Árpád Farkas

Throughout Árpád Farkas’s poetic and creative life (remarkably, almost from the very outset of his career), he was repeatedly confronted with a well-intentioned, encouraging yet stubbornly persistent question posed by critics and literary historians alike: why only this much? That is to say: why did this lyric poetry not flow more abundantly; why did this poetics not blossom more luxuriantly; why did the volumes not follow one another in richer succession? Why did the poet – who moved from Cluj to Sfântu Gheorghe while still young and has lived in that region ever since – not write more? György Gálfalvi, for example, in his interview volume Marad a láz? (lit. Does the Fever Remain?) (1977), whose title he borrowed from an Árpád Farkas poem, Köszörű-időben (lit. In the Time of the Grindstone), posed the disarmingly simple, almost friendly question to Farkas in 1977: “Why has your pen become clogged?” Which, of course, it had not. Behind the thirty-three-year-old poet – then at the so-called age of Christ, though still living his happy youth as far as earthly existence is concerned – there already stood two significant poetry collections: Másnapos ének (lit. Hungover Song) from 1968, and Jegenyekör (lit. Circle of Poplars) from 1971. The latter appeared in what today seems unimaginable: a print run of eight thousand copies – a figure that would only be surpassed once and for all by the ten-thousand-copy edition of A szivárgásban (lit. In the Seepage), published by the Püski Publishing House in 1991. At the same time, the publications and short essays were also being produced, which would later be collected in Asszonyidő (lit. Women’s Time) in 1983. Yet the poet was acutely aware of the consuming force of initial “momentum”; he feared the erosion of experience, felt a kind of “air hunger”, and had no desire to “rush”. “I do not feel within myself such a void,” he replied to the interviewer’s question, “that the same voices would not be resounding inside me – but I must command those voices to become more nuanced, because over time ears, too, have opened to more nuanced sounds.” He speaks of needing – or rather, of having to – retune the double bass to a violin. Yet he remains optimistic, for at least fifty new poems are waiting for this violin-voiced volume; and for reasons rooted in the psychology of creation, he writes publicistic pieces “out of sheer contrariness”, so that the “desire for presence” should not wear away within him. Thus, the muse does not fall silent in him; it merely draws him into the orbit of other genres and modes of writing.

In 1980, András Görömbei conducted an interview with Árpád Farkas, published in the September issue of Forrás under the title Értékeket óvó bűvöletben (lit. In a Spell that Safeguards Values). By that time the poet had been enriched by yet another volume of verse (Alagutak a hóban [Tunnels in the Snow], 1979). Although the literary historian did not pose the question that so often alluded to the quantitative dimensions of the oeuvre, the query “What does it mean to you to be a poet?” nonetheless seems to prompt a kind of defensive self-explanation, when – in what may be read as a finely articulated ars poetica – he responds as follows:

“I do not write much. I do not consider myself a professional; I do not diligently string letters together in a pearl-like fashion, working through them as a set quota, but allow only that to reach the tip of my pen which insists on being written, and which would have no other fate anyway. Nor am I impatient with myself; I am not driven by an ambition for quantity, nor do I cast sidelong glances at my fellow poets whose shelves hold more books than my own three slim volumes of verse.”

He does not hurry, he says, “towards some uncertain Parnassus”, and justifies the rightness of his pace with a serene, almost grandfatherly example: he was the kind of person who “put the water on to warm at the first bell calling to vespers; at the second he was still washing himself calmly and unhurriedly; he walked to church at an easy pace, yet he always arrived in time for the service”. Imre Kiss Pintér, however, in 1980 (“Megyek a télnek”. Farkas Árpád verseiről. [“I Am Heading into Winter”. On the poems of Árpád Farkas. És, 1980/11), in an essay outlining the poet’s career profile, voiced his concern that after the second volume of verse the “momentum of the career arc” seemed to falter. The poems became more sporadic, and when they did speak, they sounded “as if from beneath the snow” – from deeper down, more softly. This formulation, alongside anxiety over the thinning output, also betrays an underlying aesthetic unease. Surveying the critical literature and the considerable number of interviews conducted with Árpád Farkas over the years, one might also mention, for instance, the extended conversation with Ildikó Benkei – almost a small book in length, and indeed published as a volume under the title Ecce poeta! in 2005 – in which the interviewer likewise does not fail to note that Árpád Farkas is regarded as one of the leading figures of the second generation of Forrás, yet after the first two volumes “the continuation was awaited in vain” – for a few years, we may add. The poet’s explanation, perhaps with less inspiration than in his responses to similar remarks decades earlier, runs as follows: “First of all, I probably wrote poetry because I was not very good at anything else. If I could have been a fine cabinetmaker, then I would have produced beautiful pieces of furniture. But beyond that, I always wanted to say something of which – I believed – only I was in possession. If not with its full weight, then certainly with the passion through which I had lived it. When I felt that there was no real stake in my writing poetry, then I did not write. This is what happened in the 1980s, after the Alagutak a hóban period.” He also ventures a more extensive justification, in which, beyond the age of sixty, a certain note of resignation can also be discerned:

