When the poet creates a work, he does not solve – he creates. In his images he passionately reiterates a corrected version of the world, while hearkening to the beckoning voice of a higher, experience-transcending life. The recomposed world (with its wider contours) gives shape to the first signs of metaphysics. “... I look at the other; at the one who is there / behind you. / The other, who is always the other – / cannot be seen. How could you possibly sense them?” (Viola d'amour).
The young Márton Kalász gives voice – in an age distorted, one that parrots the material nature of existence as the dogma of a compulsory, rigid creed, and degrades communal equality, like production itself, to the level of defective output [referring to the early years of Hungary’s Stalinist period] – to the conviction that the tension between ambition, the completed work, and surrounding circumstances constitutes the most oppressive, yet at the same time the most elevating, realism of writing. “... chaff [...] everywhere” – he sighs in the poem of his very first book (Érlelő napok [lit. Days of Ripening]).
In the richly coloured folk idylls of the young poet – who wished to give weight to his career opening in the 1950s – and in the delicate, archaicising depiction of his environment, strange symbols flare up. There, where fate and life lie painfully far apart, and one is, at best, the other’s tormenting dream, the slowly maturing writer of verse, according to his brilliantly condensed formulas, finds that giving expression to that elsewhere-lived life, together with worldly impressions, at first appears almost simple: the poetic work is, in essence, the encounter of soul and world.
Yet while at one moment the poem is a voice breaking forth from the depths of silence, at another it extends precisely towards this heavy, subhuman muteness. If, outside, life is characterised by the whimsical malleability of negation and certainty, what else could the poet say of his own work than that “the poem is a dubious acquisition, you steal it home / beneath your sheepskin coat, and as soon as everyone is asleep, / you lay it out, pondering what it might become” (Német erdők felől [lit. From the German Forests]).
Poetry – and all great poetry – is, at the outset, instinct, and a struggle with chance. Consciousness and accident: it is difficult to establish any clear order between the two. The initiative, however, belongs to words that acquire new tonal gradations from one another. From this duality, paradoxically, only one truly serious thing can be read out: the real movement of creation in relation to perfection. “FROM FAR AWAY the sound comes – / it flickers in the mind. Perhaps, / as if a bad coin were dropped onto the pavement / on the other side of the street. / A quiet chuckle haunts its rolling. / I would not say it – / if I were not poorer by a few sounds. / I step. After the bad coin?” – writes Márton Kalász in the playful, emotional Viola d'amour.
To pursue perfection, to believe it can be caught up with: for some, a crushing virtue; for others, merely the torment of incessant haste. Every work of art has the same ultimate aim: to deepen and illuminate a world in which the creating soul most sharply catches sight of itself. (“My face, still tiring, / dejected here, to sustain: I thank you / for your perseverance, though you would make me / recognisable…” – we read in the poem Arcom vagy [lit. You Are My Face]) And if it truly does glimpse its own self, it will also believe that the much-admired, much-questioned many-facedness of the world conceals both depth and distance. The unsteady bridges of writing are supported on the far side by unknown shores; the poet’s is a secret craft. One thing is certain: writing is possible without religion, but without some form of faith it is meaningless. Faith – moral intensity. And writing (even for atheists) is a continual trial in a marked-out place – if not necessarily on Mount Moriah [biblical site of Abraham’s trial and near-sacrifice of Isaac]. “Let us walk towards the funnel, / into the bottle. With a faith / as vast as if a horizon were opening” – he formulates in Kalász Márton Próbafüzete [lit. Márton Kalász’s Notebook of Trials] – stressing, even through irony, an affirmation of faith in writing.
