Two of his poems are published here in several translations: one of them, "Peace, Dread", was written at the time when anti-Jewish legislation was introduced in Hungary and "Forced March" not long before his death in November 1944. The latter was among the poems in the notebook found in his coat pocket when his body was exhumed. Győző Ferencz, the author of a critical biography of Miklós Radnóti, has contributed an essay to this issue, in which he argues that although it is his last poems, written on the brink of death, that elevate Radnóti to the high rank he occupies in Hungarian poetry (being of Jewish origin, he was taken to labour service where he was murdered by a guard), these poems "were not the products of an unexpected, inexplicable burst of creativity. From his adolescence on, Radnóti deliberately built his life-work as a tightly woven web of themes and motifs". Yet what makes his poetry unique among Holocaust testimonies is that his viewpoint is not retrospective: he was productive during his ordeals; indeed, his last poem, in which he envisages his own death, was written only a few days before he was actually murdered. László Krasznahorkai established himself as one of the masters of contemporary Hungarian prose with his first novel, Satan Tango (1985). Ever since, he has written ten books. János Szegő analyses Krasznahorkai's oeuvre as a gradual widening of horizon: from the Hungarian periphery, the location of Satan Tango, to ever further away, aiming for ever greater universality. Szegő focuses on Krasznahorkai's 'Eastern novels', The Prisoner of Urga; From the North by a Hill, from the South by a Lake, from the West by Roads, from the East by a River; Destruction and Sorrow under Heaven; and his latest volume, which "brings together in counterpoint the two worlds, Eastern and Western", a collection of interrelated short stories, Seiobo Had Been Down Below. This issue also features a long excerpt from The Prisoner of Urga, in Tim Wilkinson's translation. Miklós Vajda, the editor emeritus of The Hungarian Quarterly, has contributed a review on George Szirtes's New and Collected Poems, published last year by Bloodaxe, as well as a bilingual edition of his poems published by Corvina, Budapest. "Szirtes is an English poet, but one with a difference", claims Vajda. The difference is his Hungarian background. He was eight in 1956 when the Hungarian revolution was crushed, and his parents fled to England. His parents chose full assimilation, and it was only after his first visit to Budapest in 1984 that he started to rediscover his roots: topics related to his Hungarian past are present in his poems written ever since, and he has also translated many Hungarian masterpieces. Szirtes has thus become both a Hungarian and an English poet. | 