“What I might have rumbled out found no one to clear a space for it, no one to receive it; and later, when after 1990 politics took over the role that poetry had once played, I no longer felt that there was any real stake in it. Why should I become a kind of entertaining artisan simply because I have learned certain artistic forms? This, of course, is deceptive, and I would not advise anyone to walk into this cul-de-sac, because words left unspoken weigh heavily on one’s inner being. The writer’s task, after all, is to write. Yet I still did not feel that I ought simply to be present, to drill and carve away even when I was not carried forward by that inner compulsion which had been there earlier in some of my pieces – so I do not force it. And circumstances did allow for that.”

For, as Árpád Farkas says – and in his words the faint hues of self-justification, or perhaps more precisely of self-persuasion, already begin to shimmer –:

“I did not take offence at individuals, but at the time itself, into which I had eaten and gnawed my way. Years earlier I did not, of course, know that a change of regime would come, but I believed that if it did, and if it were true that ‘let the foot break into a freer dance, and let song melt world-sized halls around us’ – which indeed might have happened – then a more beautiful world would follow. Instead, busybodies suggested that our time was over, that we had completed our task, that the age of metaphors had ended. Whereas I maintain to this day that the metaphor is not there to conceal secrets, but to amplify them, to make them more powerful. The rest belongs to the language of journalism. I felt: very well, then we shall not use metaphors any longer. I wrote plenty of journalistic pieces too, but I did not intend them for a volume, because that is the genre of the day. And when one finds the meaning of one’s work – even in editing a daily newspaper – why would one write poems?! … And I did find the meaning of everyday life. Of course, I did write poems in the meantime, and a book of mine was published in which the playful element already outweighs the pathetic, world-redeeming intent. When should a person realise that the world cannot be redeemed, if not in time – in one’s own lifetime?”

In a kind of New Year interview published in the 15 January 1990 issue of Magyar Nemzet, this post-transition weariness and disillusionment had not yet begun to trouble the poet; he was still animated by the fever of change. Asked whether, amid the great organisational efforts and restructurings of the time – when the Târgu Mureș–based Igaz Szó was about to become Látó, echoing the title of a poem by János Batsányi (The Seer), and when Béla Markó was to assume the position of editor-in-chief – he was “writing at all these days”, he replied that in recent days “my hand has almost been paralysed, I live in such an inner ecstasy of joy”. He was not writing, yet “a tremendous number of poems have accumulated inside me”; the urge to communicate was strong. Time was needed, however, to write them down, and he quoted Sándor Kányádi, according to whom Árpád Farkas always writes only his selected poems. Still, the poems gathering during those weeks of joyful intoxication did eventually come into being, and some of them, at least, could later be read in Erdélyi asszonyok (lit. Transylvanian Women), published in 2002. Esti lázak (lit. Evening Fevers), Tajték (lit. Foam) – dedicated to László Tőkés – and Integető (lit. Waving), according to their dates, were all written on 22 December 1989; Fekete karácsony (lit. Black Christmas) was composed at Christmas 1990, recalling the bloody days of the previous year. The passage of time – marked, among other things, by the horror of the March pogrom – already belongs to the period of disillusionment:

The heat, the colour and substance of last year’s bloody Christmas

were swept away by March’s running waters, drunk up

by June’s heat, and here we stand, knee-deep, waist-deep in Advent –

a deceived people, with empty hands!

After Alagutak a hóban, Árpád Farkas indeed did not publish a poetry volume consisting exclusively of new poems, yet he maintains that he did not fall silent; he simply “does not like superfluous work”. Why fashion a “blunt pocketknife”? The song must be softened, he believes. There is no longer any need “to address someone or some people in the imperative mood, as young poets so readily do. For that, even a crude cornstalk pipe will do!” Or perhaps a more delicate instrument must be found – here the old image returns once again, the beautiful metaphor alluding to a violin-voiced poetry. But if no one hears it, he now adds – and this is not so much resignation as a tone of accepting sadness – then “why should I make music at all?” He feels that with his poems he cannot break through the “cacophony”. “I cannot shout loudly enough to cross the sound barrier! And why should I whisper, if I no longer have secrets? Whispered speech is the language of secrets. Anyone who outlives himself is in serious trouble. I have the feeling that I have outlived myself!”