And who can say whether consciously or through instinctive intuition – yet in any case, this very strength of morality and faith already appears as a distinctive qualitative element in the poetry of the young Márton Kalász. It is not entirely without reason that his early career is associated with the stance of an untroubled genre poet or landscape poet, grounded in a fundamental tendency towards optimism; yes, it is true that his beginnings mostly depict the homely world of his Transdanubian birthplace; it is true that he writes colourful elegies born of an outward contemplation of the natural and material world; it is true that this sensuously held tone does not completely break off for a long time. Indeed, in a certain very broad sense, its continuity becomes ever more complex. Yes, the author of Hajnali szekerek (lit. Dawn Carts), Ünnep előtt (lit. Before the Feast), Változatok a reményre (lit. Variations on Hope) brings with him the novel enchantment of Impressionist lyricism – and with it the influence of Mihály Babits [major modernist poet], Gyula Illyés [poet, prose writer and public intellectual], József Erdélyi [lyric poet] and József Csorba [poet]. The demands of morality, respect for craft, and concision. Carts, feasts, weekdays and landscapes do not pass before him as mere incidental experiences; he continually returns to the earth, yet at the same time a sighing, suggestive voice within him plucks at experiences far removed from the ground, almost celestial; the world of objects and the domain of the soul cease to be rigidly distinct. Such a loosening and mutual approximation of things is, for some poets, sufficient reason for excess. In Márton Kalász, however, the empirical attitude and a metaphysical sense of life are fused by something enigmatic. In the linguistic compression, in the play between inner twilight and torrents of light, the cycle Az utolsó érintés (lit. The Last Touch) offers lavish analogies for the ultimate purposes of human existence.
The young Márton Kalász is both a devoted disciple and, at the same time, a follower of the classical tradition and at the same time, he seeks to expand his own limits. Is not his style, which disrupts the geometry of syntax, already a step of rebellion? And do not idyll and genre, in the increasingly piercing wounds they bear, already cry out – or laugh bitterly – in the timbre of the various “-isms”? “And elongated carts, ungainly yokes / set off within you – then scatter apart. / A hard bell-toll travels across the snow, / and among the willows the frost bursts into laughter” (Ha fölül ismét [lit. If Up There Again]).
The poet who is able to grant his impressions their own distinct air, and who meanwhile looks with ever sharper eyes upon the power-structures of stifling falsehood [a veiled reference to state-socialist propaganda and censorship in 1950s Hungary], is sooner or later compelled towards moral reflection. With Kalász, however, this is no coercion; it follows from his tension-filled disposition that – taking the desires of the civilised human being seriously – as a poet of faith in every sense, he must also anticipate from within all that the incessantly surging life had until then imposed upon him from without. Whatever he experiences, be it appearance or thought, the power of things, the world itself, seems increasingly to be arranged beyond the boundaries of what is merely visible. Arranged – or entangled? By turning this question into a recurring concern, he will later arrive at the delineation of the riddle’s mythological and philosophical nuances. For the moment, however, as a member of the so-called “1953 generation” [a cohort of Hungarian poets who came to prominence around the political thaw following Stalin’s death], formed – among others – by Margit Szécsi, Sándor Csoóri, József Tornai, and Béla Kondor [Hungarian painter and graphic artist, also considered for his poetic work], he seeks, with the intention of preserving colourism, the point of intersection between object and spirit. For the most part he paints in an elegiac mode, as is already disclosed by the title of his generational credo, A szökött ló elégiája (lit. Elegy of the Runaway Horse), a poem that sings of separation from the homeland of landscape.
Rilke observes that poems are not feelings, but experiences. And Kalász, as if learning from Rilke, seems to begin to recognise that the experiences and memories that have seeped into human perception and gesture must first become nameless and indistinguishable; only then can that rare moment arrive in which the poem arises. And this poem stands in the strictest dependence upon words. Exceeding its grammatical meaning, at times a single word may constitute an entire poem. How true is the lyrical intensification of which Kalász writes in Böjt (lit. Fast): “there are no small words!”.
External materiality, the spatially charged image, the internalisation of inspirations from the bodily world – all this condenses into an essence of experience and presupposes a metaphysics which, in the finished work, endows even the most complex thoughts with the freshly heard suggestiveness of sound and rhythm. Perhaps it is precisely because the poet suddenly feels concepts, senses the possibility of reflection through them, the thousand-branching paths of thought, the lack of permanence above a fragmented world, that the struck note on his musical instrument of song is now detached from its original causes, standing as a confession in its own right: a poem, with the constant security of lucid verbal economy, about how the wondrously discovered interconnections of reality conceal such complex significance, such demanding wisdom. It is this utterly individual resonance that determines the poet’s future music. Now the broken melodies, composed from the incurrent, supposedly eternal realms of existence, begin to rise, setting out in search of the most fitting form.
