Such a poet, whose personal fate and artistic achievements precondition
and illuminate one another to such an extent, is a rarity in Hungarian
literature. Both his life as well as his poetry constituted a succession of
experiments. His lyrics rank among the finest in world literature, from
Petrach to Baudelaire, Majakovsky and Rilke to Whitman.
“He who wants to be a piper
Must desend the depths of hell”
1
Attila
József
Attila József
April 11
th, 1905–December 3
rd, 1937.
In Hungary the name Attila József is today a
synonym for poet of the 20th century, as in the
Romantic age the name Sándor Petőfi had been.
His restless spirit, his life, rich in
political turns, his craving for love
that so often led him to despair,
and the final outcome, his decision
to commit suicide, all these lurk in
the depths of his works.
PHOTOFROMATTILAJÓZSEF’SUNIVERSITYREGISTRATIONBOOK
ATTILA JÓZSEF
’SFOUNTAIN PEN
2
“Be what you really want – a man.”
NO FORGIVENESS
There is no forgiveness, you know,
And regret is vain.
Be what you really want – a man.
You won’t scorch the earth.
(…)
They loved you by deceiving.
You deceived and cannot love.
Press the loaded revolver
Close to your empty heart
Or cast away all principles
And hope for a true love.
Like a dog you want to believe
Someone who believes in you.
Like so many of his contemporaries, Attila József had a life fraught with contradictions, though
József, orphaned early in his life, was perhaps more vulnerable even than they. The condition
to which he referred as “world absence” was and remained for him a personal experience. In
vain did he attempt to belong to some kind of community or find in love something to which
he could cling. In the end he experienced growth into adulthood as an unrealizable task.
“There is no forgiveness, you know, and regret is vain.”
“They loved you by deceiving.
You deceived and cannot love.”
W O R L D A B S E N C E
JÓZSEFATTILA 1932 KÖRÜL
ATTILAJÓZSEF’SDESK
1937. July-August
The family was unable to pay even the rent and was continuously compelled to change lodgings. Finally in the spring of 1910 Attila – together with his sister Etel – ended up as a ward of the state in the peasant home of Ferenc Gombai in the town of Öcsöd. Here the boy endured traumatic experiences that would continue to haunt him for the rest of his life. In June of 1912 the two siblings returned home. In his autobiography Attila writes the following about those years:
“I lived here until I was seven. I had already begun to work, as poor village children generally do. I watched over swine. When I was seven my mother – the late Borbála Pőcze – brought me back to Budapest and enrolled me in the second year of a primary school. My mother supported us, me and my two sisters, by washing and doing house-cleaning. She worked in private homes, going from morning till evening, and I, not under any parental supervision, skipped school and played the little rascal. However, in the textbook of readings for the third year classes I found interesting tales about Attila the king and I persuaded myself to begin reading. These stories about the king of the Huns interested me not merely because I too was named Attila, but also because my foster parents in Öcsöd called me Steve. After deliberating with the neighbors they had concluded, within earshot of me, that there is no such name as Attila. That really took me aback. I felt as if they had called my very existence into question.” (Curriculum vitae, excerpt, 1937).
Mama, the closing poem of the 1934 volume entitled Bear Dance, occupies as prominent a place in József’s poetry as the poem My Mother from the 1931 volume entitled Topple the Capital, Don’t Wail! Comparing the two poems, one can readily sense the difference between these two periods of the poet’s career. My Mother is, first and foremost, a parable, while Mama is a poem of expiation for the offences committed against the deceased mother.
The traumas of his childhood left a strong impression on the adult Attila József. One frequently comes across references in his works to the pains he suffered as he tried to work through them, as well as to his feelings of helplessness.
1905
His father, Áron József, worked as a soap boiler. His mother, Borbála Pőcze, was a peasant from the town of Szabadszállás. His father disappeared on July 1st, 1908. His family thought that he had emigrated to the United States, but in fact he had gone to Romania.
His mother, left alone with three children, took work as a day laborer. She went to the homes of the upper classes to wash, iron, and clean. Nevertheless, she still could not support her children.
She held the mug with both hands One Sunday, and with a quiet smile She sat a little while
In the growing dusk.
In a small saucepan she brought home her Dinner from the rich folks where she worked. Going to bed, I kept thinking
That some folks eat a whole potful. My mother was a small woman,
She died early, like most washerwomen: Their legs tremble from lugging the hamper, Their heads ache from ironing.
For mountains, they have those piles of laundry. Their cloudscapes are made of steam
And for a change of climate There’s the attic stairs to climb.
I see her pausing with the iron.
Her frail body, grown thinner and thinner, Was at last broken by Capital.
Think about this, my fellow have-nots. She was so stooped from all that laundry I did not realize she was still a young woman. In her dreams she wore a clean apron,
And the mailman would say hello to her.
1931. January 6. Translation by John Bátki
3
His childhood
and youth
1905. 04. 11.
Attila József was born on April 11th, 1905 in the house at 3 Gát
Street in Ferencváros, at the time the poor district of Budapest.
THERESIDENCEATGÁTSTREET, THEBUILDINGINWHICHATTILAJÓZSEFWASBORN
„A mosástól kicsit meggörnyedt, én nem tudtam, hogy ifjú asszony,
álmában tiszta kötényt hordott, a postás olyankor köszönt néki”
Mama
ATTILAJÓZSEF, HISSISTERETELKA, ANDHISMOTHER, MRS. ÁRONJÓZSEF
MOTHER
MAMA
I’ve thought one week of Mama only. Upon her hips she bore, ungainly,
A clothes-basket; she’d climb the stairway Up to the drying attic’s airway.
Then, for I was an honest fellow,
How I would shriek and stamp and bellow! That swollen laundry needs no mother. Take me, and leave it to another.
But still she drudged so quietly, Nor scolded me nor looked upon me,
And the hung clothes would glow and billow High up above, with swoop and wallow. It’s too late now to still my bother; What a giant was my mother – Over the sky her grey hair flutters, Her bluing tints the heaven’s waters.
1934. October.
1917
His first independent volume of poems, entitled
Beggar of Beauty,
appeared in December of 1922. The seventeen year old student secured
for himself no ordinary start to his career: Gyula Juhász wrote the preface
to the volume, commending the author as “a poet of the graces of
God.” In light of the turns his life later took Juhász’s words seem almost
prophetic: “People, Hungarians, lo, the poet who here embarks both for
the heights and the depths: Attila József, love him and stand by him!”
It was the end of the war
When I went to the country that last time.
In the city, all the stores were empty –
No food, not even bread.
I lay flat on my belly on top of a boxcar
To bring you flour and potatoes in a sack.