In a 1997 interview published in Tiszatáj  (“Inkább röntgeneztem ezt a tájat, mint fényképeztem”. Farkas Árpáddal beszélget Erdélyi Erzsébet és Nobel Iván. [lit. “I X-rayed this landscape rather than photographing it”. Erzsébet Erdélyi and Iván Nobel in conversation with Árpád Farkas. No. 12) – although the poet was, as the saying goes, in the prime of his manhood, fifty-three years old, he spoke of the following: “I am personally witnessing how the poet departs, how he grows quieter, how he falls silent, and why he no longer moves with broad sweeps of the arm within a spiritual substance in which we try to live from day to day.” And further: “But I do not dare to declare with a light heart that I shall write no more poems – for even now I still scribble – only I no longer see their place under the sun.” Árpád Farkas also refers to Sándor Kányádi in an interview given to Gábor Ködöböcz (Jelentés a völgyből. Ködöböcz Gábor beszélgetése Farkas Árpáddal. [lit. Report from the Valley. Gábor Ködöböcz in conversation with Árpád Farkas.] Magyar Napló, August 2005), who held that the time of poets had passed and that the age of politicians had arrived. Farkas speaks of this with palpable bitterness, and in his words one no longer senses resignation or self-justification, but rather a feeling of having been offended:

“I felt that if I might have reached some small harbour with all that which I formulate by saying that our poems had a stake, that they were worth writing, then I might also have arrived at a kind of summit. Naturally, this could not happen. Above all because, together with the change of regime – at least in Transylvania – a new kind of revision of texts came into being, without those texts being known, or even reread. That today I feel all that concentrated meaning, intended also as a form of self-realisation and sent echoing from the valley (to use Áprily’s phrase), to be in vain – I must confess – does indeed have literary-political reasons as well. I believed that when freedom of speech erupts ahead of human liberation, a measure of appreciation would also flow towards those who, even if only by candlelight, nevertheless illuminated the road that led thus far.”

“Now the poet is silent,” the two interviewers, Iván Nobel and Erzsébet Erdélyi, confront Árpád Farkas with what he himself also confirms: “For two years I have not written a single poem.”

With growing bitterness, the poet’s confessional sentences follow one another, addressing the post-transition “paradigm-shifting” literary theory and critical climate, whose sensibility had become, for him, incomprehensibly hostile to metaphor and symbolism, and whose arrogance condemned the community-oriented poetic voice as obsolete and outdated (perhaps alluding also to Péter Demény’s condescending, lethally ironic review Zakóban feszengő versek [lit. Poems Uneasy in a Jacket]):

“Here, now, that need no longer exists from which one fashioned oneself into a poet. You must gnaw your way out of that mountain of porridge that is society, or out of that mountain of snow that clogged your nose, your eyes, your mouth. One must get out of it at some point. But to grind away at paper merely for naked ambition – because Géza Féja and Mihály Czine spread the word that I was a poet, and not just any kind of poet – to wear oneself out for that alone, and lie awake at night wondering whether you will come with new songs for new times – for me, the stake has been lost. I believe that a fifty-year-old person should be glad to have shaped his face to some degree, to have shaped his inner world.”

If we examine Árpád Farkas’s poetics and poetic life trajectory from the perspective of those explanations he offered to readers who questioned the diminishing volume of his lyric output – and, from the outset, his deliberately economical poetic diction – through his self-interpreting, self-fate-examining confessions, as we have done above, a clear arc emerges. From the initial, subtle distinction according to which lyric poetry is necessary, and writing verse is itself a passionate act, with a poetic “hum” alive within him, yet accompanied by his own demand for a more “nuanced” poetic speech; through the phase of searching and then of finding (Görömbei); one arrives at a concluding statement that appears reconciled, yet is unmistakably sad: “No one needs poetry.”

Yet we may also approach the matter from another vantage point – not from the angle of the poet’s prose self-revelations and life confessions, instructive though they are; not from the perspective of what is absent, of the unwritten poems; nor from that of the poet’s bitter silence prompted by those who felt his poetics to be outdated – but rather through an inventory and interpretation of the work that did come into being, the volumes themselves. In choosing this path, we take the most essential route: for the poems that were written are not proofs of the superfluousness of poetry, but manifestations of the desire for poetic self-expression – demonstrations of the necessity of lyric poetry. Examining the oeuvre as a whole, without interpreting the poet’s moods or his self-deprecating bitterness, this career profile in fact testifies to the inconceivability of a world without poetry.

Másnapos ének (1968)

The beginning is marked by Másnapos ének, and within it, for example, the poem Fehér papír (lit. White Paper) may be read as an exemplary piece of the psychology of poetic beginnings, of the immense demand for lyrical self-disclosure. The lyrical situation – the white paper awaiting lines and verses – appears like a white blade in the poet’s hand: a weapon he can aim at the world with his poetic messages. The metaphors of the poem, in turn, are capable of transforming the world into verse and of preserving it on paper with the skin-penetrating, bone-illuminating force of the Northern Lights. The poet’s desire is to reveal the universe, yet the imagery does not evoke cosmic infinity; instead, it is the earth, the native land, that supplies the images to his pen: the murmur of villages and mountains, “whispering downpours”, the landscape living within him, the pines that compel the poet to speak as if at gunpoint. Gyöngeségeim (lit. My Weaknesses) points to a similar lyrical attitude: “the mountains live within me. / Cities have long been humming beneath my heart. / Along sooty firewalls the song surges up, / to win for itself / all the power – –”. An ars poetica is articulated in the poem Így (lit. Thus):

Pull yourself together, set out.

