Gábor Farkas: Immanent and Created Reality - The Poetry of János Szentmártoni
Szentmártoni János’s poetry is marked both by the instinct for confession and by the consciousness of poetic construction. “I believe I can recognise the tenacious continuity of confession from poem to poem behind the deceptively whitewashed wall of stylistic and formal certainty”, writes Kinga Erős about the poet, adding: “[to this poetry] the compulsion to confess is joined in such a way that the outcome is not rigid formal verse, but a lyricism that points to the fact that the human being is a dramatic creature who can be elevated by the sacred everyday.” [1] In other words, literature – for creator and reader alike – is a hierophanic time (to use Mircea Eliade’s term), an ascent, or more precisely a rising-above the domain and time of the everyday – a transcendent realm. This seems to contradict the immanent personal quality that already appears in Szentmártoni János’s early poems, namely that the poet’s “inspirational soil is the most directly lived, universally known everyday experience” [2], in the words of Miklós Fodor. Regarding A másik apa (The Other Father, Szentmártoni’s most frequently reviewed volume so far), Fodor also points out that in this experiential poetry, which balances “the diversity of objectivity” and “the multilayered nature of subjectivity”, the author is kept in a state of constant dramatic tension by “the possibility of an artist’s fate striving to break away from everydayness.” Thus, both a lyricism pointing from immanent reality towards an internally created transcendent reality and an objective experiential lyricism characterise Szentmártoni’s poetics.
The fixation of the immanent experience of being reveals its significance precisely in what it cannot fix, in what must take shape within the recipient: personality. For all objectification – from Babits through the poetry of Radnóti and Ágnes Nemes Nagy, all the way to the poets of the newest generation, such as Noémi László – always focuses on the subject. Put differently: the objectified experiential layer ultimately renders the subject, the personality, visible. The objectification of everyday life as an experience of being simultaneously creates distance in the subject and, in the end, diverts attention from the essence. This is precisely what the already quoted Miklós Fodor reproaches as a deficiency in the poems of János Szentmártoni, yet he immediately adds that “this deficiency is the deficiency of essence. We therefore cannot say that the essence is absent. The essence is present as absence. As distancing.” [3] In this objectified medium, the subject nevertheless attempts to exist lyrically; every experience – from adolescent rebellion through love and marriage to the lived experience of fatherhood – carries this weight, as in Kosztolányi: “I could not find what I wanted / The treasure for which I perished / My place in the world is granted / My heavenly home has vanished.” – writes the poetic predecessor in Boldog, szomorú dal (Dezső Kosztolányi: Happy, Heartbroken Song, translated by Edit Gálla). “I set out on every road, / searching for her in wind and grass”, “I take a deep breath, I set out / toward the depth of her absence” (Hiánya mélye felé [Toward the Depth of Her Absence]).
What do the objects and experiences, created to become reality by this lyric poetry reveal? Once again, in the reviewer’s words: “the human being moving parallel with–in opposition to hard everyday life, who wishes to show himself within the force field of a firm sense of truth and ethical–moral maturity.” [4] As a poet, therefore, he makes the essence visible – and the essence is precisely absence: like Ulysses, tossed alone upon the sea, clinging solely to the hope of homecoming. For János Szentmártoni, the poem thus becomes a garment, a pseudo-garment, a hiding place within metaphor, “in which [the subject], amid the blurriness of any scenery, looks out at us: as a child, as an adult, philosophically, vulnerably–arrogantly even.” [5] And the scenery of these roles is everyday life, together with the objects of everyday life. The recipient need only be careful about what they focus on within this lyrical medium: the scenery, the constructed roles, or the message. And the message, returning again and again from poem to poem, from volume to volume, is homecoming – sometimes in a figurative sense, evoked by mythological heroes, sometimes expressed concretely, stripped of symbols and metaphors. In the poetry of János Szentmártoni, this does not signify an abstract process of finding oneself, but rather the desire for actual arrival among one’s loved ones. “I invent my life, / so that I may have a past, / and some image of a future” writes the poet in his confessional poem Vers előtt (Before the Poem), and here life simultaneously means the time span from birth to death and the experiential medium and assemblage of objects that determine our lives throughout. These experiences and objects belong to our roles: the vulnerable and obedient child, the rebellious adolescent, the fiancé, the husband, the family father, and the poet. In this respect – again recalling the above-mentioned poem by Kosztolányi – our roles also arise from our compulsions to conform, which may then conceal the essence, the “treasure.”
