Kabdebo, Thomas: Attila József. Can you take on this awesome life? (Budapest, 1997)
1. Ceaseless Childhood
Contemporary psychiatry refers even further back that Freud and his contemporaries had done in attributing later trauma to childhood suffering. Today, it talks about the circumstances of conception, the habituation of the infant, the comfort of the new bom babe and indeed, the happiness of the unborn embryo in the womb who may or may not have experienced the psychosis. Attila József was bom on April 11 1905 in Ferencváros then a working class district of Budapest. Though built over a hundred and fifty years ago the house still stands. Its two storeys are now partitioned into small flats. The building is slightly improved since Attila's time but still dilapidated both outside and in. No doubt renovations were made partly due to the poet's posthumous fame. This is 3, Gát Street. There is a sizeable marble plaque and in gold letters an inscription which reads: Attila József, the great poet of the proletariat was bom here, on April 14,1905 Bourgeois and working class, Attila József, here I come!3 Attila was bom on the eleventh not the fourteenth of April. Indeed, he was a proletarian poet, but he was much more. His appeal was universal and if he was anything by choice he was the poet of the poor and for the poor. Instead of the slightly supercilious stance expressed in the above quote, one can find several more befitting lines: 'He who is poor, is the poorest', or, 'The battle which our ancestors once fought through recollection is resolved in peace.'4 Attila's father was a Transylvanian labourer who had found employment at the turn of the century in a soap factory in Budapest. Transylania was then a part of Hungary and Hungary was a partner in the Austro- Hungarian Empire. The otherwise natural process whereby a country lad of agricultural roots seeks employment in a town was coloured by the following elements in József's case: Áron József, Attila's father, had been a hussar serving with the Hungarian army in mainland Hungary as a peace-time conscript; his family was originally Romanian speaking and ethnic Romanian in today's parlance. He had adopted a Hungarian version of his original Romanian name, which had been Áron Josifu, and called himself Áron József.5 Attila's Transylvanian relatives included his aunts; Etel Josif, who married and eventually died in Budapest in 1940, and Anna Josif who 22