Everything is within reach: the landscape,

the staff, and this mythical eastern wind.

At most, you may slip once more

along the edges of the ravines.

The poetic outset is vehement, forceful, marked by a strong sense of communal commitment and imbued with hope. The volume met with an enthusiastic critical reception; its clearly intelligible message testified to the loyalty of a soul attached to its native land and to a sense of poetic responsibility. As a member of the creative cluster known as the second generation of Forrás (a “cluster”? – the poet himself asks ironically, in several places. “So be it.”), he fights his personal struggles, as all creators do, yet he may live with the awareness of the sympathy of his peers and himself feel that he is surrounded by companions travelling along similar poetic paths and sharing analogous perspectives. According to numerous studies by Béla Pomogáts devoted to Romanian-Hungarian minority literature, this generation brought about a rebirth of communal experience. The poets who came to prominence in the literary press in the second half of the 1960s – among them László Csiki, Árpád Farkas, László Király, Lajos Magyari, Zsófia Balla, Ferenc Kenéz, Béla Markó, and others – generally completed their higher education in the mid-1960s, mostly at the university in Cluj. They presented and discussed their first works in the Gaál Gábor Circle, where, as has been observed, “it was the shared work that laid the foundations of a generational consciousness of belonging together”. In contrast to members of the first generation (such as Géza Páskándi, Domokos Szilágyi, Gizella Hervay), who found positions in editorial offices in Bucharest or Cluj, Árpád Farkas and his contemporaries were “awaited by the modest teacher’s lectern in some village in Székely Land, the Transylcanian Plain, or Satu Mare”, and only after a few years – following the reorganisation of the minority press in 1969 – did they join the staff of one of the county newspapers, several of them becoming contributors to Megyei Tükör in Sfântu Gheorghe or to Hargita in Miercurea Ciuc. At the same time, however, this brought a considerable poetic gain: they entered into a more direct relationship with the popular strata of Transylvanian Hungarian society and received creative impetus from the revitalisation of minority public life that occurred at the end of the 1960s. In terms of both the circumstances of their beginnings and the “poetic models of their articulation”, the two generations “differed from one another”. Whereas the first generation drew primarily on “its large-city experiences and its interest in reviving the traditions of Transylvanian avant-garde poetry”, the original experiences of the second generation were shaped by rural life and traditional culture. In the Preface to Másnapos ének, the volume’s introducer, Aladár Lászlóffy – himself a member of the first Forrás generation – discerned in the poetic voice a vision capable of renewing Transylvanian poetry. He identified Árpád Farkas as a promising talent of his generation and maintained that the poet was able to renew poetry while at the same time preserving the traditions of Transylvanian lyricism. Reviewers – many of them – praised the image-creating power of the poems, the objectified simplicity, clarity, and human warmth of Árpád Farkas’s lyricism, reminiscent of folk poetry, as well as its craftsmanship. Conceptual clarity and lucid intellectuality vibrate through the poems (Zoltán Bertha); an avowed attachment to communal traditions of fate, a “sense of rootedness”, and a task-consciousness intertwined with historical existence (József N. Pál) permeate the work; everything is transformed into something personal and human, objects and concepts are transmuted into a single substance, the entire poetic world is of one soul, identical with the poet’s own inner disposition (Jenő Alföldy). He delights in the flavours of language – as his greatest treasure – yet uses it with restraint.

Jegenyekör (1971)

In Imre Kis Pintér’s 1980 career profile (“Megyek a télnek”, És, 1980/11), it is rather the second volume, Jegenyekör (1971), that he evaluates as a genuine surprise. The tone, he writes, has indeed darkened, yet this merely renders the force and will of “light” all the more emphatic. What the critic detects in it is the “unmistakable breathing of a significant talent”. Géza Féja, upon reading this volume, formulated his oft-quoted judgement in 1972 (Tiszatáj, 1972/12): “Let us rejoice, for a poet has been born.”

Kis Pintér does not yet regard the first book as “native”; he discerns Whitmanian reminiscences in it, and sees the dominant impulse of the poetic diction as the “unconditional command of faith” and the desire–demand for a “useful will”. (Others, by contrast, emphasise its affinity with the poetry of Sándor Kányádi, particularly the visual force of his verse.) Jegenyekör, however, already marks a poetic turning point, Kis Pintér believes: at the moment of “separation”, the “bond” grows stronger – the bond that ties the poet to his native land. The third poetry collection (Alagutak a hóban, 1979), he writes, stages a battle between intellect and emotion; the poet “resonates with the community of fate inherent in fragile existence” – and yet, despite the flawless poems, the critic feels that “something remains unfinished, as if left in torso form.”

