The New Hungarian Quarterly, 1984 (25. évfolyam, 96. szám)
BOOKS AND AUTHORS - Lengyel Balázs: New Volumes of Poetry ( László Bertók, Judit Tóth, Tibor Gyurkovics, Károly Bari)
NEW VOLUMES OF POETRY László Bertók: Ágakból gyökér (Branches into Roots) Magvető 1984., 88 pp.; Judit Tóth: Füstáldozat (Smoke Offering) Szépirodalmi 1984., 72 pp.; Tibor Gyurkovics: Boszorkányok pedig vannak (Witches Do Exist) Szépirodalmi 1983., 204 pp.; Károly Bari: A némaság könyve (The Book of Silence) Szépirodalmi 1983., 60 pp. Hungarian poetry in the last ten years has gone further and become more extreme than ever before. This is not simply because contemporary poetry, almost as if it wishes to strangle itself, is trying to do away with those features usually considered poetic. It throws off rhyme and melodiousness and attempts to arrive at a new form. The Hungarian reader is used to this by now. It is the poet’s relation to his words, to the message of his poem, that is in the process of being altered; this is especially true in the work and experiments of the youngest poets who seem to wish to make use of lyrical verse for purposes other than those we have become used to. Although they have not as yet gone to the extreme of using lyrical verse to decorate the walls or drive a computer with, poetry can appear in the form of a poster in a teenager’s room or as power driving a computer that prints out inscrutable answers. The reader, who may recognize that he is in the presence of a poem from the shape of its typographical make-up if from nothing else, sometimes mutters some old quotations and heaves a sigh for what has happened to the poem. One extreme, the newest, is the poem that does not resemble verse and which is arranged in a way that does not resemble a poem: it is often a concrete poem or a poster or simply a flow of words and metaphors without purpose, euphoric baby-talk which —and here the poets are right—is the first display of delight in words, the basis of all poetry. There is this formless, metaphoric and imagistic euphoria, produced by adults, which is, of course, capable of communicating their emotional state and consciousness directly ; there is also, luckily, in contemporary Hungarian poetry a modern non-neo-avantgarde form which, through its purposeful order, can carry the poem’s message. Although breaking form in one way, this type of poetry has an internal form and that, in the striking phrase of János Arany, the 19th century poet, is practically identical with content. Experiment, innovation, emotional distance, and prosaic qualities do appear in these poems, but in setting them down, the words written do not just evoke more words in the poet’s mind but the controlling question as to whether the words written are accurate. One should not state a priori that the current fashion for automatic writing has not and cannot bring results (in poetry results depend upon talent and not upon principles); nor should we contrast this phenomenon with the latest works of some of the older poets, some of whom are already considered as ‘classics.’ (I have in mind collections which are the climax of the poetic careers of such as Sándor Weöres, István Vas, Győző Csorba, László Kálnoky, or Ágnes Nemes Nagy.) Any such comparison would be unfair to the new works which will have to be judged and selected by the future. However, going behind the curtain of fashion, it is useful to look around and see what is emerging and developing between the two extremes: here there may be poetic careers other than those which aspire to setting avantgarde conundrums, whether we can see the emergence of more solid, autonomous views of the world and of individual poets.