I, your stubborn son, brought a chicken for you,
But you weren’t there.
(excerpt translated by John Bátki)
In the 1935-1936 poem entitled
Belated Lament
he recalls the
moment, which as an adult he was to prove unable to work through,
when he learned that he was an orphan.
By the summer of 1919 Attila’s mother, dying of cancer, was
bed-ridden. In the autumn she was moved to an urgent care hospital,
where she spent her last days. Attila József was in Szabadszállás,
where he was spending part of a school break with relatives, when
he got the news that his mother had passed away.
1919
His sister Jolán places the birth of the poet’s
juvenilia, among them his first surviving
poem,
Dear Jocó!,
during these holidays of
1916-1917 in Szabadszállás.
I would like a lot of money:
I’d eat roasted goose and honey,
Cut the figure of a dandy,
Buy the fifty dollar candy.
(excerpt)
Translation by Zsuzsanna Ozsváth and Frederick Turner
“…love him and stand by him”
From June of 1920 until his adulthood
Attila József became the charge of Ödön
Makai, who enrolled the boy in the Makó
high school. It was here that began his
career as a poet. He was introduced to
the by then acclaimed poet from Szeged,
Gyula Juhász (1883-1937). 1922 was a
significant year in his life from another
point of view as well: it was then that
first began to blossom his love for the
daughter of the director of his old
collegium, Márta Gebe, for whom he
wrote a series of love poems.
4
1920
MÁRTAGEBE, HISFIRSTLOVE
In the first days of the Soviet Republic of 1919 the lawyer
Ödön Makai – against the protests of his family – married
Attila’s older sister Jolán, who completed higher
elemen-tary school and found employment at the Dermatological
Clinic. Makai resigned from his position at the Hungarian
Bank and opened a private practice as an attorney.
Between 1922 and 1925 Attila József wrote roughly half of his entire oeuvre. The poem
Rebellious Christ
was printed
in the October 19th issue of the periodical entitled
Bluebird,
something that prompted public prosecutors to press
charges of blasphemy against the poet in early 1924. At first he was sentenced to prison for eight months and
fined 200,000 crowns, but on March 4th, 1925 the court absolved him. The press made a great deal of the verdict
and in the wake of the trial the poet’s name became widely known. By May of 1924 he was already planning the
publication of a new volume of poems. Indeed, it was his intention to give it the title
Rebellious Christ.
5
1924
Rebellious Christ
1923
He traveled ever more
frequently to Szeged. One
of the short lived periodicals
published by the youth
of Szeged printed his first
prose text as well, and
in April of 1923
Nyugat
(West), the most prestigious
literary periodical of the
age, published three of his
poems.
In May of that year he was among those in Szeged celebrating twenty-five years of literary activity
by Gyula Juhász. It was then that he saw for the first time in person Mihály Babits (1883-1941),
Dezső Kosztolányi (1885-1936), and Lőrinc Szabó (1900-1957), the major poets of the age.
GYULAJUHÁSZ
GYULAJUHÁSZ, DR. JÁNOSESPERSIT, ATTILAJÓZSEF, LAJOSKÁROLYI, ENDREVERTÁN, FERENCMÓRA, ANDÖDÖNRÉTISTANDINGINFRONTOFTHEKORNÉLIAHOLLÓSYTHEATER
In the early days of 1923 Attila József left
the grammar school. When his
guard-ian learned of this, he cut off the young
man’s financial support. It was by this
time Attila’s firm intention to live solely
for poetry.
MIHÁLYBABITS DEZSŐKOSZTOLÁNYI
The Years of
Preparation
With a Pure Heart
“My strength is my twenty years –
I will sell these twenty years.”
1924
Attila József soon became a part of the literary life
of Budapest. He often turned up in the Modern
coffeehouse (later the Japan Coffeehouse was to
become his favorite haunt). It was also at this time
that he met, among others, Pál Ignotus (1869-1949),
the prominent critic from the periodical
West.
6
1925
Beginning with the middle of the 1920s the
impersonation of a lyrical “I” evoking the vagabond or the rebel became more prominent in the poetry of Attila József. With a Pure Heart constitutes the first representative formulation of this figure. Contemporary criticism immediately related the hero of the poem to the figure of the highwayman and the character at the center of the poetry of Villon, the student who, though suffering penury, endures his circumstances with cynical indifference. The poem seems to formulate almost provocatively the extreme response of a man deprived of everything to his extreme situation. Pál Ignotus, in an article written in West, praised the poem as a model example of a new wave coming in the aftermath of the avant-garde, calling attention to its successful intermingling of modern elements and attention to form. In May the poet left the university in Szeged and returned to the capital. In Budapest he became a member of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party.
I am fatherless, motherless,
Godless and countryless,
I have no cradle, no funeral shroud,
And no lover to kiss me proud.
For the third day I have had
No food, not a piece of bread.
My strength is my twenty years –
I will sell these twenty years.
And if no one heeds my cry,
The devil may choose to buy.
My heart’s pure, I’ll burn and loot,
If I must, I’ll even shoot.
They will catch me and string me up,
With the good earth cover me up
And death-bringing grass will start
Growing from my beautiful, pure heart.
1925 march
Translation by John Bátki
At the urging of friends and family he enrolled in the university in Szeged. He was,
beginning in September of 1924, a Hungarian, French, and philosophy major at the
Hungarian Royal Franz Josef University. He often suffered privation, and acquaintances
frequently supplied him with food. In October he planned the publication of his second
volume of verse with the title The
Lover of Lightening,
later changed to
No Shriek of Mine
.
It came out just after Christmas.
NO SHRIEK OF MINE
On March 25
th, 1925 the poem
With a Pure Heart
was published in the journal
Szeged, something which led to a new turn in the life of the poet. Another
local journal immediately attacked Szeged, and, presumably because of this,
linguist Antal Horger, the deacon of the university, became aware of the poem.
He was so enraged by the verse that he ordered József to appear before him
and, in the presence of two witnesses, “advised” him to leave the university.
Horger’s threats constituted an affront that would have life long impact for the
poet, something for which he made reprisal in his 1937 poem
Birthday Poem
.
I SHALL INSTRUCT A WHOLE NATION,
NOT ONLY THE HIGH-SCHOOL POPULATION
VILLON
So – I lived to be thirty-two!
This poem is a surprise too:
itty
bitty
gift that came my way
in a corner of this café
from me
to me.
My thirty-two years have flown,
never had two hundred a month of my own.
That’s right,
some birthright!
I could have been a college teacher,
instead of an idle pen-pusher,
boho
hobo.
But at the university in Szeged
I was summarily expelled
by a mean
dean.
