Vince Fekete (1965) is a multifaceted figure in contemporary Hungarian literature: poet, short story writer, parodist, author of children’s literature, deputy editor-in-chief of the journal Székelyföld [Hungarian-language literary monthly published in Miercurea Ciuc/Csíkszereda, Romania], literary organiser – yet the guiding thread of his career to date is without question his three decades of work as a poet. The publication dates of his first volumes (Parázskönyv [lit. Book of Embers], 1995; Ütköző [lit. Crash Barrier], 1996) should not mislead anyone, for a decade earlier, he already had enough poems for a book, which, however, ultimately did not appear. His protracted debut thus became intertwined, during his university years in Cluj-Napoca (Kolozsvár), with the emergence in the first half of the 1990s of a group of young Transylvanian poets. These were the writers (János Dénes Orbán, Attila Sántha, Noémi László, and Lázár László Lövétei) whose first volumes, published between 1995 and 1997 in the Előretolt Helyőrség Könyvek (lit. Forward Outpost Books) series of Erdélyi Híradó Könyv- és Lapkiadó (Erdélyi Híradó Book and Press Publishing House) were major events in the history of poetry and generated considerable resonance across the entire Hungarian-language literary sphere. From a literary-historical perspective, the members of this generation were born under a fortunate constellation: their careers could begin in the first half of the 1990s, under social conditions that had become freer and more open after the political changes, and with the effective support of key figures of the older generations. The poetry of this generation, which took shape, among other places, in Serény Múmia (lit. Busy Mummy), the supplement of the Kolozsvár journal Helikon edited precisely by Vince Fekete, was far less homogeneous than many still assume based on the tendencies that became emblematic. At the same time, it is undeniable that in the work of most of these young writers, a longing for freedom emerged, rejecting all kinds of constraints (above all, ideological, artistic, linguistic, and even ethical). Their rebellious, non-conformist activity as authors also served to foreground the entertaining function of literature at the expense of all else, to reduce the distance between author and reader, in the name of ‘literature that serves the Reader’, opposed to the aristocratic concept of literature and in the spirit of literary popularity.

Fekete’s early poetry – rich in variety, formally diverse, and in its tone more restrained than that of his peers – connects more directly to the generational aims articulated primarily by János Dénes Orbán and Attila Sántha in that in his first volumes he too indulges in uninhibited play with different poetic modes of speech, traditions, verse forms and with language itself. In Parázskönyv, however, the direct articulation of bitter personal experiences still predominates (for example, the tragic loss of his father – see the poems in the cycle Szikék ezüstje [lit. The Silver of the Scalpels] – or his encounter with the lives of those evicted from their homes – see the poems in the cycle Hallgatás miértre [lit. On the “Why” of Silence]). The intertextual links he forges with poetic predecessors (for example, Attila József, János Sziveri, Jenő Dsida, and Villon–György Faludy) serve this aim rather than any other. In his later poems, however, stepping into other poetic universes increasingly entails rewriting, overwriting, and reinterpretation, leading to a more intensive dialogue similar to that of the most talented practitioner of intertextuality in this generation, János Dénes Orbán. “The book was edited by the author” – we read in the colophon of the first volume, from which it can be inferred that he also wrote the sentences on the back cover: “Shamanising with beautiful words, ornament and plainness, playfulness and serious matters, humour and irony appearing together and alongside one another.” All this indicates not only an intention to bring together opposing qualities, but – as several poems in the volume (for example A szerkezet [lit. The Structure], Árnyékaink [lit. Our Shadows], Fa [lit. Tree], Szavak [lit. Words], Epilógus (A modor elveszejtése) [lit. Epilogue (The Loss of Manner)]) also show – that alongside the more direct voicing of personal experiences, Vince Fekete is marked from the outset by a high degree of artistic self-awareness and self-reflexivity, and is from the beginning preoccupied with questions related to the craft of poetry and the role of the poet. István Fried, for example, interprets even his poem Haza és haza (lit. Home and Home), dedicated to Attila Mózes, as “a document of confronting a poetic role”: “The vocabulary and allegory expected of a Transylvanian poet can no longer receive their (transformed, transforming, doubt-beset) meaning within the accustomed architecture of the poem, but only within that response to a rhetorical poetic genre which may be derived from the inner dialogue of the sacred and the profane and may be viewed along the dialectic of disassembling and reassembling [1].” “Only the structure keeps things together / nooneissureofanything in the dome of the sky” – with this assertion Fekete opens his first volume (A szerkezet [lit. The Structure]), and in an essay on the poetry of János Sziveri he speaks of a type of poetic posture and mode of composition that he clearly does not stand far from himself: “Writing poetry is no longer a festive occasion but, as a consequence of acknowledging relativity and the lack of perspective, is rather the expression of uncertainty and doubt. Accordingly, a negatively constructed, dismantling, and re-arranging type of poetry takes shape. The shaking of the artistic position is complemented by a posture that foregrounds irony and self-reflection [2].” The poem Fa [lit. Tree] in the same volume begins as follows: „A költőnek a legnehezebb. Egy-egy szó, / mint ködben, felparázslik. Puhán / egyensúlyoz arra: a drága fény / sziporkázva odacsalja.” (lit. “For the poet, it is the hardest. A word / flares up in the mist. Softly / he balances towards it: the dear light / lures him there in sparks.”). In a recent conversation, he interprets the question of ‘the hardest’ in a broader, more general sense: “To seize, to formulate, to speak the world – the poem is about something of this kind, about the difficulties of saying things. About the struggle in front of the blank page, about whether what ends up on the paper is indeed precisely what I wanted to write down, and in just this way. (…) The further we advance in practice, the more difficult the vocation becomes. In this sense, it is the hardest (also) for the poet. And not only for the poet, but for anyone who takes what they do extremely seriously [3].” This conscious taking stock of the poet’s role in the early phase of his career was, in parallel with the generational endeavours already mentioned, accompanied by intense playfulness and a strong striving for linguistic and formal freedom. One conspicuous manifestation of this is the second half of the volume Ütköző (lit. Crash Barrier) and, within it, the “Ghost-poems” (“Szellem-versek”: A ladik és a Szellem [”Ghost poems”: The Boat and the Ghost], Az özvegy és a Szellem [lit. The Widow and the Ghost], A Város és a Szellem [lit. The City and the Ghost], A Szellem és a szerelem [lit. The Ghost and Love]).

