István Kovács is a writer, poet, literary translator, editor, historian and cultural diplomat. At the Ferenc II Rákóczi Secondary School, he studied under such distinguished teachers as Géza Bodolay [b. 1957, theatre director and translator], Béla G. Németh [1930–2007, literary historian], Zoltán Mádhy [1929–2006, literary historian and critic] and Andor Szerdahelyi [1931–2008, writer and literary critic]. As a student of history and Polish at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), he lived in the legendary Eötvös College [an elite residence and intellectual workshop for outstanding students]. There he encountered Tadeusz Różewicz, then a visiting student, whose works he was already translating. During this period, he also befriended József Utassy [1941–2010, poet and translator], and was present when Utassy first recited his poem Zúg a március (lit. March Roars) on Hungary’s national day 15 March 1968.
Kovács wrote his first poem in November 1965. In his early years he composed his poems in his head, committing them to paper only once he deemed them complete. Awarded a scholarship to Warsaw, he also produced several poems there. In September 1966, Ferenc Kiss [1939–2010, literary historian and critic], a research fellow at the Institute for Literary Studies of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, wrote him a long letter praising the poems Kovács had sent for review, encouraging the young poet to pursue his vocation. In the autumn of that same year, Endre Rózsa [1941–1995, poet] invited him to contribute to an anthology. At their first meeting six young poets gathered; only then did Kovács learn that nine poets would ultimately be represented. They went on to form the legendary group known in Hungarian literary history as the ‘Kilencek’ (lit. ‘The Nine’): alongside the youngest, István Kovács, its members were József Utassy; János Oláh, Benedek Kiss, József Konczek, Imre Péntek (Molnár), László Győry, Endre Rózsa, and Katalin Mezey. They chose János Angyal [1943–2011, poet and literary editor] as their editor.
The anthology’s title was first proposed as Ördögfing (lit. Devil’s Fart), then Fehér sapkában (lit. In a White Cap), before they settled on Elérhetetlen föld (lit. Unattainable Soil), after a poem by János Oláh. Following three years of wrangling with publishers, the book finally appeared at Christmas 1969, introduced by László Nagy [1925–1978, one of the foremost poets of twentieth-century Hungary]. Leading critics and literary historians such as Mihály Czine, Mihály Ilia, András Görömbei, Zoltán Kenyeres, Lóránt Kabdebó, and Győző Határ [1914–2006, writer, poet, translator, and émigré intellectual] received it with enthusiasm and urged the poets to continue.
After three years of rejection, Kovács’s first individual volume was at last published: Havon forgó ég (lit. Sky Whirling on Snow, 1973), followed by Ördöglakat (lit. Trick Lock, 1982), Véset (lit. Engraving, 1985), A tér töredékei (lit. Fragments of Space, 1995), Kézmozdulat a szürkületben (lit. A Gesture in the Twilight, 2004), and Az idő torkában (lit. In the Maw of Time, 2007).
His novel A Gyermekkor tündöklete (lit. The Radiance of Childhood) went through several editions and was adapted into a feature film under the title Budakeszi srácok (lit. The Boys of Budakeszi) in 2006. His most recent poetry collection, published in 2018, bears the striking title Shakespeare a Corvin közben (lit. Shakespeare in Corvin Lane [Corvin köz was a symbolic site of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution]). Alongside his own creative work, numerous translations by Kovács have also been published both in Hungary and abroad.
Throughout his varied life and rich, many-sided creative career, István Kovács approached his own poetry with such modesty – so little concerned with personal advancement or self-realisation, and so wholly devoted to service in the noblest sense – that his verse seemed always to recede into the background. Yet the reader perceives his reticence rather as a mastery of condensation, a striking economy of image and concept. The critical reception, while acknowledging the wealth of his life and oeuvre, has also revealed the painful, oppressive sense of enforced waiting that separated the volumes from one another in a period still too close to be called history. The hard-won publication of anthology of ‘The Nine’ seems, in retrospect, to have determined the fate of each individual career in the light of Hungary’s cultural politics.
The cycles of Kovács’s volumes each bring a distinct set of problems to the fore; yet taken together, in lyrical concert, they define his poetry from an ontological perspective. This is above all characteristic of his vision of history, his interpretation of historical process. His conception of history, his very preoccupation with historicity, with time and existence, opens his poetry to the receptive, interpretive reading of the audience. His volume Montaigne toronyszobájában (lit. In Montaigne’s Tower Room) points towards this concern: eternity and the instantaneous moment alike preoccupy him; he strives for clarity in understanding the epochs, events, and moments that determine both the perennial and the passing condition of humanity.
