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Sándor Márai (1900-1989) is well-known in England as the author of Embers, a world-wide best-selling novel. He was a prolific prose-writer and essayist, but he also wrote poetry; in fact, he began his career with the publication of a book of verse at the age of eighteen. Márai came from a patrician family from Northern Hungary (his home town was Kassa, now Kosice in Slovakia) and lived for many years in Germany and Paris before returning to Hungary. A sophisticated writer of the middleclasses, he was at the height of his popularity at the time when Hungary entered the Second World War in alliance with Nazi Germany, a decision strongly disapproved of by Márai. In the last year of the war he went into hiding in a locality near Budapest, but Hungary`s liberation by the Soviet army did not bring about the establishment of a Western-style democracy, only (after a period of ‘democratic’ transition) Communist one-party rule, shored up the Soviet Union. When the Communist takeover seemed irreversible Márai decided to leave his native land for good – in fact he and his wife left on passports issued by the authorities who were glad to get rid of this ‘bourgeois’ writer. After some years in Italy Márai moved to the United States where he eventually died, committing suicide at the age of 89.
  
   ‘Funeral oration’ (Halotti beszéd) was written in Italy in the 1950s, in a state of severe depression, at a time when Sándor Márai felt that he had not only lost his readers, but also his country. He also recognized the fact that his fate was shared by all those Hungarian and other Central European refugees who preferred the uncertainties of exile to collaboration with a Communist dictatorship. The original ‘Funeral Oration’ was the first prose text in Hungarian that survived from the end of the 12th century, a text known to all educated Hungarians. To this point of reference Márai grafts a poetic lament about the fate of the exile who, having lost his home and property, is in danger of losing his native tongue, his entire cultural heritage. His poem can be described as a long cry of despair, reflecting the existential crisis of its author.