From the outset, however, a distinctive feature that sets Fekete’s poetry apart from that of the most prominent contemporaries of his generation is that, while he does not shy away from referential ties, he also shows a marked sensitivity to transcendence and metaphysics – a trait that only intensifies over the years. In his volume A Jóisten a hintaszékből (lit. The Good Lord from his Rocking Chair) (2002), which contains both a selection of earlier poems and two new cycles, he not only enters into an ironic dialogue with the expanded tradition of poetry (and with the ‘Good Lord’ Himself), but in a moving sequence of flowing free-verse ‘journal entries’ that explore the metaphysics of love through the emptiness of a relationship (the cycle Leveleskönyv [lit. Book of Letters]) he seeks a path towards the more universal secrets of existence. The earlier cycle in the volume (A Gazda bekeríti [lit. The Farmer Puts Up a Fence]) still includes poems conceived in a manner related to the generational tendencies of liberated poetic outlook (such as A Mester. Fiaihoz [lit. The Master. To His Sons], Ezredvégi diákdalok [lit. End-of-century Student Songs], Térj eszedre [lit. Come to Your Senses]), along with formal and rhyme-based jeux d’esprit (Tettedre hívás [lit. To Call You to Action], A bordalhoz [lit. To a Drinking Song]). At the same time, the meditative tone that fully blossoms in Leveleskönyv is already present here, as is the existential disquiet that later deepens in Védett vidék [lit. Protected Region] (2010) (Áram [Current], Drótpolgárok [Citizens of Wire], Akinekel [Asforwho]). Writing about the universe of the Leveleskönyv poems, Tamás Prágai notes: “From the opening poem of the cycle, Az első perc és az utolsó pillanat [lit. The First Minute and the Last Moment], and its first lines – ‘az utcák zegzugos hálójának / az udvarterek szitás csápjainak / ingadozó mozgása melyben / jobbra-balra billenve lebeg / a jóhiszemű járókelő’ (lit. ‘in the zigzag mesh of the streets / in the sieve-like tendrils of courtyards / the swaying movement in which / the well-meaning passer-by / rocks to and fro’) – the question arises whether in this space-time, in this relative, that is, in Heidegger’s sense non-existent world, knowledge or reflection, text or poetry can exist at all. The narrator of Fekete’s cycle, conjured from the life facts of a couple’s relationship, arrives at the recognition of the world as a being precisely through this situation, grasped as a borderline experience (through the impossibility, the failure to truly address the ‘you’). The last poem of the volume ends with an exact indication of time: ‘becsapja bevágja ismét a szél / a kaput valahol a templom / környékén jár, aki elment / érzi a szíve ritmusát a ha- / lánték dobolását órájára / pillant a fakó / számlapra a mutatókra s / mondja mormogja a kápráz- / tató alkonyatban / fél négy‘ (lit. ‘the wind again slams / the gate somewhere near the church / the one who left is there / he feels the rhythm of his heart / the drumming in his temples / he glances at his watch / at the pale dial, at the hands and / he says he mumbles in the dazz- / ling twilight / half past three’ (Befordul nem be se forr [It Turns Only In, Never Heals Over]). Time in which the world can unfold has been born [4].” Yet this unfolding does not truly take place here, but in the Protected Region. Although Book of Letters appears to be a turning point in his poetic career, despite all its merits – the deepening self-analysis and reflection on existence, the distinct individual syntax without punctuation that he has found for this purpose, and the almost continuous, though only marked by titles, verse-speech despite the seemingly shifting ‘Self’ of the speaker – it leaves a sense of lack. The circling of the borderline situation increasingly becomes standing in place, even immobility: („már nem kívánunk / sem új indulásokat / sem új megérkezéseket / nem kívánunk / új kezdéseket / sem új befejezéseket / sem elmenni nem bírunk / sem folytatni így / csak vagyunk itt” [lit. “we no longer desire / new departures / nor new arrivals / we do not desire / new beginnings / nor new endings / we are unable either to leave / or to continue like this / we simply are here”] (Sötétebb és egyre mélyül [lit. Darker and Ever Deepening]). The poet, too, seems unable to free himself from the recognised and articulated sense of existence; his poems grow repetitive, treading water, and, as a result, the world cannot truly unfold but rather closes in, clamping down on the relationship shown as emptied.

