Ferenc Buda (b. 3 November 1936) was born on the very night that Dezső Kosztolányi [Hungarian modernist poet and prose writer] died. He was almost exactly twenty years old when the 1956 Hungarian Revolution was crushed by Soviet tanks. Of the two consciously acknowledged traditions marking his life, it was this latter event that more decisively shaped his path, all the more so because he was later put on trial and sentenced for the poems he wrote in the aftermath of the revolution. As he recalled: “We were twenty in 1956. I was in my third semester at the university in Debrecen. They put me on trial for a few poems, sentenced me to one year, and I served it. I was young, strong; prison did not break me, but I had to begin everything again.”
The year spent in prison also influenced the formation of his poetry. He entered a world in which, against all external pressures, one had to construct and assert an inner realm. It was here that he truly learned to hate power, any form of power exercised over others. The experience of 1956 remained a constant presence throughout his career. In Állampuszta [a rural prison and labour camp], he composed a cycle substantial enough to fill a volume: Falak könyve (lit. The Book of Walls). The work reveals the tension between the longing for wholeness and the condition of humiliation and confinement. It confronts the demand for completeness (so characteristic of the poetry of Attila József [one of the major Hungarian modernist poets]) with the constraints of harsh reality, formulating along the way a judgement of historical weight on the emerging new order.
He began by invoking a model, in effect recreating the poetic world of Attila József, setting his own world in opposition to the world of power: “You cannot be wise, / so cast aside your accusations, / and since you are human, / do not repeat your rightful faults.”
Then he confronted the command to “weighing oneself with the universe” (a reference to Attila József’s Ars poetica) with the reality of Állampuszta: “Work, drink, eat, / and lie down by ten at night. / The metallic taste of fear / reaches the tip of your tongue.”
Buda’s prison poems could only be published in 1989, yet they are connected to his first volume Füvek példája (lit. The Example of Grass, 1963), which already revealed the burdens of personal self-discovery at the outset of his poetic career. The poems in this collection indicate that, alongside the classical Hungarian literary tradition, the avant-garde also played a formative role in shaping Ferenc Buda’s poetic world. At the same time, the volume articulated an ethical imperative of commitment and responsibility: “the example of grass gives me strength, / and among horizons rising sky-high / I wish only to work, even in dreams, / to work with adult responsibility, / with iron-ladder will braced against the earth, / lifting my head like the grasses, the green soldiers”. These lines, once again recalling the influence of Attila József, appear in the title poem of The Example of Grass.
The clash of ideal and reality can also be observed in the volume Ébresszen aranysíp (lit. Let the Golden Whistle Awaken Me, 1970). Forms of self-testimony were already present in his poetry at this point, together with the constant tensions and struggles that moved from life into verse. These are expressed with characteristic directness in the poem Roham (lit. Assault), whose confessional, self-descriptive lines could stand as the motto of any anthology of Ferenc Buda’s verse: “With clear conscience and a ready mind / I stand here, unarmed. I have not softened, / have not grown mild, and no compromise today. / Our abyss-life is ceaseless struggle / for joy, for what remains of youth. / Without stubborn faith it cannot be done. Without us, / who would usher in the dawn? I swear / by the power of grasses and leaves. // Flourish, liberation.”
Ferenc Buda’s life was deeply shaped by 1956 and by his steadfast loyalty to its legacy: by the university studies interrupted and only later completed, by years of searching for direction, by his late settlement in Kecskemét [a regional cultural centre in central Hungary], and by his continual stance of opposition. In the note he later wrote to accompany his poems on 1956, he stated: “At the moment of my release, any desire for revenge – if I ever harboured such a thing – was extinguished in me at once. I survived what happened. I have no personal accounts to settle with anyone. I suffer no want, I am surrounded by respect. Yet I have waited ever since for the restoration of justice.”
