Vase of Pompeii: A Play

by Lajos Walder

Overview

On his sixtieth birthday, Monsieur Lebordin, a world-renowned scholar and antiquities expert, suffers a heart attack while alone in his one-room apartment in Paris, and is visited by the mysterious stranger Angela, who, as we find out in the course of the play, is not at all who she appears to be ... As Lebordin reminisces about his life—his loveless marriage and failure as a father, opportunities missed and roads not taken, the price of professional success—it is the Vase of Pompeii that moves center stage: brought to him years ago by a young and beautiful American millionairess to be authenticated, it embodies the gift of love he rejected and the life he did not live ... Set in 1930s France, "Vase of Pompeii" is a Symbolist masterpiece, social commentary (applying as much to our own time as to pre-war Europe) masquerading as bourgeois tragedy.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940153884639
Publisher:	Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc.
Publication date:	02/10/2017
Sold by:	Smashwords
Format:	eBook
File size:	283 KB

About the Author

Arguably the most significant modern Hungarian poet, Lajos Walder was born in 1913 and died in 1945 in the Gunskirchen concentration camp, on the day it was liberated by the Allied forces. Exuberant and witty, poignant and severe, trenchant yet light-hearted, Lajos Walder's poems cut to the quick and stay with you. Reading them is like reliving an era long gone and, at the same time, learning to see our own world with new eyes. For Lajos Walder's message speaks to us as directly today as it did to his contemporaries almost a century ago: '... that apart from thieves and murderers // there are also human beings'. For the first time, Lajos Walder's complete extant poetry is made available in English, superbly translated by the poet's daughter Agnes Walder, who also provides a beautiful afterword, and with a passionate foreword by Scots fellow poet Don Paterson.