László Füzi warns, in his review of Fragments of Space against “misreadings” that might reduce Kovács’s poetry to mere social, political or historical commentary “I believe it can be said that István Kovács lived through history as a true existential experience, and that the consequence of this was that, as both poet and researcher, he has examined the facts, features and laws of history.” – (László Füzi: A lét: bomló emlékezet [lit. Being: Disintegrating Memory] Tiszatáj, 1995/9).
“Historical time is immeasurable”, Kovács himself writes in Térkép (lit. Map): the human being pierced by the clock hands, both helpless victim of history and its shaper, is assembled from concrete events into infinity. History is a series of struggles; humankind turns the earth into a military map – an image to which Kovács returns repeatedly, at once a reflective glance back and a protest against physical, intellectual and moral destruction.
Now hope, now disappointment, now fine irony predominates in his judgements: history cannot be replayed, and the questions arise – can one learn from it? Are repetitions inevitable? Is “the freedom of suicides”, from Sírvers Krzysztof Kamil Baczyńskinak (lit. Epitaph for Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński) truly ours? Can one protest against the intolerability of existence? One of the most beautiful poems of the volume, A tér töredékei (lit. Fragments of Space), offers a kind of answer: “The attic too may become a temple hall, / and the matchstick burning to our fingernails, an eternal lamp.”
Here too, thus too, the fullness of existence, the sacred, may become a lived experience. Elsewhere, his critique of the age is woven into the “tales” and melodies of intertexts, so that the woven fabric of word and sound may disclose its secret, becoming spark and sign. As Kovács once put it: “I do not believe that with a damaged, draughty historical consciousness we can perform the tasks of the present; a purely materialist outlook – without the disturbance of individual awareness – can hardly carry society over the difficulties that arise.” (András Görömbei: „Nem ismerjük eléggé egymás kultúráját” Beszélgetés Kovács Istvánnal [lit. “We Do Not Know Each Other’s Cultures Well Enough”, interview with István Kovács], in Kérdések és válaszok: tizenhét interjú a hetdvenes évekből [lit. Questions and Answers: seventeen interviews from the seventies], Lakitelek, 1994).
Reflecting on his works, Görömbei observed: “The poet is aided by the historian towards a more complex vision, while the historian is assisted by the poet towards a more far-reaching perspective and a linguistic power capable of seeing and showing phenomena in their wholeness.” – A költő és a történelem (lit. The Poet and History), Magyar Napló, 2005/8).
With this complex vision, István Kovács approaches the dilemmas of 1848–49 [the Hungarian Revolution and War of Independence against Habsburg rule], both as historian and as poet. His monograph on General Józef Bem [Polish general, 1794–1850, national hero of both Poland and Hungary], and his study „Mindvégig veletek voltunk.” Lengyelek a magyar szabadságharcban (lit. “We Were With You to the Very End.” The Poles in the Hungarian War of Independence), also published in Polish, stand alongside memorable poems inspired by this theme that open broad historical perspectives (Világos, 1849, Petőfi, Görgei). In Petőfi, a line such as “In his unmarked grave the dead will not sing” can also be read as an allusion to 1956 [the Hungarian Revolution crushed by Soviet tanks].
The poem Görgei and his cycle of ‘soldier-poems’ repeatedly emphasise respect for victims and heroes alike. Already in the poems dealing with the events of 1848–49 one can discern the note of personal confession that reaches full intensity in those linked to the Second World War and to 1956. The absence of a father lost to war, the daily dramas, the children forced to adulthood in an instant – these existential experiences shape The Radiance of Childhood (both the novel and the poem), as well as his poetry on 1956. Works such as Kultusz-évek drámája (lit. The Drama of the Cult Years [evoking the Stalinist cult of personality in Hungary]) and A csönd ideje (lit. The Time of Silence [an allusion to the repressive post-1956 Kádár era]) recall the suffocating atmosphere of those decades. The unresolved confrontation with the past, the many “unsettled accounts” demand not only historical but personal reckoning.
