A moving, posthumous collection of elegies and eclogues that meditate on nature, landscape, and history, by a great Hungarian poet.

Szilárd Borbély spent his childhood in a tiny impoverished village in northeastern Hungary, where the archaic peasant world of Eastern Europe coexisted with the collectivist ideology of a new Communist state. Close to the Soviet border and far from any metropolitan center, the village was a world apart: life was harsh, monotonous, and often brutal, and the Borbélys, outsiders and "class enemies," were shunned. In a Bucolic Land, Borbély's final, posthumously published book of poems, combines autobiography, ethnography, classical mythology, and pastoral idyll in a remarkable central poetic sequence about the starkly precarious and yet strangely numinous liminal zone of his youth. This is framed by elegies for a teacher in which the poet meditates on the nature of language and speech and on the adequacy of words to speak of and for the dead. Ottilie Mulzet's English translation conveys the full power of a writer of whom László Krasznahorkai has said, "He was a poet-a great poet-who shatters us."

This English-only edition does not include the poems in their original language.

Szilárd József Borbély (1963-2014) was born in Fehérgyarmat in eastern Hungary, and studied Hungarian philology and literature at the University of Debrecen, where he was an associate professor. A recognized authority on Hungarian literature of the late baroque period as well as an author, Borbély was awarded several literary prizes in Hungary, culminating in the highly prestigious Palladium Prize in 2005. His novels Halotti pomp ("The Splendors of Death") and The Dispossessed were hailed universally as one of the most important Hungarian works of literature of the early millennium. His poetry collection Berlin-Hamlet, also translated by Ottilie Mulzet, is available from NYRB Poets.

Ottilie Mulzet is a translator of poetry and prose, as well as a literary critic. She has worked as the English-language editor of the internet journal of the Hungarian Cultural Center in Prague, and in 2014 she received the Best Translated Book Award for her translation of László Krasznahorkai's novel Seiobo There Below. She is based in Prague.