There is, I think, a general recognition in Hungary that the twentieth century has produced more than its share of major writers, most of them-until fairly recently-poets. It is too early to pick over the bones of the post-war period but it is already clear that Sándor Weöres, Ferenc Juhász, János Pilinszky, Ágnes Nemes Nagy, István Vas and Dezső Tandori are figures of international significance, their success beyond Hungary being to a great extent determined by the quality, quantity and timing of the translations of their work into other languages, above all English. Of living contemporaries, György Petri and Ottó Orbán are clearly of com-parable stature (I would add Zsuzsa Rakovszky's name to theirs) and are part of this elite group whose work has already transcended national boundaries. And what a heterogeneous group they are, resembling each other in little but ambition. Their sheer variety indicates the poetic health of the epoch. Only a lush and exciting environment can support such diverse largescale life forms and it would need a deep literary, historical, linguistic and sociological enquiry to describe the apparently unlikely conditions that produced it. The differences between the poets are as fascinating and as complex as their achievements and are not easily summed up.

Various crude attempts at classification might however be made. For instance, on the one hand, there are copious producers who spread their wings wide like Weöres, Juhász, Vas and Tandori, and on the other, intense mythmakers who stand still and build high: Pilinszky and Nemes Nagy. Petri, for all his social satire, belongs with the latter group, Orbán with the former.

How does Orbán differ from the others in his group? Weöres (of whom Orbán has written) is one of the great poets not just of this but any century. His natural terrain is the cosmos: he moves from prehistory to the present, from politics to myth, from the child's nursery to the mystic's visionary experience. Juhász's terrain is the natural world and the legends associated with it. Vas's work comprises anything that is human: it involves the world of social and intimate history. Tandori is a remarkable formal experimenter and pusher of boundaries.

Orbán's enterprise lies elsewhere. He is closer perhaps to Vas than to the others, but remains quite distinct from him.

He has instinctively positioned himself as a chronicler of his life and times, an observer who registers the impact of his observations on his own passions and humours. He projects himself into the colloquial, joky, dangerous post-war world and turns its energies back on itself. In a poem not included in the current collection he refers to the shema, that definition of monotheism God sticks under the tongue of his people, and ends the poem with this typical piece of defiance:

... under my tongue glows my father's tatty
inscription
while I spit the millennium in small balls of
paper back at the world.

"The Golem"
(translated by George Szirtes)

Elsewhere he affirms his Taurean nature. To continue citing from a previous book, The Blood of the Walsungs, he is the bull who has to "suffer all these fancy diseases". He lives by sensations not abstractions. He is impulsive and heavy and dazzled. His demon is essentially moral but because it lives in an immoral world it is horrified, amused and infuriated, and it registers these emotions in bull-like rushes of imagery. Orbán has little of the gentleness of one of his major mentors, Allen Ginsberg. One cannot imagine Orbán as a Buddhist with jingling bells. He resembles Lowell in his sense of the century's hurt, but has none of Lowell's patrician hauteur. Yet Ginsberg and Lowell are clearly recognizable elements in his own compendious, idiosyncratic voice.

It is not surprising then that the subject of America should loom large in his work. He has often been to the United States as a visiting poet or professor, and has recorded it on his own epic map of madness, humour, suffering and injustice.

Bruce Berlind's introduction to The Journey of Barbarus introduces Orbán to his American readers with elements of biography and social history, tracing the American strands in his work, relating him particularly to Lowell and Ginsberg, but pointing out the debts to Pilinszky too ("I stole from Ginsberg and Pilinszky" Orbán himself wrote in his poem "Individualism"), thereby highlighting the antitheses contained in Orbán's voice, for Pilinszky and Ginsberg are not easily reconciled in either their technique or their sensibility. He quotes the Hungarian critic Balázs Lengyel, who talks about Orbán's "dual, ambivalent way of seeing... the constant and enlivening of opposites... sublime and grotesque". This sense of oppositions, of the dramatic interplay between dark and light, of old and new and big and small has equipped Orbán particularly well to deal with his experiences of America, the land of contrasts.

Size first. "A big country; I feel the functioning of the huge body, the lungs enlarging from Canada to Mexico", Orbán writes of America in "The Dazzling Disparity of Size" and no doubt that size, or consciousness of size, matters both to visitors and residents. (Berlind's reference, in his introduction, to Hungary as "a country even smaller than England", is a perfect and, I assume, unconscious, example of American gigantism.) Opposite this are ranged

...clouds, countries, wars
and the negligible small black dots
the human explosive
from "To Be Rich"

Orbán's body metaphor is important because the notion of health underlies his vision-particularly the health of those small, explosive black dots-ordinary people-to whom he owes his strongest allegiance. The "salesman-toreador" in "Lorca's New York" has "paper bowels". The traffic jam in "The Angel of Traffic" is the cause of "the fevered breath of the ocean" being squeezed from "the desert's lungs". "Empires at close range are like living skin" he tells us in "The Landscape Unfolding Before Us". The human form is writ large across the world in all its organic, pockmarked fury.

