The entire oeuvre of István Ferenczes can be described as an authentic and poetic depiction of the Hungarian fate of the 20^th-century Székely and Csángó [Hungarian-speaking communities in Romania] people. He is perhaps the only significant creator among his contemporaries who wholeheartedly, with unconditional love, directly embraces and claims solidarity with these communities. “It is clear that when (quite suddenly) I decided to become a writer, I turned to the Populist Prose-Writers (népi írók) of the interwar period, the Transylvanian Youth (Erdélyi Fiatalok), and the folk researchers. Then, the first years of my journalism convinced me that I had made the right decision. Works like Gyula Illyés’ Puszták népe (People of the Puszta), Lajos Nagy’s Kiskunhalom, Péter Veres’ Gyepsor, György Bözödi’s Székely bánya (lit. Székely Mine), Ferenc Balázs’ A rög alatt (lit. Under the Soil), Géza Féja’s Viharsarok (lit. Land of Storms), Zoltán Szabó’s A tardi helyzet (lit. The Situation in Tard), Áron Tamási’s Bajlátott szülőföld (lit. Troubled Homeland) were more intriguing to me than literary or poetry theory works. Since my early consciousness, there was something plebeian in me, an empathy for the downtrodden, the suffering, the persecuted, the small ones. I think they were the ones I truly looked up to.” – he recalls his beginnings. He learned from the finest sociographical literature, which resisted any form of romanticism or stylisation, adhering strictly to the facts and interpreting those facts, the ‘raw reality’, through the lens of social, historical justice, fairness, proportion, and humanity.

Like his schools and mentors (cf. series Magyarország felfedezése [lit. Discovery of Hungary]), István Ferenczes also methodically uncovers unknown territories, the suppressed past of his homeland, its tragic present, and the possibilities for its future. As a diligent investigative journalist and determined sociographer, he searches through various sources, documents, and personal recollections, striving for realism in every regard. However, unlike his role models, Ferenczes remains objective, living fully within and embracing the world he depicts and recreates in his writings. His ‘report-novels’, equivalent to his poetry, renew the genre of literary sociography, as seen in works such as Székely apokalipszis (lit. Székely Apocalypse), Ordasok tépte tájon (lit. On the Land Torn by Wolves), Székely tántorgó (lit. Székely Staggering), and the more recent heartbreaking documentary report on the ordeal of the Hungarians in Bucharest (Veszedelmekről álmodom [I Dream of Dangers]).

His prose and poetry share the same central concern: the biological, linguistic, and cultural survival of the Hungarian minority in Romania, which gradually develops into an extraordinarily rich body of poetry. He mobilises almost the entire lyrical and mother-tongue tradition, from folk songs, ballads, and liturgical hymns to the painful and grotesque linguistic degeneration of modern spoken language. He renovates the song form, the poem, the avant-garde montage technique, the sonnet, and, by utilising the fullest freedom of postmodernism, in his role poems, he discovers a kind of meta-world literary language. The alpha of his poetic world is the protection of his homeland and mother tongue, while its omega – in accordance with the nature of poetry – is the totality of the world. From pathos to bitter grotesque, from carefree play to the sacred, from the mundane to the sublime, Ferenczes’ poems speak in an encyclopaedic richness of poetic forms and genres, in various forms and registers, to express the complaints of the Hungarian minority and the universal and unquenchable love for life and desire for freedom.

Poetry

István Ferenczes’ contemporaries, the writers of the second Forrás generation [named after the Forrás literary journal] – including the students of the Hungarian department at Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca: Árpád Farkas, László Király, Zsigmond Palocsay, Lajos Magyari, Ferenc Kenéz, Géza Vásárhelyi, Zsófia Balla, and Gábor Cseke – entered the literary scene with the 1967 anthology Vitorlaének (lit. Song of the Sail). Ferenczes studied biology in Cluj-Napoca, and though he had little connection to the Bolyai group, after university, he did not pursue a literary career or join a literary circle; instead, he became a journalist in Csíkszereda (Miercurea Ciuc), thus missing out on the generational organisation. Nevertheless, his poetic search shares the main lines of that generation. The second Forrás generation partly continued the avant-garde modernism of their predecessors – such as Domokos Szilágyi and Aladár Lászlóffy – but unlike their universality-centred approach, their attention was primarily focused on the issues of national minority existence. In their choice of tradition, they also turned towards the rich folklore and old Hungarian poetry.

