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We, The Twenty-Five Letters Of The Alphabet
English Translations From the Selected Poems Of Lajos Walder.
Translated from the Hungarian, with an introduction and notes by his
daughter, Agnes Walder.

Melbourne: Macmillan, 2004. ISBN:1876832029. Med. 8vo. 160 pages.
Portrait frontispiece, with original typescripts and manuscript
produced in facsimile. Hardcover with dust jacket. A$50.00

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The poet Lajos Walder (1913-1945) - who chose the pseudonym 'Vandor',
(or 'wanderer') first came to notice in 1932 when he introduced himself
to the editor of 'Anonymous', a Budapest literary magazine, with the
following words: "My name is Lajos Vandor. I am a poet, a law student
and a trainee worker at the knitting mills. To the proletarians I am a
rotten bourgeois; to the bourgeoisie I am a stinking proletarian; to
the petit-bourgeoisie I am an evil anarchist and to the anarchists I am
a cowardly petit-bourgeois. And everybody is right, whatever they say
about me. But I wrote a few masterpieces - these, the poets and les
belles ames would call prose, and the prose writers and modern
aesthetes would call poems. Take them and eat them, read them, and
publish them; but first give me a cigarette because I Ieft my cash
register at home and I don't have four cents in my pocket to buy a
single fag."

Walder's poems are an accurate expression of their times. Political
tension and bizarre humour are juxtaposed in a manner concordant with
the irreverent Dada movement that after 1916 swept through the art and
literary circles of Europe. In the words of Gabor Thurzo "Lajos Walder
('Vandor') has neither ancestor nor partner in Hungarian literature. He
is a poet, without a doubt a lyricist through and through, yet one
whose every line and every poetic breath is pure heresy, pure rebellion
against the accustomed forms of poetry."

His first book 'Heads Or Tails' was published by 'Anonymous' Magazine
in Budapest in 1933, when he was twenty years old. Five years later, in
1938, his second volume of poetry, 'Group Portrait' was published by
Cserepfalvi of Budapest. There were to be no further publications in
Lajos Walder's lifetime: after 1938 the works of Jewish artists could
not be published in Hungary. Lajos Walder was one of only a handful of
Jewish students able to enter university, where he excelled and
graduated as a Doctor Of Law in 1937. In 1939 the Jewish Laws came into
effect in Hungary, and Jewish professionals were barred from practising
their professions. In the course of the war, what followed was forced
labour and the death camps at Mauthausen and Gunskirchen. Within hours
of the liberation of Gunskirchen by the advancing American forces,
Lajos Walder died as a result of exhaustion and starvation at the age
of thirty-two.

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