Fekete’s poetry, especially in his first three volumes, is richly interwoven with play, humour, and irony, yet it is in his volume of parodies, satires and animal tales, Lesz maga juszt isa (2004) (lit. You’ll End Up With Him All the Same) that he creates for himself truly ample space to display his sense of style, language and form and his humour. Here he targets above all the more sharply contoured features and justifiably criticisable excesses of the poetry of his contemporaries Attila Sántha, János Dénes Orbán (OJD), and Endre Farkas Wellmann, making them the object of public ridicule with such bravura that the parody is often more entertaining than the original work, which itself contains parodic traits – and perhaps for this very reason may even have contributed to the literary canonisation of these peers to some degree. The animal tales, the La Fontaine re-writings, were more the products of a playful, experimental mood than texts with any particular function either in contemporary literature or in his own oeuvre; it is telling that he did not continue them later.

Although from here, it might seem only a small step to writing his own texts for children, the source of inspiration for the two volumes that appeared in 2008 was, by his own account [5], much more the birth of his children and the watching of them grow up before his eyes. The little book Csigabánat (lit. Snail-Sorrow), with its eleven playful, rhymed, rhythmical poems, still belongs to the more traditional line of Hungarian children’s poetry. By contrast, Piros autó lábnyomai a hóban (lit. Tyre Prints of a Red Car in the Snow) creates the Transylvanian variant of the less common Swedish-style free verse in children’s literature. From the diary entries of a nine-year-old city girl, arranged in chronological order, a mosaic-like family story gradually emerges: from the parents’ meeting and wedding, through the speaker’s birth and nursery-school years, to her school experiences and her little sibling’s sayings. The poems are suffused by the joy of life and longing for happiness of a girl marvelling at the world, even as she is necessarily forced to confront such concomitants of existence as illness, transience, death or the possibility of her parents’ divorce.