The sensation formed by sight, and the poem-reality built from it – often all three together (sight–sensation–poetic space) carry the message in the poetry of János Szentmártoni: “autumn marched in colorful carpets, / like a Persian caravan, / birds wheeled within it:” – this was the sight so far – “mysterious, black jewels… / I did not care who had embezzled how much and when, / who had raped, robbed, / struck someone down / last night,” – this is the sensation attached to it, and finally the fragments of poem-reality: “I trudged for my daughter up the well-worn Tétény stairs, / panting a little, since after eight years’ / soot of cigarettes / and two knee surgeries walking has become / more difficult,” (25 évesen amikor hazafelé mentem [At Twenty-Five, When I Was Walking Home]). What the lyrical self distances itself from, and what it is bound to, both become visible in these lines. In effect, the experience of being is attuned here to consciousness of one’s role and to poetic space.
A good example of the interweaving of sight, sensation, and the interpretation of existence is Patkánykeringő (Rat Dance). The everyday, almost trivial event (“Recently I came upon a decapitated rat in the yard.”) nevertheless becomes the poem’s surreal opening image. As a sight, it already constructs the sensation of disgust within the recipient. The questions that follow, however, rather abstract away from the sensation, as if suggesting that we should look behind things and not judge on the basis of visual impact (“How did it get there? And how did it lose its head? / Did its companions gnaw it off? Or a cat? / Or did the neighbor’s shovel slice it off, / then fling it over to me, just to amuse me?”). These questions already redirect the recipient’s focus toward thought, the self, and the interpretation of being and selfhood: “and I do not even ask whose corpse it is. / For I feel that it fell out there from me. (…) and I kept questioning how the hell / I ended up under myself again? / Under everything I had been building for more than ten years? (…) So here it is: the bricks have loosened, / and onto the stones has turned a headless rat.” Indirectly, this is the voice of József Attila’s “meglett ember” (“fully formed man”), or we may again think of Kosztolányi’s “treasure.” [SPK1] Overall, it can be said that – in the words of the reviewer Tamás Halmai – what takes shape in the poem is “the anthropology of the experience of loneliness and alienation, the psychology of searching, distrust and uncertainty,” [6] as a seeker attitude.
“Szentmártoni has much to say” [7] – notes Tamás Prágai in connection with the poet’s second volume, Madárjós (Bird Augur). Self-disclosure, interpretation of existence – approached from another angle: an approximating perspective and abstraction. All this is the poetry of János Szentmártoni. Reality-creation and a sense of lack. Personalness and transcendence. Along these axes Szentmártoni János’s poems take shape – within a poetic world built in the tension of distancing and approaching. In a certain sense, his poetry has ontological depth, since within it “against the temptation of a loneliness that threatens the entire existence in the present, family, a personal small world that can be shaped into homeliness, and love that binds people to one another offer” [8] – in the sense of Nagy László – the “other shore” as the only humane possibility. In this way, he is connected to the lyrical tradition represented in Hungarian literature by the names of Gyula Illyés, Mihály Babits, and László Nagy.
[2016]
[1] ERŐS Kinga, „Most fölemelnek szent hétköznapok" (Now I am lifted up by holy weekdays). Bárka, 2007/1.
[2] FODOR Miklós, Szentmártoni János: A másik apa (The other father). Kortárs, 2007/1.
[3] FODOR Miklós, u.o.
[4] KALÁSZ Márton, Szentmártoni János: Itt, a papíron (Here, on paper). Kortárs, 2002/1.
[5] KALÁSZ Márton, u.o.
[6] HALMAI Tamás,Ulüsszesz szomja (The thirst of Ulysses). Szentmártoni János: Ballada hétköznapi díszletekkel. Bárka, 2011/1.
[7] PRÁGAI Tamás, “Tengerről jő majd halálom" (My death will come from the sea). Napút, 1999/1.
[8] PAPP Endre, A gazda bekeríti a házat (The farmer fences in the house). Irodalmi Jelen, 2006/May