István Ferenczes’ first two volumes were published under the pen name ‘Ferencz S. István’ (Nyári vándorlások [lit. Summer Wanderings], 1972; Utolsó kenyér [lit. Last Bread], 1978), and it was only from his third volume (Ki virággal megveretett [lit. Beaten with Flowers], 1984) that he began using the name ‘István Ferenczes’.

Although by the 1990s he had become one of the defining poets of contemporary Romanian Hungarian literature, his distinctive poetic character is already evident in his early works: the lavish language, the surreal, visionary imagery, the free use of Transylvanian and Csángó folk poetry, and generally the song-like quality of his poetry, along with the prominent presence of poems and long verses.

His first poem, the seven-part Rodostó (Last Bread, 1978), is a distinctive role poem. It recalls the turning points in the life of the exiled Mikes Kelemen, from his arrival in Rodosto (Tekirdağ) to his death, moving through hope, bitter disappointments, and the peaceful acceptance of death. The free verse is an emotionally rich lyrical reckoning, organised not by the known elements of the story and textual fragments, but by the emotional rhythm of the ‘I’, which organises the slightly archaizing poem. His third volume, Beaten with Flowers (1984), contains three long poems: in the title work, folkloric verse forms (incantations, ballads, nursery rhymes) are unusually employed to describe the homeland through an encyclopedic inventory of its flora and flowers. Avant-garde montage techniques organise the poems Mint aláaknázott váróteremben (lit. Like in a Mined Waiting Room) and Hó hull az örök vadászmezőkre (lit. Snow Falls on the Eternal Hunting Grounds): lyrical etudes, prose texts, free verse, songs, and guest texts follow one another, with bold visual elements (picture poems, framed text boxes, typographical shapes) breaking the emotionally rich lyrical flow. The dynamic ‘kaleidoscope’ of free associations interrogates the post-Trianon fate of the Hungarian minority in the twentieth century, exploring both collective history and personal stories. Ferenczes relates to the minority experience in a new way: in the poem Snow Falls on the Eternal Hunting Grounds, the hunt of Native Americans living in reservations becomes a world model for the existence and fate of the Transylvanian Hungarians: “Nagy zsákmányoknak évada ez / az összkomfortos magaslesen / megnyúzva nyerít / a mítoszok fehér lova.” (lit. “This is the season for great hunts / on the comfort-laden high lookout / the myths’ white horse neighs / flayed.”).

