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In Pilinszky I both see and do not see the raw world of our production. Unimaginable pain always emerges from his poems and although In our production those eruptive confessions are not as nuanced as in Piiinszky's poetry, they are very human and in this case it perhaps carries more weight, more value because theatre strives to be alive, not a recitation..

JANOS PILINSZKY was born in 1921 in Budapest to a family of intellectuals; his father had two diplomas, that of an engineer and that of a lawyer. He completed a prestigious secondary school, enrolled law, then proceeded to read Hungarian and Italian languages and literature and the history of art. Pilinszky published his first poems in 1938-1939. In November 1944 he was mobilized, his unit retreated westward and as of February 1945 he experienced directly the horrendous world of concentration camps which determined his whole later life and his poetry. His first collected poems Trapeze and Bars were published in 1946 and won him the prestigious Baumgarten Award the next year. Pilinszky spent several months of 1947-58 in Italy on a grant, in 1949 he was banned from publishing. He writes fairy tales in verse. For a short while in 1956 he was the language editor in a publishing house and in 1957 began to cooperate with the Catholic weekly Uj Ember (The New Man) and writes essays, religious and philosophical reflections and literary, theatre and film reviews mostly for this weekly. In mid-1960s he was allowed to travel again (Poland, Switzerland, Belgium, Novi Sad, Vienna, London, Rome) but he stayed in Paris most of the time, yet finding the means to visit the USA. In 1975 his sister committed suicide and he stopped writing poetry then. In early 1978 he met Ingrid Ficheux in Paris and married her in August of that year. After the second cardiac infarction he died at the age of sixty. Piiinszky's published books of poetry are Trapeze and Bars (1946); On the Third Day (1959); Metropolitan icons (1970); Splinters (1972); Space and Form (1975) and Crater (1976).The novel Conversations with Sheryl Sutton was published in 1977.

More about Kosztolànyi Dezsö Theatre on p. 105-106.

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