vándor’ (‘Wanderer’)—was well known as a poet in Budapest in the 1930s; yet he was never known as a playwright. He wrote his plays in the harshest of circumstances and in secret in the early 1940s while intermittently serving in a Jewish forced labor battalion. He wrote them without the slightest chance of having them staged or printed, since by then the works of Jewish artists could, by law, no longer be performed or published in Hungary. Today, we are left with the wistful thought that, in those terrible times, he may have at least lived with the hope that one day his plays might find a home in print and on stage. Indeed, throughout the years of organizing and translating my father’s plays, this thought has been my abiding inspiration.

      Not only were my father’s plays completely unknown in his native Hungary, but even as manuscripts they had no physical presence in that country for twenty-eight years. In 1961, my grandmother Ida Walder brought out my father’s unpublished manuscripts to our family, who had emigrated to Sydney, Australia, in 1957. In 1989, I returned to Hungary for the launch of the posthumous publication of a volume of my father’s selected poems, entitled A Poet Lived Here Amongst You. At that time, I took with me copies of the plays in order to show them to the late Géza Hegedüs, renowned literary critic and professor of drama at the University of Budapest. A year later, in 1990, two of my father’s three extant plays, Tyrtaeus and Vase of Pompeii, were published in their original Hungarian under the title Pompeji. His third play, Below Zero, was planned for a later publication in Hungary.

      In his foreword to Pompeji, Géza Hegedüs wrote: In aesthetic value and nuance, the plays differ from the grotesque tartness of Walder’s tragi-comic poems, but they are comparable to them in being the uniquely beautiful creations of an original mind. (My father’s complete poems in English were published by Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc. in 2015, under the title Become a Message: Poems. That volume also contains a detailed synopsis of my father’s brief life, which tragically ended on the day of his liberation from the Gunskirchen concentration camp on May 4, 1945.)

      In the early post-war years in Hungary, my mother tried repeatedly to have my father’s plays staged. She knew several directors and actors personally—many of them from my father’s erstwhile literary circle. One particularly close friend of my father’s was a highly gifted actor and director. Season after season, he promised my mother that he would see to it that the plays—starting with Tyrtaeus—were performed, but this never eventuated. Finally, when my mother tried to pin him down on a firm date, he said that he would have Tyrtaeus put on, on the condition that he himself be named as the playwright. Following this betrayal, my mother did not try to bring attention to the plays again, especially once communist censorship was in place, which made the eventual success of her endeavors highly unlikely.

      We don’t know the order in which the plays were written. My beloved mother, died in Sydney in 1973. In my conversations with her about my father’s work, the sequence in which the plays had been created somehow never came up. My uncle Imre Walder (the other person closest to my father and his literary legacy) was not present when my father composed the plays. The labor battalion my uncle had been assigned to was sent to the Russian front in early 1942, and by the time he returned to Hungary from Russian captivity, my father was no longer alive. Incidentally, the typewritten original of Vase of Pompeii bears a copyright stamp in Hungarian and in French. The

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