With our present edition, we celebrate T. S. Eliot's hundred-year-old, eternally youthful poem, which is also considered one of the milestones of European literature in the twentieth century. A large-scale apocalyptic poem, mainly James Joyce's Ulysses
comparable to his novel. A library's worth of literature and so many translations have tried to faithfully understand and follow the author's intention. There are also several complete and fragmentary versions in Hungarian, among others by Gábor Devecseri, Sándor Weöres, István Vas and Mátyás Dunajcsik.
"Folktales with a desire to fight the test, and I started the work with fear or rather dread, and I consider the end result more like a version than a translation, during which I tried to understand and flow through the text with my own poetic and intellectual possibilities, striving for accuracy to individualize and explain ...
When the director of the Europa Publishing House called me to ask if I would be interested in translating this cycle, because then they would buy the rights, I felt that I had received the greatest prize that a poet could receive. He hung a huge block of marble around my neck. I tried to straighten up with this weight. That's how it worked."
John Hay