His reproof came quick and hard,
for my poem “With a Pure Heart”
he’d defend
the homeland
against me with drawn sword.
And so my spirit’s conjured
his name
and fame:
“You sir, as long as I am competent,
will not teach on this continent,”
he blustered,
flustered.
But Professor Horger, if it gives you cheer
That this poet is not a grammar teacher,
control
your joy –
I shall instruct a whole nation,
Not only the high-school population
you’ll see
you’ll see.
BIRTHDAY POEM
1937. April 11.
FRANÇOISVILLON
He established personal relationships with Lajos Kassák, György Lukács,
Béla Balázs, Lajos Hatvany, Andor Németh, Frigyes Karinthy and Arthur Koestler
7
1925
In the first days of October 1925 József traveled
to Vienna. Here the director of the Collegium
Hungaricum took him under his wing, finding
students for the young poet. József enrolled in the
University of Vienna. He read with great interest
the classical works of Marxism and the writings of
anarchists. He often sought out those coffeehouses
that were frequented by Hungarians.
Even before this he had known German and French. He now perfected this knowledge and, more
importantly, through his familiarity with languages, gained access to new German and French poetry.
Vienna
His friendship with the educated and refined Andor Németh
(1891-1953), who, fourteen years his elder, worked as an editing partner
with Kassák, was of critical importance to Attila József. Németh was
the first to recognize his significance, and he always stood by him. It
was his first concern to introduce the poet to the Hadik coffeehouse
crowd, a circle of friends surrounding Frigyes Karinthy (1887-1938),
one of the most significant satirical authors of the age in Hungary. In
1993 he introduced him to Arthur Koestler (1905-1983), the author of
Hungarian birth who was later to become world famous.
Németh was the first
to recognize his significance,
and he always stood by him
THEBUILDINGOFTHECOLLEGIUMHUNGARICUM
He established personal relationships with Lajos Kassák (1887–1967), a prominent representative of the Hungarian
avant-garde, and, in early 1926, émigrés who affiliated themselves with various political trends. These included the
Marxist philosopher György Lukács (1885-1971), the film-theorist Béla Balázs (1884–1949), the liberally inclined poet
and designer of applied arts Anna Lesznai (1885–1966), as well as the writer Lajos Hatvany (1880–1961). Following
his return to Hungary, Hatvany helped to promote – not just with his writings, but also with financial donations – the
recognition of talented young artists, Attila József among them. In the émigré circles in Vienna the young poet began
to become, consciously, a Marxist. He read the works of Marx, Hegel, and Lenin.
LAJOSKASSÁK BÉLABALÁZS
ATTILAJÓZSEF’SUNIVERSITYREGISTRATIONBOOK(VIENNA, 1925)
“If he got money, he spent it, he ate. If not, he didn’t.”
8
Paris
THEINNERCOURTYARDOFTHESORBONNE
In September of 1926 he traveled via Vienna to Paris. It was here that he learned of an article by
Ignotus entitled
Verse and Versification
that had appeared in the September 15th issue of
West
reprinting and praising his poem
With a Pure Heart.
Later Hatvany, a patron of the arts and artists,
also spoke highly of this poem, saying that through it “future ages will come to know what became
of the unfortunate generation that came after the collapse.”
During his stay in Paris he continued to lead
the bohemian life, with all its deprivations,
that he had come to know in Vienna. He
frequented the favorite coffeehouses of the
Hungarian émigrés, where he met, among
others, Imre Cserépfalvi, the man who was
later to become his publisher. Cserépfalvi
describes how Attila József enjoyed, with a
true gourmet’s delight, an occasional modest
repast in Paris.
ATTILAJÓZSEF’SUNIVERSITYREGISTRATIONBOOK(PARIS, 1926)
1926
On November 12
th
he matriculated
into the ranks of students
at the Sorbonne University
Towards the end of June he
spent almost two months on
the French Riviera in Cagnes
sur Mer, a village not far from
Nice. In August of 1927 he
returned to Hungary with
great plans. He enrolled in
the Faculty of Arts at the
university in Budapest (in
the end he spent two full
semesters here) and prepared
his third volume of poems
for publication with the
title
I Have Neither Father,
nor Mother.
1927
He learned French with tremendous keenness. On November 12
thhe matriculated into the ranks of students at the
Sorbonne University. By this point he sympathized with the anarchist movement and he became a member of the
Anarchist-Communist Union. In early 1927 he came into contact with the Hungarian section of the French Communist
Party. He became absorbed in the poetry of François Villon. On March 12th he played a role in an evening gathering held
by the newly founded periodical
Esprit Nouveau.
The only issue of this periodical to be printed, an issue in which József
figured with a poem in French, was published in the spring of that year.
9
FERENC
FEJTŐ
„Be blessed, oh my god, who gives suffering
As the only divine remedy for our folly
As the highest and purest essence preparing
The strong in spirit for ecstasies most holy.”
(Translation by David Paul)
Excerpt from the writings of the author, historian, and publicist born in 1909
Attila József first used this strangely magical, beguilingly, sweetly poisonous folk stanza at the beginning of the volume entitled Night in the Slums. It then became a sort of inscription for the volume of selected poems entitled Bear Dance. If one were to collect, as eventually someone will, the works of Attila József, he should put it with great reverence before every poem as a painfully beautiful motto.
“He who wants to be a piper” – he recited it for me once, rapt in thought, when I wrote about him that, “he could not have chosen a better, more accurate, or more fitting motto” - “Must descend the depths of hell” ... He turned his head to the side and placed the index finger of his right hand to his mouth: “As if I had written it; but what does it mean anyway?” We pondered this for awhile in the evening air of the Zugló neighborhood of
Budapest. What does this “hell” refer to, what kind of fate, promise, misfortune, want? The life of the proletariat, hunger, repression, poverty, the heavy, thick emptiness of the nights on the outskirts of the city, what kind of concentrated fire, what uncharted regions, what desolate lands of the soul?
“A poem is paper money,” he said, unexpectedly, “and suffering is the gold reserve.” We huddled in the darkness, in that brown, lukewarm evening darkness in which the soul feels as if it were lying in bed and stretches itself out. He propped his head on two fingers. “I have the reserve,” he said gently, bragging, becoming serious. “Pure gold.” And he was glad of it.
Now, I repeated to myself, fretting and letting out a little gasp, it really is as if he had written it! As if he and only he had written the implacable and, nevertheless, despotic law, a rule of art and a rule of life, („my whim composes according to rule”) - he tempted fate – playfully, humming carelessly, piping out that which was forbidden, playing innocently, effortlessly, “like a child” with the all-destroying elements, until the conversation turned from impish melody to a serious dirge, and stern angels gave him a rap on his paling knuckles.