Where, then, does inspiration work? In language? Or on the far more tangible planes of reality? Or does the poem carve out its own interregnum in the unspoken abstraction of things? “I sense you: you stand outside for days. / In the devouring light / you gulp down a grey element, a grey landscape. / So, it suggests, you will understand yourself, / since you have long haunted the shelter, / and time and again an explosive force, a clamour / bursts up far away, in your stead, / for many furious onrushes.” We feel how this surging–stumbling intonation, in which instinct is underpinned by a cultivated poetic mind, is – through its realism, yet beyond realism – a reflection of the unknown, with every secret and every ruse of artistic formation (here above all of expressivity). Measure, pulse, emphasis, plastic delineation, the essential symbol distilled from sensation – all await absorption, as it were, into form, and then that unconditional beauty comes into being, one outstanding example of which is Költő a tengernél (lit. The Poet by the Sea).
If our dwelling is in the other, who is likewise nothing but restless seeking, self-searching, is it not rather an opposing totality, the earthly cosmos of objects, that offers solace to the soul in search of a home? Ultimately, it is objects that suggest meaning; not only are they far from being dull categories, they are endowed with significance in every manifestation. They remain, they can be grasped, and since they preserve the fossils of events, memories, destinies, sometimes, even in their mute silence, they act as spokespeople for entire lives. “The good flavour of my multiplicity is shattered, breaking up, with my blunt mind withering away another message” – the poet formulates in the cycle Hírek Árgyélusnak (lit. News for Árgyélus [Árgyélus: a fairy-tale prince figure from Hungarian folk tradition]).
How far removed from this is the Márton Kalász who once probed the external lessons of the senses? Everything that endows his art with greatness now begins to unfold. Now, when the poem opens up the sensory world of object and phenomenon to the boundless relations of thought. To the inherent beauty of the object Kalász adds the elusive nuances of attraction towards the unknown.
One of the great secrets of his poetry is vindicated in continual change; yet, like the certainty of renewal, fidelity shines in its distances: if we divide it into periods, it is clear that each new domain also condenses its own antecedents within itself; there is no period in whose emotional–stylistic genesis it would not be apparent how precious a component of this lyric is attachment and faith. Can it be doubted that the significance and archaism of the material world, the associations and reflections rooted in youthful atavisms, and the symbols that can be unravelled from mature experience, impelled the birth of the cycle News for Árgyélus? Be that as it may, this concise construction – with its neologisms, its fairy-tale and biblical allusions, its fondness for antiquity, its references to poetic tradition – is an entirely individual form. And what moods and distances are bridged by the poems’ peculiar word-weaving! What, seen from the perspective of this form, is distance – the span of thoughts and images – becomes, in the realm of the soul, a tormenting depth.
The poet who, once, received from fate and from nature a homeland of landscape articulated in an enchanting language, now – after the hundredfold orchestration of that dowry – appears as a poet who has not forgotten the emotions of lyrical thought, yet is sober, investigating the possible bonds between rationality and mysticism, and who thinks, almost exclusively, in cycles. From this point on, nearly every poem is subjected to the same test: at what degree of naturalness, and with what discipline of intellect, can the poem weave its sensuousness together with the daring associations of the mind? Having attained a voice of exceptional concision, Márton Kalász unfolds this density in his partly interconnected, partly autonomous cycles, as though by deepening his themes through a singular tendrilling of image and concept.