The two most significant long poems in his works are Bacchatio Transsylvanica (1981–1985) and Didergés (lit. Shivering, 1998). The former is essentially a Song of Songs: a gallant, chivalric love confession that glorifies the beauty, worth, and kindness of the beloved. Yet it is a unique love song because the grotesque placement of time and space disrupts the present and places the poem in a mythical, dreamlike poetic realm, while ironically playing on the reality that breaks all elementary order, rules, and laws: “Mikor Qxyhuatwandzán / szombaton volt a vasárnap […] én bünkösd havában csütörtök voltam / teleholdkor ortodox havazásban / vártam hiába a kedvest.” (lit. “When in Qxyhuatwandza, / Saturday was Sunday […] I was Thursday in Pentecost month / during the full moon in Orthodox snow / I waited in vain for my beloved.”) Ferenczes’ Qxyhuatwandza, similar to Lajos Gulácsy’s and later István Kormos’ Nakonxipán, is a poetically created dream world, but in Ferenczes’ case, the perfect, desired world of lovers is constantly disrupted by the bitterness of everyday life. The poem thus becomes a juxtaposition of the idealised vision and the sweet, bitter reality of life. The Bacchatio Transsylvanica is striking for its newness and the poem’s opulently eruptive language. The poet uses a wealth of verbal accidents, language coincidences, and nonsensical phrases to create an extravagant style that is also a liberating game. Yet, the linguistic coincidences are always meaningfully grim: “fejedre / dérdíjat tűztek / írdetik ellened / országos sörözés // hűneidről / lurilláznak / angolkóros kürtök / s befúvós hangszerek […] ég veled hífjúság // sarkangyalok / körzik / halálmaid / fejedre / térdíjat tűztek // vámpírosan zuhan le / mögötted a / csüggöny” (lit. “on your head / the frost-veil was set / written against you / national drinking feast // your traitors / luring / horns with rickets / and wind instruments […] farewell to you, youth // angels of hell / circle around / your death / on your head / the frost-veil was set // vampires fall / behind you / the curtain.”) The monologue Shivering (1998) seems inspired by the identity-lost guest workers who speak in infinitives, as seen in István Domonkos’ Kormányeltörésben (lit. With the Steering Wheel Broken, 1971), which became cult-like almost immediately after its publication. Ferenczes’ poetic hero is an uneducated West Moldavian Csángó guest worker, stranded in the land between countries, nations, and cultures, abandoned even by God, trying to define his identity, his place in a world where he can never truly be at home: “futnék bé Budapest / azt mond büdös oláh / ha mond mocsok bozgor / futnék ki Bukarest / hol hát lenne haza” (lit. “I would run to Budapest / they say, dirty Romanian / if they call me filthy bozgor / I would run to Bucharest / where would I find home.”)

Alongside these longer poems, István Ferenczes’ poetry is also characterised by shorter folkloric songs (Visszanéző [lit. Looking Back], Csángó bölcsődal [lit. Csángó Cradle Song], Felcsíki legénytánc [lit. Bachelor Dance from Felcsík], Ballada [lit. Ballad]) and apocryphal works (Bornemisza Péter Erdélyben [lit. Péter Bornemisza in Transylvania], Bölcsődal [lit. Cradle Song], Arany János bujdosásai [lit. Exiles of János Arany], Pastorale con morbidezza, Addenda a LX zsoltárhoz [lit. Addenda to Psalm 60]). The bitter experiences of the 1990s in Romania and the 2004 Hungarian referendum on dual citizenship further amplify the poet’s works on minority fate, culminating in his 2010 special volume Zazpi, which can be compared to Sándor Weöres’ Psyché. The Zazpi poems feature a Spanish–Portuguese, Iberian, Basque, Galician, and God knows what kind of mixed poet and adventurer who, during the Spanish colonisation, learns Quechua and ends up lost somewhere in the Lima jungle. The book, which includes partially authentic and partially fictionalised notes, is a blend of an essay novel, a memoir, and a sociographic work, while also presenting a literary quest. Ferenczes creates a meta-world literary language, a vast cultural space that can be interpreted and embraced regardless of linguistic and national background. In this expansive space, he can express his own agonising pains, but equally importantly, he can also escape the constraints of the small people and the small language. Although the central theme of the Zazpi poems is the universal experience of losing one’s homeland, they also serve as playful and philosophical reflections on poetry, the meaning of life, and the entirety of existence. They are also an encyclopedic collection of Ferenczes’ poetical persona. In the magnificent register of poetic forms, with the tools and power of poetry, he uncovers and introduces the rarely known, mysterious Hispanic–Latin world to us: madrigals, gazels, rubá’í, quintilla, seguidilla, serenades, soledad, glosa, epic fragments, Galician folk poetry, Quechua songs, lamentations, arias, opera, half-sonnets, limericks, coplas, and cantars. Ferenczes, alongside the more academically constrained forms (sonnets), particularly and intentionally uses poetic forms closer to his poetic temperament: emotionally rich, musical, rhythmically intense, and providing greater freedom in verse structure, such as the various versions of cantar (song), romance, and poetic fables. Not only thematically but also poetically, he draws a parallel between the future of the Latin American indigenous peoples under colonial rule and that of the Romanian Hungarian minority, virtuously matching it in his poetry. For example, in the Kompország (lit. Ferry Country) poem, an intertextual reference to Ady: the tragic future of the indigenous people living on the reed islands of Lake Titicaca, whose daily experience of the fragility of existence becomes the tragic future of the scattered Hungarians: “Kompország ez, sárból, nádból tákolt haza, […] Alul pokol, fölül az örök hóhatár, / mint a sebet Isten egyszülött fián, / a tenger, a tenger, ördöglakatot zár, / és meghal itt az utolsó indián.” (“This is a ferry country, a home built from mud and reeds, [...] below hell, above the eternal snow border, / like the wound on God’s only son, / the sea, the sea, locks the devil’s lock, / and here dies the last Indian.”) The millennia-old Catholic image of God, its sacred reverence and cultural sphere, and their national–universal correspondence are, as the poems of Amor mystica – a cycle constructed according to the ritual order of the Latin Mass and published also as a standalone book – also indicate, self-evident truths: “Hatalmas voltod előtt / az ember oly parány, / Istenem, mint lehet / elbírni ily arányt, / viselni a semmihez / sem mérhető magányt.” (lit. “Humbled by Your mighty being, / the human stands so small. / My God, how can one bear / so vast a ratio’s thrall, / endure that solitude / no measure can recall?”)