Kovács captures tragedy with rare sensitivity and refinement, often in its very naturalness, whether in his poems of 1848, of war, of 1956, or in reflective verse facing the burden of mortality. His precisely crafted imagery and masterly rhythms draw the reader’s attention, as in Amíg a hó elolvad (lit. Until the Snow Melts) and Katyiń fekete könyve (lit. The Black Book of Katyn [on the 1940 Soviet massacre of Polish officers]). These poems highlight the importance of protest and moral resolve against dishonour, oppression, crippling violence and subjugation.
At the same time, they underscore the central theme of memory and remembrance in Kovács’s poetry. In its historical dimension, this entails remembrance of noble deeds and evil ones, of perpetrators and victims, of guilty victims and victims who were once perpetrators. Each memory-image is itself a memento, often linked with the motif of the grave, the gravestone, the column – symbols of the finitude of human life – which strengthen this character of memorial witness. The emphases of remembrance reveal too that history is not past: it embraces all times simultaneously. Thus, in Kovács’s lyric voice, history is not linear but is seen as historical memory itself – contemplating the future through the gaze of the present into the past – figured as a journey between concrete and abstractly general, individual and collective human moments, existential experiences and questions. From this perspective, Kovács appears also as a chronicler of human existence in its individual, communal and universal sense. As the poet Gáspár Nagy [1949–2007, prominent voice of Hungarian dissent poetry] remarked: “He is relentless, for he has bound himself as chronicler of past and present, for he records and refuses to forget.” (Gáspár Nagy, Időzített örökmécses… [lit. Time-Bomb Eternal Flame…], in Szavak a rengetegből [lit. Words from the Wilderness], Szeged, 2004.
In his poems, the human being shaped by history and the bloodstained history shaped by humanity, the fate of the individual and the community are inextricably entwined, coupled with visionary intensity, with the inner compulsion to speak and to act, and with the imperative to seek truth.
Kovács thinks in perspectives, scanning past and future alike, thus easing the suffocating immediacy of the present. Can historical time be reversed, measured? Is humanity the victim of time itself, or of its own self-created physical and spiritual aggressions, its wars? The struggle with time brings together multiple temporal planes: historical time is coupled with inner time “out of joint”. While journeys through historical time may invite calculation, they also bear the stamp of unpredictability, whether as the consequence of a “higher will” or of the peculiarities of human nature itself. Alongside unceasing, unstoppable time, his poetry also evokes fragmented time surviving only in traces, and the image of “eternal” time (Úton-úttalanság [lit. Path and Pathlessness]; Avar-induló [lit. Avar March]).
As Gábor Nagy, literary historian and critic observes, “He does not conceive of history simply as a chain of events, nor of literature as merely its closest ‘co-author’; rather, he perceives history as the peculiar movement of existence itself.” (A történelem örökmécse [lit. The Eternal Flame of History], Új Könyvpiac, September 2007). Existential and ontological questions preoccupy him; he does not seek to provide absolute answers but emphasises instead the necessity of reflection. Though he reflects on the world around him – whether narrow or expansive – his poetry is not addressed to the moment, nor written for the moment. He is engaged by beginnings and endings, yet it is the process itself, and the experience of being within the process, that becomes decisive: a presence filled with positive values, guided by an ethical order presumed, or at least desired, to dwell within all.
“In the rhyme-pairs of birth and death / divided by place-names”, he discerns parallels between heroic birth and rebuilding, which may be read as counter-movements, counter-actions against destruction, extinction, national or universal death. The condition that defines the quality of existence – the concept of freedom, its forms, its realisations, its possibilities – he probes in many of his poems. With bold unmasking clarity, he exposes the difference between genuine freedom and illusory freedom: between “a square metre” of liberty or the martyr’s inheritance of freedom, and the semblance of freedom of life “beyond the bars”, “in the jaws of false arc-lamps” (Vaskönnyek [lit. Iron Tears]).
In the relation of historicity and time, his subtle poetic devices confront the reader with both the apparent ephemerality and the true perspectives of historical events, showing why an event becomes an existential question. Thus, the Segesvári éjszaka (lit. Night at Segesvár [alluding to the 1849 battlefield where Hungary’s national poet Sándor Petőfi vanished in combat]) conveys a “a silence beyond existence” that menacingly transcends the specific event, casting the threat to fundamental human values into the spotlight.
Existential questions that define human being are captured with masterly concision, as in Robespierre. He asks his questions with unsparing directness, yet in the purest poetry, as in Temetheted-e (lit. Can You Bury It?) or Path and Pathlessness.