How a mature poet draws the imagination – the perceptibly ever-closer experiences of transcendence – into the outwardly lived experiences of curiosity: this, for instance, is one of the principal stakes of Az imádkozó sáska (lit. The Praying Mantis). From this point on – or even more so from Szállás (lit. Shelter), enriched by strange, at times bizarre, conceptual adventures – the poet’s urge for perpetual transformation seems inexhaustible. And it is perhaps not unfounded to suppose that around this time Márton Kalász truly realises that lyric poetry has no final word about life. His Pannonian habitus [referring to Hungary’s western/Transdanubian, “Pannonian” cultural landscape] is almost encircled by a northern, incisive clarity weighed down by gravity, and by a likewise northern, Germanic mysticism that intermittently glints within this clear gaze. It surrounds him, but does not destroy him. Even the furthest-reaching thought of Márton Kalász is characterised by a kind of vividness and personal tonality. “To give it wings,” he formulates in Sötét seb (lit. Dark Wound), “and to praise the Creator for having been able, for our sake, to blend thought with sensation…”
The modern poet, a prisoner of fragmentariness, if he does not wish to lose life itself (even in a stylistic sense), has but one option, even in despair – continuation: that is, each completed poem must be confessed again in a subsequent poem. It is not by chance that, in the repertoire of modern poets, continuation is in fact the ceaseless rectification of creation, and expiation. At the same time it is a compulsion that strikes at authenticity; the poet’s self-portrait must resemble as many faces of life as possible. What is at stake here is no less than a kind of magnetic hermeticism. A hermeticism, a considered enchantment seized from the unknown, which does not seek to close in upon itself, but to measure the truths taken from the world against one another. The spirit of Hölderlin repeatedly passes through Kalász’s lyric poetry – so that both author and reader may grow accustomed to the thought that the subtle, viable truths one gains of the human being are as numerous as the nervous systems that endure them. True, the soul’s adaptation cannot be separated from the duality whereby the body, whether as accomplice or rebel, serves history. How many corrosive, perpetual questions are raised, for instance, by the relation between the comprehensible and the incomprehensible, the temporal and the timeless? (Is it not precisely these stifling depths that are laid bare by A rózsafestő [The Painter of Roses] or Kezdő haláltánc [lit. Beginning Dance of Death]?)
Temporal and timeless? Into what might an individual life be raised between these extremes? Everything belongs together, whether one regards history as a programming error or as a divinely orchestrated flow of time – for the personality that reflects on the temporal and the timeless stores its experiences within this very concept. With the dream of infinity and the merciless awakening to facts. History: something which, somewhere, is one; yet its locations and details are different. Stepping into the arena of writing, Márton Kalász is soon touched by history, and from Éjféli körmenet (lit. Midnight Procession) onwards, the recurring theme in his work is war (or, put differently, a conflict that stands in opposition to all rational and moral logic). The battle of iron and the clash of ideas – that, too, is war. Yet the prey of terror, of the most brutal horrors – iron notwithstanding – is individual life; it either embodies blind forces, or is defeated by them. “There is no sign: there is a boundary. / And standing here now, in defence, I wonder whether in trouble – / was there hope for variants, were there horizons…?” – Kalász asks in Van Gogh kertjében (lit. In Van Gogh’s Garden). The way this dilemma here confronts existence is a grammatical tour de force. In its halting music and concision, it recalls Paul Celan, while in its philosophical grounding it evokes Hölderlin. What finds expression is the grammar of life’s questions – that complex, interruptive, abrasive speech which carries itself from intact hope to despair, from the festive occasions of faith to the everyday radiance of faith.
If this is both stimulant and remedy for the heart, then reason is incapable of reaching so far. Instead, its salvation lies in its own negation: by opening its boundaries to the demands of feeling, and by seeking to dissolve, in the realm of mystery, the anxieties of our age realised in numbers, calculations and automatisms, it looks for a sense of home there. For example, it turns itself towards God. Transposing the scattered worlds – that is, fragmentation and hard-won anxiety – into the mobile mystery of the pulse of life, namely into the world of writing, the poetic order that presupposes the ever-expanding nature of reality’s limits seeks the appropriate style, so that on the heights of form, both fragment and anxiety may become poetry. And let us not assume that grand prose, with its objectifying and integrating power, is essentially of another order: is not the mysterious spirit also present in the most resolute realism, in the concrete universal itself? In literature, once spoken, every thing is more than itself. Reality is never one-directional. Moreover, measured against the meaning of human life – a meaning that is essentially cast again and again into the same eternal longings – this wavering reality seems increasingly to be drawn towards the irrational.