The world of the small Székely town of Kézdivásárhely (Târgu Secuiesc), Fekete’s native town, is presented – this time for adult readers – in the volume of short feuilleton-stories Udvartér (lit. Courtyard Space), also published in 2008. These texts, most of which first appeared in the feuilleton column of the county daily Háromszék (Trei Scaune), have many virtues, among them an original writerly use of language that, drawing on numerous sources – from Székely dialect elements and turns of phrase, through urban street folklore, jokes and everyday clichés, to quotations from well-known poets and writers – evokes with savour and humour both the mentality and cast of mind of rural Székely villagers and those of the small-town Székely citizen, petty bourgeois, the ‘local’ person. This is done in such a way that, despite all the witty exaggeration, distortion, and caricature, the nature of the ‘local person’ and the paraphernalia and episodes of his life – from pig-killing to Easter sprinkling, from cellar to loft, from pub to literary evening, from home-distilled potato brandy to tonic, from moustache to pocket-knife – may be familiar to readers elsewhere too. At the same time, despite its generality, everywhere recognisable qualities, and inherent sadness, this world never loses its specific, local, ‘courtyard space’ aspects. In addition, the tableau of Háromszék society and the presentation of fates and life-situations is extremely rich, diverse and temporally wide-ranging: it stretches from realistically atmospheric and now already laugh-inducing evocations of decades of Romanian socialism (for example Nagymonológ [lit. Grand Monologue], “A tőkés világ igazi arca” [lit. “The True Face of the Capitalist World”], Sor [lit. Queue]) to the post-regime-change decades, depicting the disillusioning moments of the present despite their comic portrayal (Futóhomok [lit. Quicksand], Homlokpuszi [lit. Kiss on the Forehead], Jeles napok [lit. Red-Letter Days]). The volume deploys a whole range of humorous and ironic modes and tones (from the indulgent and nostalgic through the grotesque to the sarcastic, even scathing), while it is always clear that the author does not view the world he depicts from the outside and above, with cool detachment, but from within, willingly taking on an attitude of affectionate identification. One of the book’s critics, Judit Pieldner, is right to say that “through the lightness and the punchlines there shimmers the past and present of a region, with its at times stomach-churning, painful reality [6].”

One of the striking features of Vince Fekete’s poetic and prose universe is that with this prose volume, we are led back once more to his poetry. It is no coincidence that the revised edition of Court Space of 2014, published under the same title but reduced by the omission of some pieces (for example, Kocsmadumák [lit. Pub Talk], Másnapos dumák [lit. Hung-over Talk]) and enriched with others (for example, A helyi asszony természete [lit. The Nature of the Local Woman], A helyi szex kezdetei [lit. The Beginnings of Local Sex], Lóra, magyar! [lit. Mount, Hungarians!]), bears the following motto: “Vargaváros. Előfutamok egy verseskötethez” (lit. “Vargaváros. Preludes to a Volume of Poetry”). It is as if these prose texts, too, were in fact preliminaries to a poetry collection in the making. At the same time, one might think that Vargaváros is already partly written, since the poems of the first cycle in the 2010 volume Protected Region (for example, Vargaváros. Századelő [lit. Vargaváros. Turn-of-the-century], Vásárváros [lit. Market-Town], Rózsapiac [lit. Rose Market]) evoke and re-create it. Kézdivásárhely and its environs clearly belong to Fekete’s ‘protected regions’, as does the broader natural landscape (Háromszék?) in which he so willingly loses himself in contemplation. As Mihály Ilia writes: “I do not think anyone has bent down to the Transylvanian landscape with such care and love in verse since Áprily as Vince Fekete has done [7].” This is not, however, a matter of simple lyrical regionalism, nor of re-animating the cult of landscape-homeland and native soil associated with the Transylvanianist tradition. In the landscape, there is always the human being who leans towards it, and within the human being, in turn, the landscape is always already present. In Fekete’s poems, the spiritual life of the human being and that of the landscape interact and build into one another in an original and memorable fashion („a vidék magába szippantja, elnyeli, / beissza testét” [lit. “the countryside sucks him in, swallows him, / soaks up his body”] – Felissza mind [lit. Soaks It All]).

The ‘protected regions’ are also those familiar, inhabited landscapes that are truly internal (one might think here of Sándor Kányádi). Such a region is, for example, the rich world of literary tradition stretching from the Nyugat generation (Mihály Babits, Dezső Kosztolányi, Lőrinc Szabó, Gyula Juhász, Miklós Radnóti, and János Jékely) to Transylvanian predecessors and contemporaries (Domokos Szilágyi, Lajos Létay, Sándor Kányádi, László Király, and Lázár László Lövétei). The volume opens with a motto from Lőrinc Szabó: „mert rettenetes, hogy az ember / útja oly silány s oly rövid / a földi portól a veszendő / húson át vissza a porig” (lit. “for it is dreadful that man’s / path is so paltry and so short / from the dust of earth through the perishable / flesh back to dust once more”) (A hitetlen büntetése [lit. The Punishment of the Unbeliever]), and the untitled poems that open and close the book essentially vary and write out this anxiety-provoking thought. First in a passionately throbbing free verse that protests: „Mert nem lehet ilyen jéghideg, ilyen / gépies nem lehet, ennyire pimaszul, / szemtelenül és megmagyarázhatatlanul / monoton nem lehet minden, ilyen / megmásithatatlanul zakatoló ez / a körforgásos őrület,” (lit. “For it cannot be so icy cold, so / mechanical, it cannot be so brazenly, / shamelessly and inexplicably / monotonous, this / grinding, cyclical madness cannot be / so unalterably relentless”); and finally in a more composed, more distilled sonnet that appears somewhat more understanding, more accepting in the face of the law of existence: „Mert nem lehet ilyen jéghideg, / gépies, ennyire monoton nem lehet / úgyszólván minden, nem lehet ilyen / ez a körforgásos őrület, // hogy így menjen szakadatlanul, / hogy fölépüljön, fölemelkedjék, / majd semmivé váljon hirtelen, / mint egy darabjaira hulló nyakék.” (lit. “For it cannot be so icy cold, / mechanical, it cannot be so monotonous / virtually everything, this / cyclical madness cannot be such, // spinning on unbroken, / building, rising up / then suddenly disintegrating / like a necklace scattering into pieces.”) The shift, the movement, is the result of the poetic path traversed within the volume, and, in arriving at a sense of home both in landscape and in existence, the series of explicit and implicit intertexts that call upon and appropriate the poetic worlds mentioned above provides important points of support.