“He who wants to be a piper
Must descend the depths of hell
There he must attempt to master
The fiendish craft of piping well.”
The Poetry of
Attila József
1927
In this four line stanza I see summarized the meaning of his life and poetry. The romantic pathos of the “accursed poet,” the Baudelaire-esque poet’s defiantly refined sense of his calling
– what do these have in common with this childish little rhyme, as simple as a pastor’s ditty? It is in its tragic essence, its doubly tragic essence! Because Baudelaire’s or Ady’s attitudes towards life were unambiguously tragic and pessimistic. The poet is an accursed prophet, one who himself sets himself ablaze, he is a tragic hero who promenades and swaggers in the buskin of pathos with an air of serious grandeur and satanic arrogance, with the spite of the fallen and condemned angels... This kind of life affirms self-destruction, helps to tread itself underfoot like grapes in a tub, and in vain sings from time to time, “I am the lord,” because it knows and feels inescapably that it is poetry that is the lord, immortal poetic beauty, and the human body and nervous system is but the “gaudy servant” ... One must accept the worst in life in exchange for the best in verse. One must descend the depths of hell... not with a pipe, but rather with a Wagnerian orchestra. One must lay waste, but loudly and prodigiously. Weep, but in the manner of Jeremiah, and even be silent with emphasis. “I decided to be accursed...”
„Soyez béni, mon Dieu, qui donnez la souffrance Comme un divin remède à nos impuretés Et comme la meilleure et la plus pure essence Qui prépare les forts aux saintes voluptés!…”
„Be blessed, oh my god, who gives suffering As the only divine remedy for our folly As the highest and purest essence preparing The strong in spirit for ecstasies most holy.”
FERENCFEJTŐ
ENDREADY CHARLESBAUDELAIRE
10
Márta Vágó
1928
TO
BELONG
SOMEWHERE
The following five years were to be
the period of the poet’s attempts to
find a community. He wanted, like
most people of his generation who
had begun their careers as writers
in the mid and late 1920s, to belong
somewhere. Attila József became
ever more immersed in various
political groups. In the fall of 1928
he came into contact with the Miklós
Barta Society, which, following in
the footsteps of Dezső Szabó, a poet
who took his inspiration from folk
culture, and Zsigmond Moricz, a writer
who in his critical realist works made
the peasant the subject of literature,
was the organ of progressive, young
intellectuals who oriented themselves
towards the country’s peasantry.
attempts to find
a community
The poet attempted to compensate for the
failed relationship by explaining it through
social and class differences:
“I loved a well-to-do girl,
her class tore her from me,”
– he wrote in the revised version of the poem
In the End
(1930).
In early 1928 Attila József was introduced to Márta Vágó,
daughter to the outstanding economist József Vágó, and a
great love began to intertwine them. Through Márta József
came into closer contact with bourgeois radical and liberal
circles. Márta, who had attended lectures by Karl Jaspers,
one of the leading figures of existentialist philosophy at the
university in Heidelberg, had a strong influence on Attila
József. It was she who drew the poet’s attention to the
significance of sociology and Bergson’s philosophy of intuition.
They had already begun planning their wedding when, at the
beginning of September, Márta traveled to London for an
extended stay, in part to study the profession of social welfare
and in part because the girl’s parents wanted, by doing this,
to test the seriousness of the young couple’s intentions. They
corresponded frequently with each other through the end
of the next year. Ultimately it was not distance that brought
their relationship to an end, but rather the fact that Márta
came to the realization that Attila József was incapable of
assuring the conditions necessary in which to raise a family.
Ultimately it was not distance
that brought their love to an end
Going beyond his earlier anarchist attitudes,
Attila József now turned to the ideas of the folk
movement centered around village life. It was
in this spirit that he wrote, together with the
journalist and sociologist Dániel Fábián
(1901-1980), the pamphlet entitled
Out to the Village,
in
which the two authors sketched out an agenda
advancing the movement of the so-called folk
writers. In the fall of 1930 he became a member
of the illegal communist party. It was at
approxi-mately the same time that he came into contact
with psychoanalysis as well, something that also
played a decisive role in his fate.
THEPAMPHLETOFTHEMIKLÓSBARTHASOCIETY MÁRTAVÁGÓ
11
Judit Szántó
TO
BELONG
SOMEWHERE
At the end of 1933 and the beginning of 1934 the party organization
in Budapest informed its members that Attila József was no longer a
member of the party and that the relationship with him had to be
terminated. The defiant Attila József, who had been under psychiatric
care since 1931, had not proven acceptable to the narrow minded
movement, a movement compelled, because of the difficulties it faced
as an illegal organization, to keep strict confidences.
He was asked to start a
periodical sympathetic to
the communists, and in
June the first and only issue
of
Truth,
which he edited
together with Ferenc Fejtő,
was published. In October
the volume entitled
Night
in the Slums
was published,
only to be harshly criticized
by the papers that were
under communist influence.
the relationship with him had to be terminated
end of 1933
It was through this movement that he met Judit Szántó, with whom, towards
the end of 1930, he bound together his life. In March of 1931 the volume
of poems entitled
Topple the Capital, Don’t Wail!
was published, only to be
confiscated by the authorities, who pressed charges of incitement against him
because of his poem
Socialists
.
The authorities pressed charges of incitement
against him because of his poem Socialists
JUDITSZÁNTÓ
Nearby, graveyard arcades:
steel mills, cement works, powerplants.
So many echoing family crypts.
These factories guard the secret
of a mournful resurrection.
A cat scratches the planks of a fence
and the superstitious watchman sees
a will-o’-the-wisp, quick flashing lights –
as beetle-backed dynamos
shine cold and bright.
A train whistle.
Dampness rummages in the gloom
in the leaves of a fallen tree
and weighs down
the street’s dust.
In the alley, a policeman and a mumbling worker.
An occasional comrade carrying handbills
scurries by catlike,
avoiding streetlamps, listening
for noises from behind
sniffing around like a dog.
Night in the Slums
1930
1
I sit on a glittering rock. Young summer’s light breeze floats like the warmth of a dinner for two.
I am getting my heart used to silence. It is not very hard to do –
the past comes swarming back when the head bends down and the hands hang low.
I look upon the mountain’s mane – each leaf reflects
the light of your face. The road is empty, empty –
but I can still see
your skirt flutter in the wind. and under fragile branches your hair tumbles forward, your breasts softly sway
and, as the brook trickles away, laughter springs again
on the round white pebbles that are your teeth.
2
O how I love you
who could bring to words
both solitude, that furtive plotter in the deepest hollow of the heart, and a whole universe.