Constraints, burdens and commitments appear on one side – yet on the other, there is always the desire to step beyond them. We read in the poem Zöld ág (lit. Green Branch): “To fly on wings? / Where to? / To what place? / I am chopping wood for kindling, / winter will soon be here.”
The desire for flight also appears in one of his haiku: “To fly – to where? / A frightened bird crouches / on a cracked eggshell.” This yearning to step out, to break away, seems to echo back to the Kosztolányi tradition [Dezső Kosztolányi, Hungarian modernist poet of childhood nostalgia and existential subtlety]. This is reinforced by the longing that breaks to the surface in the poem Lennék kisgyermek (lit. If Only I Were a Child): “Something, nevertheless, broke off midway. / Once a year at least one should play – / to go sledding in winter, to swim in summer, / to perch on a bending cherry branch.”
Buda’s most frequently used expression, his “keyword”, is the ‘heart’. He does not use it in the same sense as so many others before him – for instance Attila József in the poem beginning Áldalak búval, vigalommal... (I Bless You with Sorrow and with Joy [a canonical poem of love and emotional duality]) – although of course it appears as an image of love as well, as in Buda’s well-known poem Ne rejtőzz el (lit. Do Not Hide): “You rattle inside my heart / and smooth yourself into my palm”. Yet he also uses the word in a broader sense, as a representative of the whole human being, of the full undertaking of one’s humanity. Two examples out of many: “Loaded to the heart with memory / I listen to the doves cooing outside” in Az ember olykor (lit. At Times the Human Being); and “Snow falls on my homeland, / rising to my ankles, to my knees, to my waist, / to my heart” in Havazás (lit. Snowfall).
Opposed to the heart as the symbol of wholeness, the representative of a manufactured, artificial world appears in the image of the artificial heart:
“Synthetic stone. Synthetic silk: / Artificial heart. Artificial honey. Artificial flower. / Surgery and surgically altered.” in the poem Civilizáció (lit. Civilisation).
From here we can understand the perpetual inclination to take stock, the impulse to reckon with oneself. This derives from the fact that between human beings and nature, and between human beings and history, something is always intervening. As Buda puts it: “…here someone / always tangles everything, / whispers across it”. A natural relationship between them cannot simply arise. It is no coincidence that I mention nature and history together: Buda continues to live within both.
His larger compositions – such as Tanya-hazám (lit. My Farmstead Homeland), Árvaföld (lit. Orphaned Land), and Himnusz haza (lit. Hymn Home) – are all tied to the landscape. Yet this statement is still too general and must be made precise: all of them are connected to the Great Hungarian Plain, the Alföld, and within it specifically to the Kiskunság region. He has spoken about this as well:
“I am certain that the Supreme Power in whom I believe also intended a role for me – and consequently a place, a stage upon which my story may unfold,” he said in an interview. “It is undeniable that my elemental attachment to the Great Hungarian Plain owes a great deal to the fact that I was born and raised in Debrecen, even though I always longed at times for more undulating landscapes – and that the greater part of our life has been spent in Kecskemét. Here I developed rich human relationships, I was welcomed from the start, and I in turn took this region into myself. Yet this alone is not sufficient explanation, for many people live their entire lives in a place from which they continually yearn to escape, where they never feel at home. Why then, why… There must be something formed earlier, something that preceded my own life by generations.”
What might provide such a bond to a landscape even before one’s life begins? No one should assume any irrational or supernatural explanation; if anything, it concerns the experience of the past and the conscious recognition of one’s connection to it. And if we return to the poems themselves, we see that these are not simply “landscape poems”. They speak also of other matters: My Farmstead Homeland speaks of the people living in the landscape, Orphaned Land speaks of uncertainty, Hymn Home speaks of history.
Alongside these, images and declarations – let two examples from My Farmstead Homeland stand here. The summary statement of the poem reads: “Wordless earth, you endure everything”. For how long, we may ask. And another image: “My younger sister, blackthorn bush / dyed with blood / what will become of us? / What will perish with us?”