Equally important supports are all those moments of his personal life story that have become significant, worth preserving, and valuable, from childhood to love affairs. Yet moving along the path, whether in a landscape suffused with metaphysical overtones and at the same time preserving geographical concreteness, or in an evidently inner, spiritual landscape, is not easy – even with the handholds and supports of ‘protected regions’. In the free-verse poems that lift everyday speech into poetry in the characteristic manner of Vince Fekete’s mature style, the confrontation with the cruelty of existence, the disquieting experience of eternal recurrence, and the human being’s fundamental social solitude is deeply affecting.

The most beautiful poems in the volume – Miért (lit. Why), Film, Kérdés (lit. Question), Tajtékos ég (lit. Foaming Sky), Tízezer éj (lit. Ten Thousand Nights) – and in truth the entire consciously structured and constructed book present us with twenty-first-century (Transylvanian) diagnoses of a shaken existence. „Fetrengeni fűben fetrengeni fában / fetrengeni a füvek illatában / úgy lenni a füvekben fákban / versekben és metaforákban / mint lehelet vagy a lélek / sóhaj egy parány életének” (lit. “To wallow in grass to wallow in trees / to wallow in the scent of grasses / to be in grasses in trees / in poems and metaphors / as breath or soul / a sigh of a tiny life”) – we read in the great, existence-summing cycle Ten Thousand Nights, which also gathers together characteristic Vince Fekete motifs. “Standing above his imagined grave and reconsidering life, the poet plays the eventual reconciled dissolution gently off against the harmony found in this earthly life, or rather: he renders these two states continuous, suspending the rupture between here and beyond” – writes Györgyi Pécsi in an apposite formulation, and it is hard not to agree with her further assessment: “Védett vidék reorganises and re-interprets the world with a fine metaphysics unusual in Hungarian poetry and with an emotional intensity likewise rare today. It is a significant volume not only within Transylvanian but within (borderless) contemporary Hungarian lyric poetry as a whole [8].”

Vince Fekete’s more recent poems, published so far only in journals but which will, we may hope, sooner or later mature into another volume, testify that he fortunately still has much to say about our ‘protected regions’.

[2015]

[1] István Fried: A transzközép keresés lírikusai. (lit. The Lyricists of Trans-Central Search) In: István Fried: Irodalmi történések Transsylvaniában. (lit. Literary developments in Transylvania.) Erdélyi Híradó – Előretolt Helyőrség, 2002. 25.

[2] Vince Fekete: Sziveri János költészete. (lit. The Poetry of János Sziveri.) Helikon, 1994, 18. 6–8.

[3] Tibor Elek: Feloldódni a tájban. Beszélgetés Fekete Vincével. (lit. Blending into the landscape. Conversation with Vince Fekete.) Bárka, 2015. 2.

[4] Tamás Prágai: Fekete Vince: A Jóisten a hintaszékből. (lit. Vince Fekete: The Good Lord from his Rocking Chair) Kortárs, 2004. 4.

[5] Tibor Elek: ibid.

[6] Judit Pieldner: Bestiárium Siculanae. Bárka, 2009. 5.

[7] Védett vidékek: Fekete Vince versei 2003–2010. Ilia Mihály 15 soros blogja. (lit. Protected Regions: Poems by Vince Fekete, 2003–2010. Mihály Ilia's 15-line blog.)http://librarius.hu/2011/12/12/vedett-videkek-fekete-vince-vesei-2003-2010/

[8] Györgyi Pécsi: Megállított idő. (lit. Time stopped.) Kortárs, 2010. 10.