Pompa funebris

The very first edition of the collection of one of the most prominent contemporary Hungarian poets Szilárd Borbély (1964) won two prestigious literary prizes and enjoyed extraordinary critical acclaim. The poetic world of the collection, the organic part of which is an account of a real brutal event - a murder - that affected the author's closest relatives, is built on the formal binding and content variation of sequences, on sentence constructions, rhymes evoking medieval, baroque and revivalist reminiscences, on a new approach to semantic relations. In this way, he creates a revelatory, extraordinarily impressive poetics that pushes the boundaries of the philosophy of being. Through motifs from the circle of Hasidism, he draws a personally perceived Christology, and thus maps out possible paths of poetry after the experienced hell.

Czech edition