This is one of Buda’s most beautiful natural images, and it opens itself to manifold interpretations. He regards humanity and nature as of the same essence, and it is with those who are perpetually vulnerable that he identifies. For this reason, we may say that even had there been no direct attachment to the uprising in 1956, the fundamental tone of this poetry would not be different, since vulnerability is continually renewed in this region.
Behind Ferenc Buda’s commitments and acts of identification, there are great struggles. Behind the statements we find hesitation and doubt; behind the exclamations, questions. Among Hungarian poets, it is perhaps in Buda’s work that we encounter the greatest number of questions. He spoke of this as follows:
“A person seeks answers to things and, amidst pain and anguish, may at best reach the point where he is able to pose the question. Perhaps that is no small thing either. These are simple, elemental questions: Who comes to visit, old man with a stubble-field face? Or: Whose is the burden? Whose is the prize? Or something that may sound a little transcendental, but is still a simple question: Who drives out the devil? Or: Does one need credit for it? Is there credit for it? Who decides? What decides? The questions are this simple, just as our lives themselves are reduced to a few essential questions.”
Let us mention a few more of these sharp, penetrating questions, directed at the heart of things: “What is the word worth in itself?”, “Words, words – but what are they worth?”, “What thread does the spider weave / that it cannot be torn even to the grave?”, “Who will answer? / Who will answer me?”, “Has summer become winter? Will winter become summer?”
In Ferenc Buda’s lyric poetry, we may observe the close interconnection of life and poetry. He measures poetry by the standard of life, and he has preserved to this day his belief – or rather his sense of the importance of the poetic word, for doubt has indeed appeared in his poetry over the past decades. Behind the crafted form of his poems, we sense the craftsmanly reverence of a person struggling with material. Buda wrestles with language, with the material of poetic craft, in the same way that a sculptor wrestles with stone or wood: shaping, polishing, refining until the final form is found. The gradual forming and honing of the poems could be demonstrated with many examples.
Before turning to those, let us remain for a moment with the characterisation of his poetic world. His early collection The Example of Grass, published more than forty years ago, was still characterised by a kind of polyphony. Later, the tone of his poetry became more tragic, even as his ethical ideal of poetic conduct did not change. He expressed this in his farewell to László Nagy [Hungarian poet associated with mythic-national and moral symbolism]: “Your legacy: the Work, indivisible, unsurpassable. / Your legacy: the vault of heaven breaking above our heads – the responsibility collapsed upon us. / Contemporaries, heirs, young and future wielders of the pen, today it is not a pen we bury here, but a sword.”
The linking of the pen and the sword clearly recalls the traditions of Hungarian poetry, and the fact that Buda connects László Nagy to this tradition signals an affirmation of the poetic ideal that endures through transformations in history: an ideal that accepts continuity and, with it, the social struggle that continuity demands.
It was the struggle for this ideal that gave rise to Ferenc Buda’s so-called “self-testifying” poems. Legenda (lit. Legend) evokes abandonment and loneliness through the image of the biblical Joseph keeping solitary vigil, just as Szél fúj (lit. The Wind Blows) conveys a sense of enclosure and confinement. The gesture of self-witnessing occupies a central place throughout many of his poems.
Buda’s poetic world has become distilled to its essence. One might think that we are already reading only the clear statements of a state of reconciliation, as in the poem beginning Élünk hát (lit. We Live Then): “We live then, / we live, / ancestor and heir. / Face upon face, fate upon fate / darkened by ashes.”
Yet from this world, reduced to its final elements, the path leads towards the great poems of commitment and identification. Consider the declaration in Holt számból búzaszál (lit. From My Dead Mouth a Wheat-blade Will Spring): “I shall not repent paying in blood, / with flesh and bone I pay here only. / I am at home, I lie in your lap. / From my dead mouth a blade of wheat will green.”
Among his larger compositions, Assault was the first; it was followed by the already mentioned My Farmstead Homeland. The poems Orphaned Land and Hymn Home point toward his identification with community.
