The New Hungarian Quarterly, 1984 (25. évfolyam, 94. szám)

BOOKS AND AUTHORS - Lengyel Balázs: A Poet of Quiet Defiance (László Kálnoky)

I 6 o THE NEW HUNGARIAN QUARTERLY of his skill in creating milieu and atmo­sphere, nor of his ability in organizing the planes of time and experience into an or­ganic whole—here all is subordinated to a would-be depth and complexity. The title story, Rondo, is the best of the four stories written since the novels came out. In this a Hungarian seaman relates ad­ventures in Havana—the writer is openly himself, and the story is at least as much concerned with the writer’s struggle to write it as with the actual narrative itself. The author’s presence sometimes melts into the story and, indeed, appearing as an in­dependent element then fading and ulti­mately disappearing. The title presumably indicates the recurrence of a theme as in music: here it is the impossibility of writing the story. It is not quite clear how important the seaman’s story is per se; the writer seems more concerned with how to treat it as material. The story itself could be quite in­teresting: at its nucleus is a crime committed in the lawless world of the just-liberated Budapest of 1945 but interest in it is re­pressed by the sheer hocus-pocus around its formulation. This story, and the unsuccessful attempt at science-fiction, leads to the sus­picion that Péter Lengyel, considered one of the best of his generation, has exhausted the generational complex as theme and is looking for new directions he has not as yet found. Miklós Györffy A POET OF QUIET DEFIANCE László Kálnoky: Bálnák a parton (Whales on the shore). Szépirodalmi, 1983, 100 pp. Acceptance of poems by readers is a slow process. A relatively long time has to pass before what is produced at a given time is sifted, a vast number of faceless poems are condemned to oblivion and only a few achieve a face and character, taking up a permanent place in the field of vision of the poetry-reading public. It takes time before this or that poem becomes an individual concept, an objectified something which people may discuss as soon as its title is mentioned. Even in Hungary, this takes a long time, despite the fact that Hungarian think of themselves as a poetry-reading nation, and we often respond with pride to the envious surprise of foreigners (partic­ularly foreign poets) on hearing of the size of the editions poetry is published in here. Indeed, how far away and with what yearn­ing is remembered that happy era, known to the poet Dezső Kosztolányi early this century, when—he wrote—the waiters in the coffee houses argued over which of the sonnets published on Sunday had more life to it on Monday, even Tuesday. Alas, these waiters are gone. Nor do we have coffee houses either. But poetry is still alive. It is still being absorbed by the general culture; its accep­tance by readers is still considerable. But how and how quickly? How many years does it take for a poem or a poet? It could well be fashionable (scientific even, in the modern manner) to offer an exact formula of the rate of speed of absorption to the reader; a formula which would—-say—account for the momentary actuality of the poem in the numerator (this increases the speed), and show the lasting value (which presumably has a slowing effect) in the denominator. But the science of cultural sociology, or the theory of literature applicable to the statisti­cal survey of effect-mechanisms has not gone as far as yet. We have no firm law, no

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