A writer, poet and translator of literature and philosophy, Dezső Tandori was born in Budapest on 8 December 1938. He graduated in Hungarian and German Language and Literature from the Loránd Eötvös University in Budapest in 1962. After graduation he worked as a teacher and lecturer. He has been freelance since 1971. Besides writing and translating, he has created drawings, picture-poems and graphics.
He received the Graves Prize in 1972, the Sándor Weöres Prize in 1990 and the Kossuth Prize in 1998.

N.A.

We stepped in - the apartment didn't even tick-tock.*
*(or any other simile with similar meaning. The auth.)
Its broken axis - you, lay there
covered by a single sheet.
Your Noxyron pills, your tranquilizers
rolled all over the wreckage.

The sadness of the mere verb "to be"

I would have liked it if it was that way.
It wasn't that way.
I asked: be that way.
So it became that way.

Stairs neither up, nor down

I do not wish for anything unattainable:
I do not wish anything attainable.
I wish th*t.
- -- -- -- -- --
*

We always have to
*ight for something, so we wouldn't be
*dent for something.

The same thing reveals and covers

What would start
without it, from somewhere!

Or is there room for
the missing and the available?
Is it necessary at all
to make this distinction? 

"She only stared at my shadow,
she didn't see me smiling:
she stared only at me,
she didn't see"

Translated by Gábor Gyukics and Michael Castro

Dezső Tandori: A portrait on HLO