József Attila and Prima Primissima award-winning writer, university professor, literary translator and critic died in the 89th year of his life.
György Ferdinandy was hospitalized with pneumonia in Miami, Florida at the end of November, his condition did not improve after that; died on Sunday - the writer's editor, Márton Mészáros Navarrai, announced on Monday on behalf of his wife.
Ferdinandy was born in Budapest in 1935. His father and grandfather were doctors, his mother was a typist and a housewife, and he memorialized their figures in numerous small prose works. The last published volume of his life entitled Erökség is the short novel The King of Fools (2007), which tells the story of his father, and the short novel Egy sima, egy ervett (2010), which is made up of writings about his mother.
After the 1956 revolution and freedom struggle, he left for the West as a first-year Hungarian-French student at ELTE BTK. Between 1956 and 1964, he was a bricklayer, Russian translator and bookseller in France. From 1957 to 1960 he studied at the universities of Strasbourg and Dijon, in 1964 he became a teacher at the State University of Puerto Rico, where he taught - with interruptions - until 2000. Between 1964 and 1970, he was the publisher of the twelve-issue literary magazine Szomorú Vasárnap.
In 1969, he obtained a doctorate in literary history at the University of Strasbourg, writing a thesis on Zsigmond Remenyik.
In 1973, he settled again in France for a short time, and between 1976 and 1985 he was an external employee of Radio Free Europe. From 1981 to 1986, he edited the Anthology of Western Hungarian Prose, was a collaborator of the NRF and Le Monde. He returned to Hungary in 1987, at which time he taught for one year at the Eötvös College. In 1992, he spent a semester at the Janus Pannonius University in Pécs.
After he retired from the State University of Puerto Rico in 2000, he initially lived alternately in Puerto Rico and Miami, Florida. From the 2010s, he moved back home to Budapest, but returned to Miami every year; He has not visited Hungary since 2019.
His first book of short stories in French, L'île sous l'eau, was published in 1960; his first book of prose in Hungarian was published in Munich in 1965 under the title Futószalagon. His book, The Story of My Happiness, was first published in Hungary in 1988.
György Ferdinandy was a member of the French Writers' Association, the Hungarian Writers' Association, the Hungarian Academy of Arts and the International Hungarian Philological Society.
He is the recipient of several prestigious Hungarian and international awards, including the Saint-Exupéry Award (1964), the József Attila Award (1995), the Babérkoszorúja of Hungary (2019), the Prima Primissima Award (2019) and the Budapestért Award (2022).
He is in the process of publishing his life's work, the third volume of which, Örökség, was published in 2023 by Europa Könyvkiadó. His volume of recent writings entitled Szól a kakas was published by Magyar Napló Kiadó in 2022.
He translated the works of several Hungarian poets and prose writers into Spanish, some of them together with his wife, María Teresa Reyes, a former university professor, reviewer and translator of Cuban origin and Puerto Rican identity. He also worked as a critic, writing essays, notes, and criticisms on hundreds of works of contemporary Hungarian literature.
György Ferdinandy was married twice and has four children.
MTI
Cover photo: György Ferdinandy
Source: Claude Truong-Ngoc / Wikimedia Commons
