This is the address of our little place.
Our furniture may be old-fashioned,
But we have plenty of books to read,
We are in need of nothing. We are happy
That we are alive and learning.
To be, not to possess.

London, 1961
 

The great litter of humanity, whelped,
wipes away the past.
Nature bows down before her progeny,
like the broken mirrors of lakes.

Out of negligence they swat the fly
out of the future. Who cares?
Who really cares about culture
 as long as comfort prevails?

We clamour for more and more oil
as the cancer patient morphine,
we, tapeworms at the banquet table,

squinting fishheads in the driver's seat...
who will defend us from such corpses - you ask.
A thousand books, two hundred concerts.

Toronto, 1973
 

A wise Hassidic rabbi had this to say:
"How right it was of God to choose his dwell
In heaven, not on earth. For in this hell, 
Alas, his windows would be broken every day."

London, 1961
 

For Anna Karenina and Juliet Capulet

I arrived home with a copy of Tolstoy's novel
under my arm. "It's the Russian Gone with the wind,"
you quip, but I am bothered with your putdown.
Does time have to diminish absolutely everyone,
even some who can write rings around his rivals?

And yet... Vronsky is charmless, Anna is common;
how desirable is an all-encompassing heavenly love
when the loving couple cannot remain together
sans formal balls and ballroom masquerades
where an engraved invitation outranks the great passion?

Fortunately, though he hated Shekespeare intensely,
Tolstoy was unable to rewrite his plays.
Otherwise, in Act Three of Romeo and Juliet,
our Juliet would speak the following lines:

"The captain of Verona is displeased with us,
So shall your Juliet the bride of Paris be.
My father and the custom here will have it so.
And so to you, my Romeo, I say, Buzz off!

Philadelphia, 1969
 

We arrived by bus. Across the dirty road 
lay a log in the mud. It marked the new border
We joined the birchtrees in the light fog.
Would I laugh, or cry, or fear, for I had returned home?
My hands were clammy and shaking, my face was burning:
Does chepa pleasure await me or some furious fate?
A soldier in rags motioned us into the barracks.
We were in the front row. Behind a cheap desk
sat a Russian sergeant with a fat, pock-marked face. He acted as if we were not there, all thirty-six of us.
Before him lay a newspaper printed in Cyrillic.
He looked at it but did not read it.
Twenty minutes passed. I cleared my throat.
"Don't provoke him, Georg," someone cautioned.
At last the Russian swept the newspaper away
and looked at my wife. "A bourgeois, and beautiful, too!"
he exclaimed in a glee, in tolerably good Hungarian, 
amid the icy silence. I almost felt some compassion for him
as I shoved the two passports his way. They had been issued 
in Washington by the new Hungarian ambassador himself
in a little celebration that made us happy. That was two 
 months ago. 
The Russian sergeant's fat eyelids crooped over the pupils 
of both eyes as he slowly scrutinized the documents.
Then he threw the two passports into the drawer of the desk.
"I want them back!" I protested. He waved his hand airily:
"Patience, be patient. We want them for now. In Budapest 
you may request the - after your prison sentence."
"You are sending me to prison?" I joked. "I did not expect this.
Why not inform me of the charge against me."
He lifted his little finger, the way one speaks to a naughty boy,
"You go to jail because you were in Hitler's army."
"I served with the U.S. Army." I said and began to shake
with fury. "I never fought in the Nazi army."
"Americans? Nazis? It's all the same to us.
Now go," he said, and beckoned the next couple.

Hungary, 1946
 

Faludy became famous in Hungary in the mid-thirties, when he published his Villon translations. Soon it was found out, that there were only vague similarities between his translations, and the originals. However, his re-creation seemed to be more vivid and living, then Villon himself. Nevertheless, the discovery of his action created furore and envy amongst his fellow-poets. The translations of those envying have been forgotten long ago, while Faludy's Villon is still popular at the end of the century.
Faludy escaped from the Nazism to Paris before the Second World War. In 1942 arrived in New York, and in 1943 volunteered for and was enrolled in the American army. He fought against the Nazis in a tank unit. 
In 1946 he returned to Hungary, hoping with the naive faith of a poet, that the former allies - the Russians - brought a new and decent era for humanity. He had to realize that the Russians and communism are only in their names different from the Nazis. (See the poem: At the Hungarian border) He has been arrested and imprisoned simply for having been in France and America and for having served in a "hostile" army. He was imprisoned in Recsk, a communist lager, not much different from any Nazi lager. Here, however, the communists did not imprison Jews, but literates, physicians, lawyers, anyone who did not belong to the "working-class" before the war. (Anyone, who has not worked with his two hands, was considered as belonging to the "oppressing class, bourgeois" - as if the above mentioned would have not worked! The simple ownership of a house was outrageous wealth.) 
After the Hungarian Revolution against the Russians in 1956, as many bright-minded Hungarians, he escaped from Hungary. He lived in London, later in Toronto. The poems are from his book, published in 1983 in Canada: Learn this poem of mine by heart.
After 1989, when the Russians finally left our country, devastated by them for 45 years, Faludy moved home again. Today he lives in Budapest again. 
It is our best hope that we can live, work in our country free, and people like Faludy will stay.