Who, like a waterfall from its own thunder, part from me and run quietly on,
while I, among the summits of my life, in the nearness of the far,
resound and scream,
thrashing against earth and sky my love for you, sweet stepmother!
3
I love you like a child his mother, like silent caves their depths, love you like rooms love light,
the soul loves flames, and the body, rest. I love you as the living
love life until they die.
I save each of your smiles, gestures, words, the way dropped objects are saved by the earth. The way acid marks metal with its bite,
I have etched you into the instincts of my mind: your beautiful, dear form
becomes and fills all meaning. Minutes march by with a clatter
but you reside in the silence of my ears. Stars flare up and shatter
but you stand still in my eyes. Your taste, like silence in a cavern,
lingers cool on my tongue, and your delicately veined hand, holding a glass of water,
reappears again and again.
4
Oh what is this stuff I am made of that your glance can rend and shape? What soul, what light,
what wondrous magic might
lets me roam in the fog of nothingness through the rolling hills of your lush body? And like the word entering the opened mind, into your mysteries I descend...
Your arteries and veins are rosebushes that ceaselessly quiver.
They circulate the endless stream so that upon your face love may bloom, and blessed fruit grow in your womb. Your belly’s sensitive soil
is embroidered through and through by a multitude of tiny filaments weaving their fine thread into knots raveled and unraveled so that your fluid cells may gather into flocks
and your leafy lungs’ thickets may whisper their own praise! Eternal matter moves serenely down your bowel’s dump and even slag gains a richer life in your kidney’s hot pump. In you, undulating hills arise, constellations tremble,
lakes quiver, factories produce, a myriad living creatures, seaweed,
insects whir,
cruelty and goodwill stir,
suns shine, northern lights glimmer – in your substance resides
eternity, the unconscious.
5
Like clotted drops of blood, these words flutter
at your feet. Existence stutters,
only the laws speak clearly. my hard-working organs
that give me new birth each day are getting ready to grow silent. Yet until then, they all cry out to you, the only one
chosen from the multitude of two thousand million o you soft cradle, firm grave living bed, take me in! ... (How high is the dawn sky! In its ores, whole armies glitter. The brilliance hurts my eyes.
I am lost, I surrender. Overhead I can hear my heartbeat flutter.) 6
Envoi
(The train takes me in your wake, I may even reach you today. Perhaps my burning face will cool, perhaps you will quietly say, „Take a bath in the warm water.
Here’s a towel, get yourself dry.
Dinner’s cooking, to soothe your hunger. This is your bed, where I lie.”)
1933. June.
Translation by John Bátki
Ode
1933
After his break with the communist party the poet wandered for a time in a void. In the
summer of 1933 his private life was in crisis too. In the middle of June he took part in the
so-called writers’ week held at Lillafüred by the Writers’ Economic Association. Here he met art
historian Márta Marton, and the young woman’s beauty sparked in him a new love – hence
the poem Ode, a great love poem, rare in this period of his career. In a fit of jealousy Judit
Szántó attempted to commit suicide. By the beginning of 1934 the poet’s relationship with
Judit had deteriorated so much that he spent half the year in Hódmezővásárhely.
He met art historian Márta Marton…
“I love you like a child his mother,
like silent caves their depths”
TO
BELONG
SOMEWHERE
12
Márta Marton
13
Attila József’s
illness
The verse cycle entitled Consciousness, written at the end of 1933 and the beginning of 1934, is in a sense a summary of the poet’s life, a life experienced as a series of dead-ends. This speculative poetry expresses the dissonant state of the world in an intricate manner of which there is example neither in the poet’s earlier, nor in his later work. He began to bear the interrup-tion in his analytical treatment with more and more difficulty. In the spring of 1934, while in his refuge in Hódmezővásárhely, he wrote a confession, inspired by psychoanalysis, in the form of a letter to his doctor,
Dr. Rapaport. Meanwhile he assembled and edited a collection of his selected poems. Bear Dance found its way into stores in early December. From early 1935 on he went to Edit Gyömrői for analysis, someone who diagnosed him with split personality disorder, just as Róbert Bak, the doctor who treated him in the last phases of his illness, would later do.
1
Dawn unbinds the sky from the earth and at its clear soft word
beetles and children spin forth into the world: there is no haze in the air,
this bright clarity floats everywhere. Overnight, they have covered the trees: like so many small butterflies, the leaves. 2
I saw paintings daubed with red, yellow and blue in my dreams, and I felt it was all in order, not a speck of dust out of place.
Now my dreams seem pale shadows haunting my limbs; the iron world order returns.
During the day a moon rises within and inside me at night the sun burns. 3
I am thin, at times I eat only bread.
Among souls that idly chatter and temporize I search – free and free of charge –
for greater certainty than the fall of dice. Stuffing myself with roast beef would be nice,
or cuddling a small child to my heart – But even the trickiest cat can’t catch at once The mouse outside and the one in the house.
4
Just like a pile of split wood the world lies in a heap;
so does each thing push, uphold, keep every other thing in place,
so that everything is determined. Only what is not can become a tree only what’s yet to come can be a flower. The things that exist fall into pieces. 5
As a child at the freight station I lay in wait, flattened against a tree, like a piece of silence. Gray
weeds touched my mouth, raw, strangely sweet. Dead still, I watched the guard’s feet,
his passing shadow on the boxcars, stubbornly kept falling over my prize,
those scattered lumps of coal, dewy and bright. 6
The anguish is deep inside me, here, while its explanation lies out there. My wound is the whole world – it burns; I feel the fever, my soul, as it churns. You are enslaved by your rebellious heart,
and will be free only when you will stop building yourself the kind of apartment where a landlord moves in to collect rent.
7
I looked up in the night at the cogwheels of the stars: from sparkling threads of chance the loom of the past wove laws. Then, in my steaming dream
I looked at the sky again: somehow the fabric of the law always had a missing stitch, a flaw. 8
Silence listened, the clock struck one. Why not visit your childhood –
even among the cinderblock walls one could imagine some bit of freedom,
I thought. But when I stood up, the constellations, the big bear, like prison bars, shone up there above my silent cell.
9
I have heard iron crying, I have heard rain laughing. I have seen the past split apart. and realize only notions can be forgot; and all I can do is keep loving
while bent double under my burdens Why should I forge a swordblade out of you, golden consciousness!
10
An adult is someone bereft
of father and mother inside his heart, who knows that life is a free gift
something extra thrown in on death’s part, and, like a found object, can be returned, anytime – therefore, it’s to be treasured. He is nobody’s god or priest
- his own self’s least. 11
Once I saw happiness, contentment: four hundred pounds of rotund pink fat. Over the harsh grass of the farmyard it’s curly smile swayed and tottered.