The volume Tükröződések (lit. Reflections) too sets the human demand for absolute, pure being against the fractured consciousness of the present, the lived experience of uncertainty. His ontological, metaphysical prose-poems bear “Disturbing historical messages for our time, in an age of rapid decline of individuality and of the personal.” (Gáspár Nagy, Time-Bomb Eternal Lamp). It may indeed be these associative, broadly interpretable prose-poems that most strikingly draw attention to Kovács’s mastery of form and his linguistic richness.
For one living in Central Europe, reflection on neighbours and former or present communities of fate is almost natural. Yet István Kovács did not choose either of the two all too familiar modes of such reflection – neither the hatred and mutual recrimination that leads to conflict, nor the dreaminess that dissolves into empty ideals – but opted instead for action in the service of friendship. His visionary poems emphasise precisely this need for action, this imperative; they confront the reader with the consequences of its absence. In his two volumes A barátság anatómiája I–II (lit. The Anatomy of Friendship), he traces this action, its effects and consequences, within the Polish–Hungarian relationship. He himself might well be the subject of a chapter in such a book.
His work in cultural diplomacy has given rise to academic programmes, exhibitions, statues, memorials, books and translations. As historian and writer, he has published numerous studies on Polish–Hungarian themes; among his volumes one might mention Bem apó (lit. Father Bem [on General Józef Bem]), Hamuban csillogó gyémánt (lit. Diamond Gleaming in Ashes), A légió (lit. The Legion), “We Were With You to the Very End…”, Robogás a nyárba (lit. Rushing into Summer), Világok töréspontján (lit. At the Fracture of Worlds), and The Anatomy of Friendship I–II.
Kovács’s Polish-themed poems are as integral to his poetry as these works are to his historical and diplomatic activity. Frequently, a shared or parallel drama, a common catharsis, is easier to understand and to process when it is seen not through the lens of oneself or one’s own community alone. Thus, his Polish poems also lead towards the questions of national existence, self-knowledge, dignity, endurance, and cultural memory.
Friendship, the kinship of souls, also finds expression in Kovács’s relations with the kindred arts, with fellow artists and scholars. He too singles out poets, violinists, minstrels, scholars (Kobzos Kiss Tamás Geographiai szótára [lit. Tamás Kobzos Kiss’s Geographical Dictionary – Kobzos Kiss, 1950–2015, was a Hungarian singer and performer of early music]), together with certain filmmakers and visual artists. Reception, friendship, shared intellectual values and emotional bonds are themselves transfigured into poetry. Several of these poems may be read as lyrical summations of existence, highlighting the rich imagery and musicality of Kovács’s verse (Szobor-triptichon Szervátiusz Tibor műtermében [lit. Sculptural Triptych in Tibor Szervátiusz’s Studio – Szervátiusz, 1930–2018, was a Transylvanian-Hungarian sculptor]; Kolozsvári Krisztus [lit. Christ of Cluj]; Tamási Áron [lit. Áron Tamási] – the Transylvanian Hungarian writer, 1897–1966; Végakarat [lit. Last Will]).
His synthesising poems paint the image of confrontation and facing-up which, like the reflection in the mirror in the morning, can be seen only by ourselves, and by no one else. Such are the summations that declare: “I would like to be so much myself / that no one could howl with me.” (Üvöltés [lit. Howl]); “I rear up, / so that through the fissures / looking into myself I may look out...” – (In the Maw of Time). Or the summations that draw parallels, in A közel és a távolban (lit. In the Near and the Far), between fairy tale and history, between the fears of childhood and adulthood; or express with minimalist drama the stark assertion: “I live.” (Ablakba tett önarckép – decemberben [lit. Self-Portrait Placed in the Window – in December).
One might also mention the grief contained in Sky Whirling on Snow, or the catharses brought by children (Térelválasztás [lit. Partition]; Szél fúj [lit. The Wind Blows]; Orsika levélrajza alá [lit. Under Orsika’s Letter-Drawing]). We might suppose that in these poems Kovács’s confessional voice reaches his most intimate circles. Yet in truth it is here, perhaps, that poetry itself dwells – in this strange reflection that reveals the singular, the human, the confluence of times and spaces – showing that human life is indeed “not a tense of the verb”, and that “all is poetry, / thus silence is verse too, / a hymn, / an infinite poem...” (Sted).
(2013)