Vándor Lajos
The complete plays
TARTALOM, PREFACE
Tartalom
Translator's Preface
Tyrtaeus: A Tragedy
Translator's Afterword to Tyrtaeus
Vase of Pompeii: A Play
Translator's Afterword to Vase of Pompeii
Below Zero: A Play
Translator's Afterword to Below Zero
Also available by Lajos Walder
Available & forthcoming from UWSP
Preface
Lajos Walder (1913-1945), my father-poet, playwright and attorney-at-law, whose Hungarian pseudonym was 'Vándor' ('Wanderer') - was well known as a poet in Budapest in the 1930s; yet he was never known as a playwright. He wrote his plays in the harshest of circumstances and in secret in the early 1940s while intermittently serving in a Jewish forced labor battalion. He wrote them without the slightest chance of having them staged or printed, since by then the works of Jewish artists could, by law, no longer be performed or published in Hungary. Today, we are left with the wistful thought that, in those terrible times, he may have at least lived with the hope that one day his plays might find a home in print and on stage. Indeed, throughout the years of organizing and translating my father's plays, this thought has been my abiding inspiration.
Not only were my father's plays completely unknown in his native Hungary, but even as manuscripts they had no physical presence in that country for twenty-eight years. In 1961, my grandmother Ida Walder brought out my father's unpublished manuscripts to our family, who had emigrated to Sydney, Australia, in 1957. In 1989, I returned to Hungary for the launch of the posthumous publication of a volume of my father's selected poems, entitled A Poet Lived Here Amongst You. At that time, I took with me copies of the plays in order to show them to the late Géza Hegedüs, renowned literary critic and professor of drama at the University of Budapest. A year later, in 1990, two of my father's three extant plays, Tyrtaeus and Vase of Pompeii, were published in their original Hungarian under the title Pompeji. His third play, Below Zero, was planned for a later publication in Hungary.
In his foreword to Pompeji, Géza Hegedüs wrote: "In aesthetic value and nuance, the plays differ from the grotesque tartness of Walder's tragi-comic poems, but they are comparable to them in being the uniquely beautiful creations of an original mind." (My father's complete poems in English were published by Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc. in 2015, under the title Become a Message: Poems. That volume also contains a detailed synopsis of my father's brief life, which tragically ended on the day of his liberation from the Gunskirchen concentration camp on May 4, 1945.)
In the early post-war years in Hungary, my mother tried repeatedly to have my father's plays staged. She knew several directors and actors personally-many of them from my father's erstwhile literary circle. One particularly close friend of my father's was a highly gifted actor and director. Season after season, he promised my mother that he would see to it that the plays-starting with Tyrtaeus -were performed, but this never eventuated. Finally, when my mother tried to pin him down on a firm date, he said that he would have Tyrtaeus put on, on the condition that he himself be named as the playwright. Following this betrayal, my mother did not try to bring attention to the plays again, especially once communist censorship was in place, which made the eventual success of her endeavors highly unlikely.
We don't know the order in which the plays were written. My beloved mother, died in Sydney in 1973. In my conversations with her about my father's work, the sequence in which the plays had been created somehow never came up. My uncle Imre Walder (the other person closest to my father and his literary legacy) was not present when my father composed the plays. The labor battalion my uncle had been assigned to was sent to the Russian front in early 1942, and by the time he returned to Hungary from Russian captivity, my father was no longer alive. Incidentally, the typewritten original of Vase of Pompeii bears a copyright stamp in Hungarian and in French. The date on the stamp is February 10, 1944. Nazi Germany invaded Hungary on 19 March 1944. Plans for the annihilation of the Hungarian Jews were already in place by then.
My father was a certified attorney, who had completed his articles just prior to the official institution of the Jewish laws, which barred Jews from practicing in the professions. Indeed, he made ample use of his knowledge of the law in all three of his plays.
From 1942 onward, we only have a handful of poems from my father. With the future so highly uncertain, and forced labor increasingly robbing him of time, he must have made the decision to give the plays priority. Under the circumstances, he was probably looking for a broader expression of his philosophical beliefs than poetry would have allowed him. He had been familiar with the works of Aldous Huxley, Louis Aragon and Louis-Ferdinand Céline, who had begun as poets and continued in prose; he loved the theater and was influenced by Oscar Wilde and the progressive George Bernard Shaw, as well as by German and French playwrights, such as Victorien Sardou; he was equally aware of the works of the Austrian poet and playwright Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Belgian dramatist Maurice Maeterlinck. Given the strong emphasis on Greek and Latin education in prewar Hungary, moreover, my father was widely conversant with classical Greek and Roman authors as well as the French classics, especially with the works of Jean Racine. His plays are densely packed with insights so pertinent that they seem universally valid even today.
His "was the most credible voice to express the times between the two world wars," Géza Hegedüs has written about my father's poetry. The same holds true for his plays, and in particular for Tyrtaeus. Now-well over seventy years after they were written-Tyrtaeus, Vase of Pompeii, and Below Zero are brand-new plays for the English stage.
In the long battle for recognition of my father's remarkable literary talent, I have often thought of Max Brod. Our stories are not at all parallel. But if Max Brod had heeded the wish of his best friend, Franz Kafka, to have all of his works destroyed after his death, world literature would be that much poorer. Similar thoughts have driven me regarding my father's legacy.