It plopped down in a puddle, warm and nice, looked at me, blinked, grunted twice – I still see the hesitant way
light fumbled in its bristles as it lay. 12
I live by the railroad tracks watching the trains go by. The shining windows fly
in the swaying downy darkness. This is how in eternal night The lit-up days speed by
and I stand in the light of each compartment, Leaning on my elbows, silent.
CONSCIOUSNESS
In his poems passions burst out with demoniacal strength from depths barely discernible. Alienation, the feeling of the “unheimlich,” gushes forth. The images are disquieting precisely because of their unusual plasticity. Perhaps no one succeeded in capturing the confusion, the anxiety, the abject terror, and the sense of helplessness that lead to insanity in such realistic lines as Attila József did in his poem “The Scream.”
In the poem entitled “My Eyes Jump In and Out” the feeling of being threatened and the fear of impending catastrophe so commonly felt in the early stages of schizophrenia (when the patient, with the aptitude for introspection that accompanies the disorder, feels that the “I” is weakening and will not be able to grapple with the ever quickening maelstrom of the psychosis) are expressed in shocking descriptions. The poem depicts the process of going mad in characteristically bizarre images, - “When all I am goes crosseyed in my brain” –, presaging the imminent headlong crash of emptiness, nothingness, schizophrenic bleakness, bringing together in artistic form that which later appeared in the schizophrenic hypochondriac’s misguided notions of the “dried-up, empty body,” the “swollen empty intestines.” In this state of feeling threatened he tried to turn back and take refuge in his mother. In the poem “Belated Lament” the conflict evokes the feelings of disappointment and being cheated that stemmed from the illusion of his mother’s eternal being. The poem’s gentle conclusion only slightly alleviates the roughness of certain lines. The emotions are revealed concretely, in their nakedness. The poet’s self is not, in this phase of the psychosis, always sufficiently intact to be able to descend into the depths, take the rough tempers, memories, and experiences and, returning to a higher level, give them artistic form. The destructive influence of the mental disorder on his poetry can be recognized in part in these phenomena. However, even in this difficult phase, this is not necessarily total. In the poem “It Hurts so Much” there seem to lie, behind an occasional passage, bizarre sequences of thoughts, the precursors of schizophrenic confusion in the thought process, but these are completely concealed beneath the flawless artistic adaptation.
Róbert Bak: Attila József’s illness(Beautiful Word, 1938, January-February)
RÓBERTBAK
1934
ATTILAJÓZSEFJÓZSEFONTHESTEPSONTHEBANKOFTHEDANUBE(BUDAPEST, AROUND1935)
1933-1934 – Translation by John Bátki
“Once I saw happiness, contentment:
14
Edit Gyömrői
IT
HUR TS
SO
MUCH
Psychoanalytic therapy
opened new dimensions
to his later poetry, but
it was unable to help
him. Indeed, the fact that
there was kindled in him
an unrequited love for
his analyst, Edit Gyömrői,
hastened his mental
collapse. There is poetic
documentation of this,
among other poems
You
Made me a Child,
which
was originally entitled
To a
Psychoanalyst Woman,
and
the poem
It Hurts so Much.
Death prowls behind outside, inside into the hole
you escape like a small, frightened mouse to the women
while you can glow so that you be protected by their arms, laps and knees. Not only their
soft, warm laps lure, and your desire, you are thrust there by necessity. Whoever can
find a woman will embrace till all become white the seductive lips. The treasure’s double
so is the trouble one has to love. Who loves yet cannot find a partner he’s as homeless
as helpless can an animal be in the forest while doing its needs.
No other place
can hide your face even if you aim -oh, brave you - a knife at your mother. She understood
-no one else could - what these words mean and yet she has just thrown me away. My head’s splitting
among the living no place for me I cannot endure the troubles and pain. Like a baby
who gets crazy and shakes his rattle but no one comes in it is in vain. Should I love her,
could I hate her? It doesn’t matter. I’m not ashamed that I found it out because who is
scared by his dreams, dazed by the sun in any case will be driven out.
My culture’s falling
like the clothing from the lovers in the happy hour of making love. But where is she
to come and see death tosses me; why should I suffer these pains alone? The pain’s twofold
not only the woman labors and humility can assuage it; but to my songs
money belongs so my sorrow can only bring disgrace on me. I beg your help!
Oh, every whelp there on the street
let your eyes burst where this woman goes. Oh, innocents!
In labor camps wail under boots and say to her that it hurts so much. You faithful dogs!
In the thick fogs get under wheels and bark to her that it hurts so much. Women with babies!
Have miscarriages and come to her to sob to her that it hurts so much.
Safe and sound people
whoever meet her fail and shatter and mumble to her that it hurts so much. Horses and bulls!
Quietly pulls who is gelded
but shriek out to her it hurts so much. And you dumb fish!
Do accomplish the angler’s task
and gape from the hook it hurts so much. All the living
with everything, home, farm, country, let it burn down what the fire can touch. From the cinder
let’s come to her and yap together when she dozes off it hurts so much so she can hear
while living here what she denied at her pleases is her own worth. She has deprived
the outside, inside escaping life of the last chance for a rebirth.
1936. October-November Translated by László Fórizs
IT HURTS SO MUCH
unr
equit
ed lo
ve
EDITGYÖMRŐI
“Young men who can
tear each other for a woman
do not conceal that it hurts so much.”
15
1936
Welcome to Thomas Mann
The Editor of Beautiful Word
Together with Pál Ignotus and Ferenc Fejtő he
founded the left-leaning, but
“extra-denomina-tional,” periodical, Beautiful Word (which one
could also render in English as Beau Mot).
THOMASMANNANDATTILAJÓZSEF
The compilation and editing of this periodical was a labor of love for the poet, and its inner circle at the same time provided him with a circle of friends, a literary workplace, and a community of ideas. In the fall of 1935 he got together again with Márta Vágó, in whose apart-ment the editors held their meetings. We know from the memoirs of his friends that the lack of interest shown in It Hurts so Much, a volume of poems that was published in December of 1936, took a heavy toll on the poet.
THEFIRSTISSUEOFTHEPERIODICALBEAUTIFULWORD
If someone wants to hear tales about the heroic years of the
“Hungarian resistance,” he should not tire himself reading my
notes. I am writing for those interested in the truth. He who
does not understand why the faithful capture of the trivial
moment is interesting also does not know why poetry is
beautiful, or what makes a poet great. I learned from Attila
József that,
…the poet will neither fib nor flatter
he writes the truth, not just the matter
- yes, I learned this bit of advice from him, something that he
was sufficiently confident to address to Thomas Mann, a great
writer who he respected with humble devotion, and something
that hardly offended Thomas Mann. It was only the Hungarian
Royal Police, who immediately banned the reading of the poem,
that took offense.
