Born in 1936, Otto Orban saw his father taken off to prison in 1944, and was sent to an institute a year later, where he made his name as a child-prodigy poet. By the 1970s he had changed from the 'wunderkid' to the 'enfant terrible' of Hungarian poetry. Having translated Allen Ginsberg's Howl, Orban was regarded for a while as Hungarian's own Beat poet, but he has in his long career also translated Chaucer, Auden, Dylan Thomsd snf Robert Lowell into Hungarian, and is an acknowledged master craftsman.