The Night of Akhenaton

Hungary’s Ágnes Nemes Nagy (1922-91) is one of Europe’s major modern poets. Her poems are clear and packed at once, monumental yet crystalline in their thought and organisation. The vast pressures of her nation’s troubled history find their equivalent in human feeling, voiced through the extraordinary compressed power and explosive formality of Nemes Nagy’s poetry. Her subjects include nature, myth and the vastnesses of geological time, but her manner is epic, tragic and epigrammatic. Co-editor of New Moon, the most important literary magazine in Hungary after the War, her own work was banned and the magazine closed in the 1950s, but both have had a lasting effect on later generations. Too distant, too unbending, too disdainful of popularity to be a popular writer, she was neverthless acclaimed as the most important Hungarian poet of the postwar period, and her influence has been as much a moral force (to do with integrity and intellectual passion) as a matter of range and