The poet later – in the Ködöböcz interview cited above – recalled the critical responses to his early career in an ironic, self-ironic tone. He was pleased by Géza Féja’s enthusiastic welcome, but, as he put it, the truly serious criticism, articulated in the form of analytical essays, came from Imre Kis Pintér and from András Görömbei, “in whose analysis there was less of the explicitly critical element”. “One unsettled me and pinned me down somewhat with his pen, so that I might be tossed about, forced to look after my own affairs; the other gave me wings.” Unfortunately, he continues, “the sun burned my wings, and I now see that Imre Kis Pintér’s expectations were fulfilled in me to much the same extent as he himself was able to bring his critical career to fruition.”

András Görömbei’s criticism was indeed more encouraging in intent and may well have had a more uplifting effect; nevertheless, it also constituted the most exacting and most interpretative assessment of Árpád Farkas’s early career and creative characteristics. Görömbei argued – for example in his portrait of Árpád Farkas in the volume A hetvenes évek romániai magyar irodalma (lit. Hungarian Literature in Romania in the 1970s, 1983), co-authored with Zoltán Bertha – that from the very outset the poet was marked by a distinctive voice. His poems were permeated by moral and public passion, which nonetheless manifested itself within a light, fresh, and dynamic worldview. This poetry was characterised by a strong lyrical compassion and social sensitivity; his verses were “kindled by a nation-organising inclination and by hope”. Görömbei likewise regarded Jegenyekör as an outstanding work: its poetic form operates through the sensuous vividness of empirical sight, yet in terms of meaning and suggestion it is highly condensed, elevating the poems from sheer visuality to conceptual reflection. Analytical thought is richly interwoven with the moral and emotional elements of the verse. The possibilities of the individual personality, historical and social experience, collide with an undiminished desire for freedom and purity; realities confront “early ardour”, and it is through this tension that Árpád Farkas’s lyric poetry acquires a dramatic character. Görömbei also places particular emphasis on poems by Farkas Árpád that have since acquired an almost cultic status, among them Avaron (lit. On the Leaf-Litter), which may be read as a paradigmatic poem of never giving up – radiating the consciousness of strength inherent in “stumbling face-first on the leaf-litter”, “even waist-deep in a forest of bones”, and yet still in the resolve “to go on nonetheless”.

Not only Jegenyekör, but also Mikor az öregemberek mosakodnak (During the Ablutions of Old Men) can be cited as one of the most influential prose poems not merely of Árpád Farkas’s oeuvre, but of Transylvanian lyric poetry as a whole. In the erosion-scarred channels of the old men’s faces, in the wrinkles of their withered, suffering-hardened bodies, in their age and brokenness, they carry the entire twentieth century – wars, defeats, and losses. Those who longed for a life of “spotless radiance” were driven by history into grimy, indelible, blood-soaked struggles. At the same time, the gesture of washing, through a fine act of metaphorical transference, also evokes the moment of preparation for the other world.

Alagutak a hóban (1979)

The volume Alagutak a hóban, though not revelatory in force, nevertheless testifies to a deepening of existential experience; the metaphor of snow permeates the entire poetic world of the book, weaving the individual poems into a coherent whole. As a polyvalent metaphor, snow signifies the desire for a purer life, the “blanket that warms poverty”, the “terrain of miracles”, but also the “great swaddling cloth” that stuffs eyes and mouths alike and condemns one to silence. Confessional, self-examining poems also stand out among the texts (Nagyszoros elégiája [The Elegy of Nagyszoros], Szerelmek hátországaiban [lit. In the Hinterlands of Loves]), and a characteristic poetic procedure may be observed in the way the poet is able, with an almost self-evident gesture, to elevate the small, empirical phenomena of life into zones of moral philosophy. Among the important and defining poems of this lyric mode are A szivárgásban (In Seepage) and the volume’s title poem, Alagutak a hóban. In these works, the poet confronts the dramatic constriction and restrictive order of the age with a richness of imagery whose radiance and surplus of meaning render emotionally palpable and accessible feelings and states that are scarcely nameable on a purely conceptual level. The programmatic major poem of the volume is A befalazott szószék (lit. The Walled-Up Pulpit). It recalls a visit to Vienna, to the square around St Stephen’s Cathedral, where upright Viennese “bürgers” sit before the walled-up pulpit of John of Capistrano – people who know nothing, who merely “chew their Viennese”. From the final five lines onward, the objective life scene almost explodes: images of peace become examples of indifference and apathy. For the “unpeaceful” poet, a Hungarian minority voice arriving from dictatorship, without a single explicit reference, condenses the world’s indifference into the metaphor of “Europe’s indifferent bells” – bells that do not toll for him, for them, and the absence of any pulpit from which they might cry out for help.