Orphaned Land is a poem of lost perspective: “On the hoarfrost fields of Orphaned Land / I stand at the centre of the world. / Far and near / hard rock, crumbling sand”. This loss of perspective also refers to the disappearance of communal aims amid social transformation: “Dawn breaks, dusk falls. / Into the night, into the night sky / the wedge of wild geese flies / unstoppably. / Will it land somewhere? / If it finds water / it will land, surely. / But here someone / always tangles everything, / confounds all speech.”
Hymn Home was written at a time of separation from the “Sand-home”, the landscape that had shaped his life. If My Farmstead Homeland was the poem of identification with the present of the landscape, then Hymn Home is the great, summative poem of identification with its past.
Alongside his larger-scale compositions, short poems also appear in Ferenc Buda’s work; his recently written haiku testify to this. Buda has entirely assimilated this seventeen-syllable Japanese form into his own poetic world. The linguistic richness, strength and conscious craftsmanship of his poetry emerge with great force in these haiku, whether they express the tremors of the soul or the absurdity of the world.
In his more recent poems, prose writings and interviews, Buda has often spoken of the contradictions that accompanied the political transition of 1989 [the change from state socialism to a multi-party system in Hungary]. At one point, starting from the freedom created through writing, he wrote: “freedom is boundless; one may lose oneself in it”. Elsewhere, in an interview, he remarked: “A person must ‘sink into’ himself and look around at what has happened to us. I had to experience the wider transformations of the world while seeing opposing tendencies at work. Certain forms of freedom – for lack of a better word – have flourished, even producing wild offshoots, while other forms of freedom – at least for me – have become severely limited.”
Buda’s newer “mid-length” poems – such as Rigmusok századra, századvégre (lit. Rhymes for a Century and its End), Össztánc (lit. All Dance), and Malom (lit. Mill) – speak of the condition of human beings crossing from the twentieth into the twenty-first century. “This century is such a century – / it can shake you off like a rabbit dropping”, we read in Rhymes, referring to the twentieth century; and All Dance presents a bleak social panorama.
At the same time, Buda’s previously entirely closed, tension-laden poetic world, attuned to social questions, has opened outward. Alongside bitterness, playfulness appears; irony, and at times even a trace of brightness. Yet into this world there sometimes breaks a sharply “negative” song, such as the disquieting vision of Farkasok (lit. Wolves): “Though wolves are beasts, / compared to us they are merciful, / good to each other, loyal, / clever, well-mannered, / they kill only when hungry.”
Buda is characterised by a continual search for new forms; thus appeared the haiku and the anagram poems. His poetic world has become far more complex than in earlier decades, although his inclination toward larger compositions remains, together with a persistent impulse toward reckoning and summation.
And at times, supported by the full lived experience, the song returns – again the song – with the same clarity as fifty years ago, when he wrote Do Not Hide and Szürkeszemű (lit. Grey-Eyed): “A rainbow written on a sphere – / Once I was that: / A soap-bubble / balanced / On God’s single straw.” (Isten szalmaszálán [lit. On God’s Straw]).
In Buda’s oeuvre, translation holds nearly the same value as “original” composition. His human and historical orientation remains the same, which explains his sustained interest in the history and poetry of Central Asian Turkic peoples and of Finno-Ugric-speaking peoples. The kinship between translation and self-confession may be demonstrated by a single example: a piece of anonymous folk poetry translated from Mari (a Finno-Ugric ethnic group in the Volga region):
“My father set me on a tree stump, saying:
‘As the stump burns, so let he burn!’
My mother placed me in the river, saying:
‘As the water flows, so let she be swept away!’
My aunt set me at the porch, saying:
‘Let all who pass kick her down!’
My brother set me before the table, saying:
‘Let her watch how others eat!’
The stump burned – yet I did not burn.
The river’s current never carried me off.
Those who passed never kicked me down.
Though I had nothing to eat, I did not starve.”
[2013]