Első kísérletek (First Attempts) gathers the earliest surviving verse of Imre Madách, written when he was a boy of thirteen or fourteen and a first-year law student in Pest. The notebook bears the cover-title Lantvirágok (Lyre-Flowers), and the poems within are exactly what the title promises: the deliberate, imitative exercises of a gifted adolescent learning his instrument. They were never published in his lifetime; they reach us through the manuscripts edited by Gábor Halász in the second volume of the Complete Works (Révai, 1942).

The reader should hear, behind almost every line, the Hungarian Romantic generation Madách was apprenticing himself to. Each poem is headed by an epigraph — from Kölcsey, Vörösmarty, Bajza, the two Kisfaludys, Berzsenyi, Verseghy — and from the European Romantics they in turn revered: Victor Hugo, Schiller, Goethe, Matthisson, Bürger. The diction is the standard Romantic stock of the 1830s: the azure eye, the maiden, the grave, the spring that will not return, the homeland under foreign tongue. What is already Madách’s own is the persistent yoking of private grief to national grief — the beloved lost and the haza (homeland) lost in the same breath — which will become, two decades later, the dialectical engine of The Tragedy of Man. Poems like Róma, Egyptom s hazánk (Egypt and Our Homeland), and Mohács terén (On the Field of Mohács) already reach for the long historical perspective that is his mature signature.

A note on the texts themselves: the manuscript and its mid-century transcription are imperfect, and the source preserves obvious copyist’s slips, a few half-legible words, and stray printed catchwords and page-stamps from the 1942 edition (e.g. running heads, page numbers). These have been rendered or silently passed over as the sense requires; where a word is corrupt, the translation follows the most probable reading without footnoting it, in keeping with the edition’s apparatus discipline. The collection closes with two prose pieces that already show the adult writer forming: a graduation address delivered on behalf of his fellow first-year jurists in 1840, and Trencsini, másként teplici fürdők (The Baths of Trencsén, or Teplic), an early topographical essay in which the ruined castle of Trencsén becomes, characteristically, a meditation on the endurance of the nation against time.

These are juvenilia, and the translation does not pretend otherwise: a slight stiffness, a reliance on received Romantic figures, an occasional sentimental excess are authentic to the originals and have been preserved rather than polished away. They are valuable precisely as the first attempts — the ground from which the later architecture grew.