Standing out in a distinctive manner from the lyric oeuvre as a whole are Árpád Farkas’s “allusive” poems, his exemplary texts (Tamási Áron, Petőfi Sándor, A szembejövőnek [lit. To the One Coming Towards Us)], in which the figures invoked in fact embody exemplary models of conduct – forms of behaviour that appear ideal to the poet and serve as points of moral orientation. The poem A szembejövőnek evokes the figure of Károly Kós. Written in 1983 for the centenary of Kós’s birth, the poem, through its retrospective stance, makes no reference – neither on a concrete nor on a metaphorical level – to the national trauma of Trianon. Instead, Árpád Farkas paints a cultic portrait of Kós Károly as architect and as man of the word, writer and preacher of the Word: “You came as a voice crying over the thunder of hooves, / to thatch collapsing snow in its worn-down grooves, / to raise a tower for a bell-call lost to ruins.” The allusion contained in the lyrical image of “ankle-biting history” is likewise more general in nature, extensible across time. And if we recall that the poem could not be published in Romania, only in Hungary – because even the name of Károly Kós had fallen under anathema – the near-hymnic sweep and the heightened intensity of its epithets become both justified and uplifting: “In your towering towers, deaf / bells shed their tongues.” The grammatical constructions that recall an archaic state of language, the evocation of a man who came “to conquer” rather than “to submit”, the consistently present-tense poetic discourse, the exhortation “lift up your head”, and the suggestive line “the wind still roars around you” all place the unnamed figure – whose name is never written out in the poem – within the domain of the unforgettable, of perpetual presence. Through this poetic gesture, the text also obliquely alludes to the constraints of the present moment: had the name been written down, the poem could certainly not have appeared – and the fact that it did not appear even in this form may be seen as an added “gift” of Romanian cultural policy. On this matter, Gyula Dávid writes in A Kiáltó szó. A betiltott centenárium (lit. The Crying Word: The Banned Centenary), included in the volume Kós Károly emlékezete (lit. In Memory of Károly Kós), published by Nap Kiadó (Sun Publishing) in 2005. At the same time, attention to the title reveals biblical allusions: the scene of the risen Redeemer encountering the doubters and convincing the unbelieving through the sheer fact of his presence comes to mind. In this poem there is no reference to any specific national trauma – only the indication that Károly Kós, the one who comes towards us, as a witness to and articulator of such traumas, has become, beyond time and space, and will remain, a cultic figure of the national community at all times.

Asszonyidő (1983)

