Sándor Petőfi

Sándor Petőfi (1823–1849) is the national poet of Hungary. Born in Kiskőrös to a butcher's family, he lived a restless early life as a soldier, strolling actor and poor student before the success of his folk-flavoured verse made him famous in Pest in the mid-1840s. His plain speech, his songs of the Great Hungarian Plain and his comic and tender narrative poems, among them the folk epic János vitéz (1845), changed the tone of Hungarian poetry.

In March 1848 he became a leading voice of the revolution in Pest, and his 'Nemzeti dal' (National Song) was recited to the crowds on the first day of the uprising. He served as an officer in the war of independence that followed and was last seen at the battle of Segesvár (now Sighișoara) on 31 July 1849, aged twenty-six; he is presumed to have been killed there.

The English versions in this archive are by William N. Loew, a Hungarian-born American, from his 1912 volume published for the Hungarian Literary Society of New York: the long poems Simple Steve, Childe John and The Apostle, the sequence Cypress Leaves from the Grave of Dear Ethel, and a selection of lyrics.