Hiroshima by Desmond Egan (Poem)

As I look at the Desmond Egan poem entitled Hiroshima, I don't get past the name without knowing that this to is a questioning on the righteousness of an American Governmental decision. It starts “Hiroshima your shadow burns into the granite of history.” I look at that and think, yes Japan has paid for its actions in a way no-one could forget, this showing the power and seriousness of America. Egan goes on and talks about the devastation that has been caused. “I carry in my mind a glass bullet lodged deep the memory of that epicentre where one hundred thousand souls fused at an instant.” I read this and thought of my glass bullet lodged in my memory, and it is the same glass bullet that is lodged in many Americans head too. The sight of two 110 floor buildings on fire, 5000 people being fused together, in 14000 degree flames of jet fuel but this not at a time of war. When we dropped the bomb in Hiroshima it was during a time of war with attempt to stop world domination and communist ways. The Islamic extremist is the new "communist" of this century. With the same sense of righteousness and absolute faith they kill anyone who stands in the way of their idea of progress.

Desmond Egan (b. 1936), one of Ireland's most translated poets, in this volume reaches Hungarian readers, after more than ten volumes of poetry published in Ireland and numerous books translated into German, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Japanese and other languages. Those few of his poems previously published in the journal of world literature, Nagyvilág (1997), have already acted as a brief introduction to his poetry (Unkari, 1997).

Like the Hungarians, the Irish keep struggling to find the right proportion of tradition and renewal, conservative values and modernity. The turn-of-the-century "revivalism" or cultural nationalism that wanted to lift Ireland out of metaphorical homelessness and colonial dependence through reviving ancient folk culture, myths, and literature, was soon followed by cosmopolitan anti-nationalism, which radically broke with all tradition and questioned the significance of homogeneous national or linguistic identity. The national ideal emphasizing the continuity of Irish culture and "revisionism" - revising this belief - have been ever since the two main antagonistic attitudes towards national self-identity. The best writers and poets, however, from Yeats to the more recent Nobel-prize winner Seamus Heaney, never supported either extreme. Likewise Desmond Egan can be modern in a way that his Irish ness does not fall into the background; nor does his Catholic up-bringing and his feeling at home in the Gaelic-Irish language lead him into nostalgic yearning for the past. Irish ness is present in his every breath and stroke of pen with a perfect naturalness: in evoking the landscape - the Midlands of Ireland or some islands - the rural people, or, as he himself puts it in an essay, "your native place determines your accent, the very way you walk". Egan is an inspired ...