Asszonyidő (1983), the collection of journalistic prose published during what the poet himself described as a “lyrical hiatus”, transposes the most distinctive features of poetic creation into the generic frameworks of short essays and feuilletons. Real moments of lived existence, elevated into vision, characterise Árpád Farkas’s prose idiom. His work as a journalist led him regularly to travel from village to village, and every journey, every experience – however small or incidental – proved capable of being shaped and raised into a truth of life. In every detail, the whole revealed itself to him. At the same time, his perspective is marked by proportion and measure. He is far removed from demagogic generalisation: the occasional spectacle of moral erosion does not prompt him to declare the moral devaluation of humanity as such. The pieces in Asszonyidő generally fall into two formal types. According to the first, the author’s mode of perception remains metaphorical even in prose: the tonal register is elevated throughout, the elements of the metaphor adhere closely to one another, and there is no objectifying decoding. According to the second, the narratives grow out of strong openings that describe concrete situations and gradually work their way towards their own conclusions. Yet both text types are characterised by a shared human-centredness, a plebeian sensibility, a commitment to truth-seeking, and a forthright, outspoken resolve. Even the metaphorical texts are readily interpretable: abstraction always remains on this side of decipherability, and symbolism is never employed as a means of concealing opinion. At most, it renders interpretation more demanding for those who search for latent meanings behind words but do not necessarily grasp the Hungarian language’s powerful and nuanced capacity for image-making. At times, one senses in the metaphors of the prose the same subtle reticence found in the poem A szembejövőnek, which evokes Károly Kós: those who understand, understand – those who do not merely wander in the forest of symbols. The chapter titles of the volume are themselves eloquent: A középszer lakomája (lit. The Feast of Mediocrity), Csöpp fényesség a szülőföld felett (lit. A Drop of Brightness over the Homeland), Öregember méltósága (lit. The Dignity of Old Age), Cserefa-sors (lit. Oak Fate), Egy kulacsból (lit. From a Single Flask), A megmaradás esélyei (lit. The Chances of Survival). The piece entitled Asszonyidő closes the first cycle: symbolic in nature and written in an elevated diction, it is closer to a prose poem – something underscored, among other things, by its punctuation. With the exception of the final two lines, marked by a dramatic onset, the text consists of a single sentence broken into segments, as though it were a single, long-breathed sigh. Its foundation and central image is the sight of women setting out for work, dragging themselves forward, the dawn-time procession whose heavenly counterpart or mirror image seems to be the ranks of woman-shaped clouds covering the sky. The discourse is almost hymnic in its density, and the tone shifts organically from recalling the everyday necessities and existential burdens of women’s lives – their actions as those who hold families together, who guard and sustain them, and the draining obligations of the “dear, over-emancipated woman” – to the implicit, suggestive articulation of male gratitude. The most personal voice emerges in the cycle evoking the homeland. The author is at home in rural landscapes; the world they represent is familiar to him, its signs and daily rhythms intelligible and interpretable. “Atmospheres, scents, sounds” summon up for him the scenes of childhood – the small town that raised him, Székelyudvarhely (Odorheiu Secuiesc, Romania), where Szarkakő was his great mountain, his Himalaya. Yet he also knows that nostalgia alone is insufficient; it is too little if one wishes to preserve and at the same time continue to build that landscape (Fölnevelő kisvárosok – lit. The Towns That Raised Us). The scent of boiled maize evokes from the past the shattering memory of the birth of his first poem: the “beautiful clatter-rhymes and rag-rhymes” of a twelve-year-old adolescent, and the school composition written in verse – Toldi viaskodása a farkasokkal (lit. Toldi’s Fight with the Wolves). The experience of the homeland, of course, is expansive: every region fits within it, since each person has their own native land. For some, the home of the Székely craftsman carving high-backed chairs also signifies the homeland; the communal labourers of Beszterce (Bistrița, Romania) likewise enlisted themselves in the taking up and handing on of inheritance, because without such gestures, in the “great, great draughts of the world”, the wind blows one’s hair askew. The essay Az elsőház elfoglalása (lit. Occupying the First House) is an appeal against dying villages and dwindling rural populations. The sight of “crumbling buildings” weighs heavily on the author, and “one’s heart aches” at the thought that, with the passing of the old, once-noble houses are reduced to cheap building material. The elemental experience of existence that finds such characteristic expression in Árpád Farkas’s poetry is equally present in his prose. In Cserefa-sors, for example, the oak tree – with its “meditatively sorrowful” presence in the forests – becomes a metaphor for the Hungarian poet in Romania. At the same time, since the human being is, “one way or another, still a child of the deciduous forest”, the oak, alongside the “mythologised pine”, stands as a figure of wisdom and deliberation: a “service-bearing” tree that guards both itself and the forest, and thus a symbol of the minority Hungarian poet’s vocation-bound destiny.

The writings collected in the volume proclaim the chances of survival even in full awareness of an often crushing experience of existence and of harsh, unyielding reality.

Válogatott versek (Selected Poems, 2012)

The 2012 volume bearing the deliberately austere title Válogatott versek may without hesitation be regarded as a compendium and summative statement of Árpád Farkas’s poetic career to date. It is a carefully considered selection: all the major, frequently cited poems are present, and the book also includes most of the texts that had previously appeared in scattered venues without being gathered into volumes – among them, for example, the long poem Esztelneki napóra (lit. The Sundial of Estelnic), an objectifying, descriptive life-scene of a village that has become home, yet one that also opens up metaphorical perspectives. With its length of some 170 pages, the book could well serve as a reliable foundation for a truly comprehensive collected edition of Árpád Farkas’s poetry. From a bibliographical point of view, too, it may be considered the most beautiful of his volumes. Published in the Székely Könyvtár (lit. Székely Library) series of the Hargita Publishing House in Csíkszereda (Miercurea Ciuc), it justly enhances the reputation of the publishing enterprise. Its structure is revealingly thematic: the opening poem and the closing piece do not merely mark the chronological boundaries of this lyric oeuvre and life trajectory but also delineate the limiting points of the poet’s mode of vision. The opening poem, Apáink arcán (Upon Our Fathers’ Faces), widely regarded as one of the finest works of the oeuvre, concentrates its four closely drawn stanzas into an imperative of certainty binding the speaker to homeland, ancestors, and the sustaining force of tradition. The boys who soar towards the stars, the wild, frolicking colts, as likenesses of the Bartókian boys turned into stags, cannot distance themselves from their past without at the same time still clinging to it. The poem’s gentle admonition – the doubled “boys, boys” – constitutes a mild, subjective reproach that also points back at the self, warning that the gallop which loses its way amid wild winds and the enchantment of world-discovery must not destroy the possibility of return. In its gentleness, this becomes a firm injunction: “Only on tiptoe, softly: / we walk upon our fathers’ cooling, precious faces.” Full, intense metaphors rich in associative power evoke the image of an unrenounceable land – Transylvania – in which natural beauty and bloody struggles are read into one another. The beauty of the landscape simultaneously preserves the memories of historical and personal conflicts: the poetic space accommodates both the gripping sight of landslip-prone hills and grassy meadows, and the visions of historical terror symbolised by “slogans and red calf-blood”. The poem is also an act of encouragement. Through the surging rhythm of synaesthetic thought, it leads the reader to the assurance that the homeland will receive one back even if “perhaps we do not succeed in soaring to the stars, / and instead return to this clod-bound earth” – that is, if the impetus and momentum of poetic or personal world-building falter. Life’s failures or weariness may open the gate even wider for those who return, while those who remained behind illuminate the path with phosphorescent light. A defining current in Árpád Farkas’s poetry is constituted by the verse-variations of this preserving, protective fidelity and of an embracing, re-embracing love. His lyric oeuvre is subordinated to this mode of vision. The cultural and historical traditions of his homeland, as well as those attached to his own personal fate and individual life-course, have always shaped his thinking in such a way that the force of attachment outweighed the natural impulse toward separation.

