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98
Inner World (a sonnet wreath)
LászlóSárközi
László Sárközi was born in
Hungary in 1969, and honed
his formal poetry skills in a
mentorship with the late great
Hungarian
writer,
György
Faludi
(My Happy Days in
Hell).
The sequence of poems
presented here form a "sonnet
wreath" of 15 sonnets, as
follows. The first line of each
sonnet begins with the last line
of the previous sonnet. So the
first 14 sonnets (a sonnet has 14 lines, following a traditional
rhyme scheme in the original as well) are woven together
like a funeral wreath. The final sonnet is a "master sonnet",
comprising all these 14 first lines, in order. This form gains
especial power by the subject matter here. The poet feels
the bitter pull of a dual Hungarian / Roma identity – almost
a pulling apart – and the classical discipline applied to it,
paradoxically, unleashes this beautiful, albeit hard,
exposition – just enough to share with us the record of it.
Translated from Hungarian by Andrew Singer.