(excerpt, 1947-48)
“Sit down, please. Let your stirring tale be said.
We are listening to you, glad, like one in bed.
To see today, before that sudden night,
A European mid people barbarous, white.”
1937
Similarly it constituted a personal failure for the poet when, on January
14
th, 1937, at an evening event organized by
Beautiful Word
he was not
allowed to read an ode he had written greeting fellow writer Thomas
Mann because of a prohibition by the police.
Just as the child, by sleep already possessed,
Drops in his quiet bed, eager to rest,
But begs you: “don’t go yet; tell me a story,”
For night this way will come less suddenly,
And his heart throbs with little anxious beats
Nor wholly understands what he entreats,
The story’s sake or that yourself be near,
So we ask you: Sit down with us; make clear
What you are used to saying; the known relate,
That you are here among us, and our state
Is yours, and that we all are here with you,
All whose concerns are worthy of man’s due.
You know this well: the poet never lies,
The real is not enough, through it’s disguise
Tell us the truth which fills the mind with light
Because, without each other, all is night.
Through Madame Chauchatz’s body Hans Castorp sees,
So train us to be our own witnesses.
Gentle your voice, no discord in that tongue;
Then tell us what is noble, what is wrong,
Lifting our hearts from mourning to desire,
We have buried Kosztolányi; cureless, dire,
The cancer on his mouth grew bitterly,
But growths more monstrous gnaw humanity.
Appalled we ask: More than what went before,
What horror has the future yet in store?
What ravening thoughts will seize us for their prey?
What poison, brewing now, eat us away?
And, if your lecture can put off that doom,
How long may you still count upon a room?
O, do not speak, and we can take heart then.
Being men by birthright, we must remain men,
And women, women, cherished for that reason.
All of us human, though such numbers lessen.
Sit down, please. Let your stirring tale be said.
We are listening to you, glad, like one in bed.
To see today, before that sudden night,
A European mid people barbarous, white.
1937. Early January. – Translated by Vernon Watkins
16
Flóra
1936
last love
Attila József had an unusual capacity for imitation. It was not only his own poems
that he eagerly rewrote again and again, but also those of his contemporaries.
It was probably the fact that he offered Mihály Babits “corrected” versions of his
poems that offended Babits the most profoundly. Though József reconciled with
many of his “offended” contemporaries, Babits among them, Babits nevertheless
did not recommend him for the prestigious Baumgarten literary prize.
On February 20
th
, 1937 he met his
last love, Flóra Kozmutza, who
worked alongside psychologist
Lipót Szondi as a specialist in the
treatment of children and who
later became the wife of poet
Gyula Illyés (1902-1893). Flóra
faithfully captures the story of this
unconsummated love in her book,
published in 1987, about the last
months of the poet’s life. In the
Flóra poems the idealized beloved
appears as the symbol of a last,
barely-hoped-for refuge.
József presumably stylized
one of his doctor’s books as
well, a book in which he may
have read a great deal about
Freud’s ideas concerning the
influence of the death wish,
which causes severe insomnia,
and death itself as the
symbolic equivalent of perfect
sleep. From 1936 on dreams
and death became central
motifs of his poetry.
dreams and death
SIGMUNDFREUD
FLÓRAKOZMUTZA
17
1937
Well,
Well, in the end I have found my home,
the land where flawless chiseled letters
guard my name above the grave
where I’m buried, if I have buriers.
It will take me like a collecting-box,
this earth. For no one (sadly) wants
wartime leftovers of base metal,
wretched devalued iron coins.
Or an iron ring engraved
with noble words: new world, rights, land.
Our laws are still the fruit of war;
gold rings shine finer on the hand.
For many years I was alone.
Then all about me was a crowd.
It’s up to you, they said, although
I’d have loved to follow them round.
It was like that, empty, the way I lived:
no one has to tell me it was.
I was compelled to play the fool
and now I die without a cause.
In that whole whirlwind of my life
I have tried to stand my ground.
More sinned against than sinning, I
leave that thought and laugh aloud.
Spring is beautiful, summer too,
autumn better, winter the best
when you leave your hopes for family
and hearth to other men at last.
1937. November. – Translated by Edwin Morgan
WELL, IN THE END I HAVE FOUND MY HOME…
In the End I Have Found My Home…
He threw himself beneath the moving train
In the second half of July came the poet’s last, tragic nervous breakdown.
He was cared for for three and a half months at the Siesta Sanatorium. He
was unable to take part in the tour designed to introduce
Beautiful Word
in Czechoslovakia. In November he traveled, accompanied by his sisters, to
Szárszó.
When Flóra visisted him, he gave her two farewell poems. These two poems
–
You Came With a Stick
and
Well, in the End I Have Found My Home
– are,
along with
I may suddenly Disappear,
Attila József’s last poems, poems
that capture the last stages of his increasingly impossible personality. At
the same time they constitute records of self-destruction, farewell, and
acquiescence to that which cannot be changed.
On December 2
ndhis friends, including Ignotus, Fejtő, and
Hatvany, sought him out. Among them was the psychiatrist
Róbert Bak, who had treated him in the sanatorium. They
tried everything to cheer him up. The poet again spoke to
them of the failure of the volume It Hurts so Much. The
evening of the next day, at the station in Balatonszárszó, he
threw himself beneath the moving train.
ATTILAJÓZSEF’
SFOUNTAINPEN
ATTILAJÓZSEF’SSHIRT
THESIESTASANATORIUM
18
ARTHUR
KOESTLER
A Dead Poet in Budapest
1937
In a Hungarian village named
Balatonszabados, lying on the 47th
longitude and the 18th latitude, thirty-three
year old poet Attila József threw himself
under a train in a fit of insanity. The village
idiot was witness to the event. It was he
who - with cheerful excitement – brought
the family the news.
The reaction in Hungary is now centered
around transforming the poet into a saint.
While he lived, this man, after whom they
will soon name an entire era of Hungarian
literature, was treated like a mangy dog. (...)
He was my friend, or rather he belonged
to the same group of writers and journalists
I did. We were his friends, and we
generously helped him end up under that
train, and now we all write obituaries for
him. There is another reason, in addition
to those mentioned, that I bring the case
of this Hungarian poet before the German
émigré readers, who at first glance may
seem to have nothing in common with him.
This case was so typical that it could not
have been more typical.
