György Faludy (Joseph George Leimdörfer, Budapest, 1910-2006) publishes his first poems in the first half of the thirties of the last century and becomes a collaborator of the liberal publication Magyar Hírlap, relating to the radical and social democratic circles that fight the successive governments of the authoritarian regime of Admiral Horthy. Although it is usually considered that his poetic career began in 1938, when Sentinel appears in Pompeii, it was his versions of Heine and Villon published the previous year that won him his first successes, his first problems with justice and a great popularity. The Villon Balladái have been reissued in half a hundred occasions, and are one of the best selling poetry books in the history of Hungary. In the following years, Faludy publishes the Laudatur compilations. Medieval anthems and theAntology of European poets. His public activity does not stop causing problems, especially with the far right Hungarian. Harassed by several lawsuits for, among other charges, "offenses to a friendly power", he left Hungary and moved to Paris in late 1938. In June 1940 he left Paris for Casablanca and remained in Morocco until the summer of 1941 , in which he is heading to New York on a refugee boat. In the United States he enlists in the army, participating in different episodes of the Pacific War. At the end of the war, Faludy returns to Hungary and joins the public life as an active member of the Social Democratic Party. At the end of May 1949, the "Rajk case" was unleashed, and in the sequence of purges that followed him, he was arrested and taken to the Recsk camp. Released in 1953, until 1956 he earns his living as a translator, barely tolerated on the margins of the regime. After the failure of the 1956 Revolution, Faludy leaves Hungary and settles in London, where he directs the Literary Gazette. In 1957 it appears in German Tragödie eines Volkes. Ungarns Freiheitskampf durch die Jahrhundert, written in collaboration with Maria Tatár (pseudonym of his wife, the journalist Zsuzsanna Szegö) and György Pálóczi Horváth, and in 1961 his book of poemsEmlékkönyv a rőt Bizáncról. In 1962, André Deutsch publishes what is generally considered his masterpiece, My Happy Days in Hell, which will not be published in Hungarian until the fall of communism, in 1989. The book will have a discreet success, a magnificent critical reception , two English editions and two others in the United States and will be translated into German and Dutch in 1964, and French in 1965. Upon the death of his wife, Faludy leaves England and resides first in Florence and then in Malta. There, around 1966, Faludy met Eric Johnson, amateur linguist, unrepentant traveler and ballet dancer, who would become, in the picturesque universe of "neo-Latin" literature, the enigmatic Ericus Livonius. Both lived together for the next thirty-five years. In 1967 they moved to Canada and settled in Toronto. Faludy acquires Canadian citizenship and teaches courses at Columbia University, Wesleyan, Princeton, UCLA, and the University of Toronto, where he will be named Doctor Honoris Causa in 1978, the year in which the first anthology of his translated poetry also appears. to English, East and West. Selected Poems of George Faludy. In 1980, he edited his chosen Poemas, a thick volume of more than six hundred pages. Between 1983 and 1985 he published a collection of poems written in the field of Recsk, the anthologies Learn This Poem of Mine by Heart. Sixty Poems and One Speech, and theSelected Poems of George Faludy. In 1987, with the new airs created by the "perestroika" gorbachoviana, appears the first (pirate) edition of My Happy Days in Hell in Hungary. After the collapse of the Soviet empire, the couple Faludy-Johnson moved to Budapest and appeared the first Hungarian edition of Happy Days in Hell, rekindling the popularity of the poet. Extraordinary speaker, his public readings congregate crowds and his poems are frequently musicados, as they had been in the thirties and early forties. It publishes two collections of articles and sketches, in which many of the characters of Happy Days in Hell are present. He is a candidate for the Nobel Prize and in 1993 he won the Soros Foundation Prize and in 1994 the prestigious Kossuth Prize for the work of a life. In the post-communist political order, the figure of Faludy attracts the reservations of different groups to the right and left of the Hungarian parliamentary arch. His condition as witness of the horrors of "real socialism" bothers many; ultranationalism reproaches him for his participation in a dark incident in 1947, in which some members of left-wing formations, Faludy among them, demolished the statue of the anti-Semitic bishop of Székesfehérvar, the venerable Ottokar Prohászka; and what is considered his "freedom of manners" does not make him popular among the more conservative Hungarians. In 2002, Faludy married the young poet Fanni Kovács, converting Johnson, in the words of George Jonas, "into the first man in history abandoned by a 92-year-old lover." The new couple stokes the scandal with a photo report in the Hungarian edition of Penthouse magazine, which becomes (or so the legend wants) the best-selling number in its history in Hungary. It is said that Faludy lives a period of extraordinary creativity. He publishes a book of poems written half with his young wife and the second part of his memoirs, After my happy days in hell. György Faludy passes away in 2006 in Budapest.