The twentieth century – this total historical age – appears above all as a battlefield cut in two, where, even as he yearns for unity, humanity again and again separates worlds from one another; meanwhile the century pours out examples like a suppurating body. We see how the everyday actions of a person hungry for transcendence run aground in mud, and how the mind that wishes to explain the world in its entirety becomes the very idea of baseness. It is in this absurdity that we must live. And from it spring forth Márton Kalász’s prose works – alongside a period in which, temporarily setting poetry aside, he writes a remarkable fairy-tale novel, Morgató (lit. Grumbler), and publishes his essays and studies in Atossza királynő álma (lit. The Dream of Queen Atossa). And since his stay in Berlin coincides with a “day of shame”, the inauguration of die Berliner Mauer, the wall that split the city in two, he has ample memories of why and for what the untamed, passionate witnesses of history waited, from 1961 until 1989.
The homely and dramatic world of Téli bárány (lit. Winter Lamb) evokes in prose that micro-environment where “home, or elsewhere; where the bridge, in the meantime, became again a place of crossing” (Honvágy [lit. Homesickness]). The novel is a bridge between two entities within a single country – the mentality, heritage, and culture of Hungarians and of the German minority in Hungary. Within the framework of symbolic prose and memory, its narrative records and recomposes how history acts upon the inhabitants of a minority village.
By contrast, Tizedelőcédulák (lit. Decimation Slips) is anything but novelistic: in its laconic passages, shaded by documents, it depicts the hard-to-forgive motives of misdirected power, and the historical suffering inflicted upon individual ethnic groups, stoked by a madness that, conceived in advance in the lofty spheres of politics, seized control. The tragedy narrated in Decimation Slips in fact detaches itself, willingly or unwillingly, from its characters, and lives on as a warning, a commanding historical thought: it is always some form of consciousness, exalted to an inappropriately “higher” role, that makes it possible for the club clenched in Cain’s hand to strike again and again.
The words of Márton Kalász – to use one of his frequently employed expressions – carry into his lyric poetry the scent of the clod, the earth, the deciphered sounds of nature, the presence of animals (“Truth arrives, as a horse does by morning”), the properties of plants. These words possess a nervous vibration; they are compartments of historical and literary moods. His poetry finds its enchantment in homely events no less than in the realms of the heavens. With him, God cannot be disregarded – yet neither can God’s smallest creatures be ignored: a single walnut, a single onion, for these too serve as the raw material of the poem. With equal assurance he steps before God (“Homecoming to God is history – / we sometimes still teach so. Anyone who, / even if I decay within it, stood their ground and was justified, / the reflection of our face will one day be seen above upon its judges”), and into the earthly trials of vital force (“gather life, wait for it together”). It is a further question how great a part the historical suffocation of the East-Central European individual plays in the poet’s vision of history.
Not to mock the dissolution of judgement in love – neither by brute force, nor by intellect, nor by vocabulary: whether this is, for a Hungarian poet, a peerless stance, and how much in it belongs to taste, to a turning towards God, to hope – remains, under the signboard of lyrical mysteries, the contingency of individuality. All the same, Kalász’s more recent writings, often taking poetry itself as their subject, survey the field with integrity: from Joseph Brodsky to Tomas Venclova, from an eminent figure or two of contemporary German lyric poetry to the Swede Tomas Tranströmer, he lives in an eminent inner union with many masters of world poetry, by virtue of temperament or of subject. This, too, is a symbol, for in the end versification itself is nothing other than union, interweaving – the exciting play in language of conjoined feelings and thoughts, of oppositions and parallels. A play whose outcome is governed, at times, by diversity, and at others, by depth. “Where has it gone, what has it become within us – a power of the soul?” – he asks in Homesickness.
See: everything begins and ends in secrets. And the poet remains faithful. Even if he arrives at that kind of metaphysical joy which almost seduces one with the promise of totality – a joy forged from the (now ornate, now barren, now artful, now unadorned) dignity of poetry that points towards ultimate causes, and from the irony of that dignity – it would still be an act of infidelity not to roll up his sleeves for the next step.
[2013]