It would be banal if our man were merely
a misunderstood genius discovered after
his death – this, one could say, would be a
classical model and so all would be in order,
as it were. However, in this case Attila József
was considered a great poet already at age
seventeen, and we all knew he was a genius.
Nevertheless we allowed him slowly to go
to ruin right before our very eyes. Before
they ever would have made him into a
saint, i.e. while he was still alive, he was
pugnacious, stubborn, and difficult to bear.
(...) We were, by and large, kind and
patient with him. We even helped a little
too, and we handled him with that discrete
condescension that is more certain than
rat poison to ruin the sensitive. He could
have been saved had he been cared for
attentively. But such an undertaking
demands tremendous and concerted energy,
as well as a large investment of time. One
can accumulate discouraging experiences
over the course of such extravagant
enterprises. No one wants to be the Don
Quixote of soul-saving. One would prefer to
remain the Sancho Panza of philanthropy.
(...) Only reluctantly and with great effort do
I dare to say – in part because it may seem
excessive indulgence, in part because the
reader cannot verify it - that Attila József,
about whom the world has never heard a
thing and even now will not hear much,
who at the 47th parallel threw himself
under a train, this Attila József was one of
the greatest lyricists of Europe. An idiotic
sense of duty compels me to express this
conviction, though it is of no use – his dead
poems will remain mute, and the train will
not stop.
As I have said, I write about him because
his case, in more modest proportions, is
constantly repeating itself in our ranks.
With our combined strength we destroyed
him, we communists and anti-communists,
members of factions, benevolent souls,
dialecticists, materialists, idealists,
intellectuals, all of us who are withdrawn
and inferior. We always play the humanist
Don Quixote, but we are little more than
the stalwart Sancho of the coffeehouse
terraces. (...) Our symbolic case study, Attila
József, from that distant, exotic country, also
understood dialectics. Indeed, he wrote
articles on Hegel. Nevertheless he preferred
to make his bed on the train tracks. There
were other witnesses to the event apart
from the village idiot. An agent and the
station head wrote the incident up in the
record book. Here is how Attila József died
according to their description: For some
time he stood, somewhat distant from the
station, lost in thought next to the train.
When finally it started to move, he kneeled
next to the tracks on the railway bed, bent
forward, as if he were bending down to a
stream, and placed his hand on the track,
as if he had wanted to wet it. The
wheel cut off his hand and part of
the braking mechanism shattered his
head.
He was insane, perhaps he really
thought the tracks were a stream.
In any case we must believe
that it was with a clean
conscience that he lay
himself down.
(English translation of
Pál Schweitzer’s 1939
translation)
No one wants to be the Don Quixote of soul-saving.
One would prefer to remain the Sancho Panza of philanthropy.
ATTILAJÓZSEF’SPOCKETWATCH ARTHURKOESTLER
19
His Volumes
1922–1929
No shriek of mine, it is the earth that thunders.
Beware, beware, Satan has gone insane;
cling to the clean dim floors of the translucent springs,
melt yourself to the plate glass,
hide behind the diamond’s glittering,
beneath the stones, the beetle’s twittering,
O sink yourself within the smell of fresh-baked bread,
poor wretched one, poor wretch.
Ooze with the fresh showers into the rills of
earth--in vaearth--in you bathe your own face earth--in your self,
it can be cleansed only in that of others.
Be the tiny blade upon the grass:
greater than the spindle of the whole world’s mass.
O you machines, birds, tree-branches, constellations!
Our barren mother cries out for a child.
My friend, you dear, you most beloved friend,
whether it comes in horror or in grandeur,
it is no shriek of mine, but the earth’s thunder.
1924, Spring – Translation by Zsuzsanna Ozsváth and Frederick Turner
NO SHRIEK OF MINE
In 1928 Attila József began a work on the foundations of a
philosophy of art the title of which was to be
Inspiration and
Nation: The Metaphysics of Art.
The poet sought to provide
theoretical support for the ideal of pure poetry to which he
himself ascribed. The strong philosophical bent of the society
that had formed around Márta Vágó clearly played a significant
role in his decision to turn to philosophy for his arguments.
Inspiration and Nation
may have remained unfinished, but József
made use of its central contentions and principles in his critical
writings on literature. Indeed to some extent he modified
and expanded on them. For Attila József the most significant
philosophical guide was Benedetto Croce, whose theory of
intuition he tried to further develop. It was one of Croce’s
fundamental contentions that art is a form of intuition that is
free of all conceptual comparison, and that it does not reflect
reality, but constitutes rather an independent spiritual form that
tends towards direct apprehension of the unique so that it can
immediately be transformed into expression.
These were the most productive years of his career. With respect to the sheer number of poems, he wrote
roughly half of his entire oeuvre between 1922 and 1925. He discovered for himself not only free verse,
expressionism, and surrealism, but also the tone of folk songs.
POÉSIE PURE
In his poetry of the late 1920s the ideals
of surrealism, as well as those of “poésie
pure” (“pure poetry”), prevail. “Pure poetry”
is a general name referring to a tendency
that has its origins in the works of Edgar
Allen Poe and his French translator Charles
Baudelaire. Stéphane Mallarmé is thought
of as one of its most archetypal figures.
In the 1920s, when this tendency was
articulated in programmatic and polemical
form, Paul Valéry and Paul Claudel
constituted its principal representatives.
“Pure poetry” is not an expression of
sentiment. Neither does it purport to tell
a tale that can be told in prose, nor does
it mean to change reality or convince the
reader of the truth of some idea. The
pure poet considers his principal task the
condensed concentration of purely poetic
elements.
1929
I have Neither Father nor Mother
His first volume, Beggar of Beauty (1922), reveals the young poet still living through a period of sentimental upheavals. His handling of form is, considering his age, quite secure, though the influence of the poets of West (Ady, Kosztolányi, and particularly Gyula Juhász) is palpable in his work. At the same time he is clearly well aware of the significance of the opening lines of a poem. His rhythms are forceful: “Some great-great fire should be set ablaze / that the people might warm themselves” (Winter, 1922). In the following years he came to realize that he was not identical to the figure of the beggar of beauty, and thus began a period of restless self-searching. The free verse of Walt Whitman represented new opportunities for him, as did his growing knowledge of the endeavors of the avant-garde.
1922
Beggar of Beauty
1924
No Shriek of Mine
EDGARALLENPOE
In February of 1929 the volume entitled I Have Neither Father nor Mother was published, containing the fruits of four years of work. It emphasized first and foremost the poet’s impudent, cheerful, and headstrong bearing. Ferenc Fejtő celebrated it as the poet’s first truly successful volume, a volume “in which one feels haunted by the bizarre charm of a danse macabre.”
