The Song of the Cosmos – Attila József Selected Poems (Shearsman Books, 2026)
April 24 | 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm
Book Launch and Conversation with Editor and Translator Ágnes Lehóczky and Adam Piette
The translations by Piette and Lehóczky form a five-year-long project with an ambition to translate a significant selection of the poems of the modernist, socialist, working-class Hungarian poet, Attila József (1905-1937). József lived a poverty-stricken, passionate, and unstable life as a wanderer, a bohemian, a poet, a thinker, a non-conformist, a hobo, and a lover till his untimely death by suicide, struck by a train, in Balatonszárszó on Lake Balaton, aged only 32. His poetry is surrealist, existentialist, Villonesque, tough-minded, quasi anarchist, deeply drenched in Hungarian folklore and the folk song, passionate, lyrical, elegiac, marked by his solitary wandering, his keen observation of the lives of the people, by his psychoanalytically inflected gaze into the unconscious, into the mind and body of lovers, his philosophical focus on dialectic and social injustice.
The lyrics, free verse and formal, in an astonishing number of experimental forms, range from the metaphysical to the memoir, have filiations to French medieval, post-symbolist and surrealist poetry, fuse Nietzsche, Marx, Hegel and Freud in daring raids on the inarticulate, sing with haunting vernacular and ancient beauty and rise to extraordinary heights and flights of the imagination, yet are always grounded in the real, in the concrete particulars of the metropolis, the dark streets of the underclasses of this world.
This bilingual volume presents a chronological selection of József’s poetry, featuring both English translations and the original Hungarian texts. With introductions and afterwords by Ágnes Lehóczky, George Szirtes, György Tverdota, Aranka Kemény and Adam Piette, the book aims to recreate ‘The Song of the Cosmos’, an unpublished collection József envisioned in the early 1920s. ‘Cosmos’ here isn’t the physical universe but rather the soul expanded to cosmic proportions, a ‘universe imbued with a political subject’. The volume incorporates a faithful and playful reconstruction of the original graphic design, conceived by József’s artist friend György Békeffi in the 1920s.
Ágnes Lehóczky
Ágnes Lehóczky’s poetry collections published in the UK are Budapest to Babel (Egg Box, 2008), Rememberer (Egg Box, 2012), Carillonneur (Shearsman, 2014), Swimming Pool (Shearsman, 2017), Lathe Biosas, or on Dreams & Lies (Crater Press, 2023) and Apropos Paradise Square (Pamenar Press, 2025). She also has three full poetry collections in Hungarian published in Budapest: Ikszedik stáció (Universitas, 2000), Medalion (Universitas, 2002) and Palimpszeszt (Magyar Napló, 2015).
She is the author of the academic monograph Poetry, the Geometry of Living Substance – comprising four essays on the poetry of Ágnes Nemes Nagy (2011). Her pamphlet Pool Epitaphs and Other Love Letters was published by Boiler House Press (2017). She co-edited major international anthologies: the Sheffield Anthology (Smith/Doorstop, 2012) with Adam Piette, The World Speaking Back to Denise Riley (Boiler House, 2018) with Zoë Skoulding, Wretched Strangers (Boiler House, 2018) with J. T. Welsch and most recently the ‘Monk Collective’ with Adam Piette (Blackbox Manifold, 2023). Fission of Being – Endnotes on Earthbound was commissioned by The Roberts Institute of Art, London in 2021. She is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Director of the Centre for Poetry and Poetics at the University of Sheffield. Lehóczky edited The Song of the Cosmos – Attila József Selected Poems (Shearsman Books, 2026) which she co-translated with Adam Piette.
Adam Piette
Adam Piette is Professor of Modern Literature at Sheffield. He is the co-editor of the international contemporary poetry journal Blackbox Manifold with Alex Houen. He is author of Remembering and the Sound of Words: Mallarmé, Proust, Joyce, Beckett; Imagination at War: British Fiction and Poetry, 1939-1945, and The Literary Cold War, 1945 to Vietnam. He edited the special issue of Translation and Literature on “Modernism and Translation”, The Salt Companion to Peter Robinson with Katy Price (2007) and The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century British and American War Literature with Mark Rawlinson (2012). His poetry collections are: nights as dreaming (Constitutional Information / earthbound press), CCCLXV with Crater Press (October 2025), and Lies Blurring Here with Broken Sleep (2026). He is the co-translator, with Ágnes Lehóczky, of The Song of the Cosmos: Selected Poems of Attila József (Shearsman Books, 2026). He is currently co-editing an edition of Australian poet Catherine Vidler’s work with Amelia Dale and A.J. Carruthers for Puncher & Wattman.