The America that emerges out of Orbán's "barbaric" journey is an amalgam of pop-art, poster, caption and snatches of intense transferred observation: candid pho-tographs with collaged juxtapositions. This is the journey Barbarus makes. In "What Became of the Sixties" he records how:

a black boy practices karate on the green grass
the imaginary jawbone breaks
COME TO JESUS FOR HE IS THE KING

The observed detail opens on an image extended from it, then snaps into the capitalized (and therefore sloganized) call. The three are presented as a natural progression: the real-the poster-the caption, the whole triad with a Robert Rauschenberg or James Rosenquist largeness and cumulative power. In fact the whole American experience is punctuated by such capitalized cries, like enormous roadside billboards: THE POET IN THE CAGE ("Canto"); TRAVEL ON FOOT TO THE HEART OF THE WORLD ("Sunday in a Small American Town"); WOULD YOU CARE FOR A DRINK SIR ("To Be Rich"); YOUR PLACE OR MINE... KEEP YOUR EYES OPEN, POP... EXIT SIXTY-FIVE KEEP RIGHT ("The Four-wheeled Man") and so on, throughout most of the book. The effect is to amplify and equalize. It is like being at a party where everyone is shouting, but some of the voices are not those of people but of institutions, signs, collections of folk wisdom or commercial organizations. The fact that these voices can be mixed and brought to equal prominence suggests the synthesis of them all into a single myth. A large country gets large letters, among other things.

With largeness comes heroism. America is a place of large deeds. Road building, for instance: "Concrete concrete concrete concrete to the horizon" ("The Gray-haired Swashbuckler"); or flight": I saw the dawn plane / with red and green lights flashing lurch through the void towards Denver" ("Mickey's Birthday"). And as for people, their energies seem boundless, they "spout off, screw, squabble, harum-scarum / and we still haven't mentioned the rowdy minorities" ("The End of Adventures").

The immensities are there to be overcome but at an almost apocalyptic price. "The End of Adventures", a poem dealing with the AIDS epidemic, offers us the plague; "Snow" a "no more bloodthirsty killer than the other cheek of banality"; in fact the whole of America produces a poem, "more than poetry / it's a planet-sized risk in itself".

But none of this is specific to Orbán: it is part of the myth of America, a myth aided and abetted by America itself. Orbán's socialist, humanist perspective regards the conservative elements of the American psyche with horror and foreboding, but that is scarcely surprising. What makes the poems remarkable is his grasp of extremes and his ability to internalize these in images of volcanic energy. The images transcend truism by virtue of the intensity of their juxtapositions. Pity and irony appear in high relief, but they proceed as much from the poet as from the world: it is, we realize, a case of the topography of the soul matching the topography of the subject.

Berlind's translations capture Orbán's rhythmical and colloquial structures with considerable skill. I have already quoted a number of passages which demonstrate this, but the bounce and sensuality transcend local effects. The local effects are useful microcosms of course:

I take a long walk at night on the west side of
Central Park
and hear the spasmodic dry wheezing of the
great lecher
like a spearshaft combusting his hard lovers
in his red-hot lap,
since they don't know how to teach him
what he cannot know,
the showery, happy satisfaction that brings
on dreamless sleep.

"In New York Again after Ten Years"

This slightly softens the orchestrated attack of the original last line ("az álom- talan alvást hozó, zuhatagos, boldog kielégülést") but is very effective within its own linguistic dynamic. Orbán's Hungarian has few points of rest: Berlind's American-English requires more to bring out the sheer pitch of the verse. It naturalizes the Hungarian so the American reader hardly perceives the voice as foreign.

Homer stumbles up the platform
and winking at the gods with his blind eye says
I DONE SUNG THIS FIRST OFF IN KAINTUCKY

"Old Fiddlers' Picnic"

The sheer conceit, a splendid example of the ambivalence Lengyel talks about, of the blue grass fiddler as blind Homer, arises as discovery not calculation. The fiddler is heroic, naive and mythopoeic at once: he is and is not Homer. His music has more in common with "the wind that jogs on at a slow lope over the endless cornfields" than with high art and the "finicky musicologist" who switches such music off when he hears it on the radio.

"Tradition like ancient monuments leaves me cold" Orbán says in "Canto" the first poem in the book. Barbarus, the traveller, is a self-declared bumpkin ("The Journey of Barbarus") who, in "Under the Thundering Ceiling" teaches "the complex character of barbarians to simple-minded Romans". What Barbarus has to teach the Romans is, in effect, tradition, but it is the tradition of vanished empires and bloody trails in the snow.

The social commentator in Orbán knows very well that the poems about America are as much about the old world as the new. The dazzling disparity in size is the given condition of life: the gigantism of geography is more than matched by the gigantism of history. Isolating the American poems tends to conceal this a little. After all, the visiting Barbarus hasn't come from a liberal, humane democracy into an immense imperial power prepared for his horror and delectation. He is a visitor from another imperium and pretty well wise in its ways. He is, at heart, a Budapest poet but he reads Budapest into the world and the world into Budapest; into the specific historical moment of Budapest that he knows and feels deeply. In Orbán's oeuvre the American poems move in and out of his other work with ease, without any dazzling disparity in size. The danger of isolating these poems is that an element of tourism-that mixture of wonder, contempt, fear and flattery-hovers a little more spectrally about the book than about Orbán himself. But this is only a very faint spectre and the sheer energy of the work drives such spectres away with its enormous gusts of imagery.

The fact is that Orbán is a remarkable poet and Berlind's American-English versions are substantial confirmations of that. As I myself found when translating him, he is not difficult to translate. You just have to stand in some appropriate place and you feel him blowing all around you.