The final poem of the volume, Ének (Song), evokes the primordial form of poetry: in song, in a gentle late-autumnal chant of reckoning, it links the visual planes of a life-summing reflection. The opening line, imbued with quiet serenity – “One must live, mustn’t one, my beautiful” – signals the intention of a reconciled summation and an attitude of humility before the order of nature. The subjective inventory is brief; the order of existence determines the generic fate of humankind: “A shirt flutters on the line. / The air crackles around them: / our children are growing.” And although the image – “the shirt in a harsh winter” – and the air crackling with the suggestion of frost might seem to foreshadow trials, what is evoked here is not so much the struggles awaiting the ancestors – which the poet and his partner have become, as implied by the plural – but rather those facing the descendants, the children. The tone of the poem remains unimpassioned, gently admonitory. The foundational image of the volume-opening poem is inverted in Ének according to the commandment of existential continuity: the once frolicking colt, the boy yearning to soar into space, has by now, following the eternal choreography of generational being, himself become a father who waits and receives those who return. Árpád Farkas does not lavish words even on this poetic reckoning. The stocktaking is austere, almost epitaph-like, dispensing even with punctuation – devoid of any creative arrogance, and indeed marked by a sigh-like, self-effacing gesture of self-assessment, yet not without the quiet pride of a consciousness of having lived a meaningful, useful life. In its cadence, it also calls Attila József to mind: “I was who I was / in a word-proliferating age / a typewriter-tapper”.

András Sütő wrote and delivered a greeting in honour of Árpád Farkas’s sixtieth birthday at the theatre of Târgu Mureș, and published it in Háromszék on 24 April 2004. It is a greeting of a distinctive kind: the writer first summarises the essence of what had been said about the celebrant before the political transition, sketches the scholarly background in a few sentences, and presents the established, consensual portrait of Árpád Farkas. Thus Sütő condenses what might be called the lexicon entry as follows: “Árpád Farkas was received into literature, one might say, as a ‘cheerful youngster hopping on one leg, in short trousers’. He was, of course, a teenager. It is also written that in his first volume (1968) poems of faith, purity, and vows occupy a prominent place? No doubt other things as well. The homeland, too, is present with its present and its past – programmatically so. It is stated that he undertakes its mountains, its people, its sunrises. That a characteristic feature of his poetry is intellectuality, accessibility, simplicity, and so on. In solitude he senses an abyss; his attraction to community is extraordinary. Roughly this much.”

Yet, in Sütő’s view, this was only the sayable part of Árpád Farkas’s poetry. What became sayable only later, he writes, was that Farkas “depicted in dramatic fashion the mute terror of the de-Hungarianisation of Transylvania”; that he did so “with the passion of a worthy continuation after Dsida’s Psalmus Hungaricus, and with a resplendent richness of aesthetic form”. Sütő also maintains that Árpád Farkas’s worldview perhaps comes closest to the Transylvanian vision of Károly Kós: “They are kindred spirits, twin souls in the nation-protecting concern that became their personal fate, just as in the fortissimo passages of a masculine fidelity – without even a flute-note’s worth of rhetoric, without a single half-tone slipping in pain or in attachment.” According to András Sütő, “Árpád Farkas dares to remain faithful to the ‘nevertheless, nevertheless’ hope discredited by bad poets”; he is the proclaimer of a “nevertheless-morality”, let us extend the characterisation. “Árpád Farkas […] in the great Transylvanian winter tried to hum himself out of the belly of Transylvanian historical frost by singing little warm songs. For he did not flee from his fate, but rather ran towards it; and not on the basis of half-heard rumours – that there exists a poet in whose case fate and character are bound together by the destiny of Siamese twins – but not by accident, rather by law, he took upon himself and bore – and bears to this day – his poetic shirt of Nessus; we may call it Transylvanian fate if we wish.”

[2014]