Prose in the 1990s

After completing his university studies, István Ferenczes worked as a journalist for Hargita Népe, a newly established newspaper in Csíkszereda (Miercurea Ciuc), from 1968 onward. In 1975, he was removed from his position for political reasons, yet from 1979 until the regime change of 1989, he again worked as a journalist, serving as the Székely Land correspondent of the Bucharest-based Falvak Dolgozó Népe (Working People of the Villages). His native village, Csíkpálfalva (Păuleni-Ciuc), lies only a few kilometres from Csíkszereda; in fact, apart from his school years in Lugos (Lugoj) and his university studies in Kolozsvár (Cluj-Napoca), he has spent his entire life in his homeland. As a reporter and correspondent, he gained intimate knowledge of the Felcsík and Gyergyó regions, and, through his work for Falvak Népe, of the Hungarian Csángó villages and their inhabitants in Western Moldavia. Apart from György Beke, he is arguably the person most thoroughly acquainted with this region.

Drawing on several years of investigative journalistic experience, Ferenczes published his selected life-stories in the volumes Gyásztól gyászig (lit. From grief to grief, 1994), Székely apokalipszis (Székely apocalypse, 1994, 2002), and Ordasok tépte tájon (Landscape ravaged by devastation, 1997). In his harrowing writings and reports, he recounts the silenced chapters of twentieth-century Székely Land history: the atrocities committed by the Romanian Maniu Guard units that broke into Felcsík at the end of the Second World War, and the daily, heartrending struggle of the Gyimes and Western Moldavian Csángó communities for the survival of their mother tongue. Ferenczes aptly describes his shorter, hybridised prose pieces as ‘report-novels’: works that belong no less to the literature of documentary fact-finding than to classical belles-lettres. As an investigative author, he relies primarily on oral history to uncover events, reconstructing stories from personal recollections and testimonies, and articulating the era iconically through individual, everyday destinies. He does not listen to his subjects from the position of an omniscient, external, objective narrator; rather, his account is interwoven with personal engagement and deep respect. A distinctive merit of these testimonies is that the author preserves and reproduces the speakers’ natural, often fragmentary or dialectal speech. The protagonists of the report-novels Istók János morzsa revolúciója (lit. Crumb Revolution of János Istók) and Jánó Ilona pokolra száll (lit. Ilona Jánó Descends to Hell) speak in the Moldavian Csángó dialect – partly in a language predating nineteenth-century Hungarian linguistic reform, reminiscent of Balassi with its beautiful natural metaphors, and partly in a Hungarian damaged by the pressures of the surrounding Romanian linguistic environment. Ferenczes records these accounts phonetically, retaining their broken, oral quality, and provides footnotes to clarify dialectal Hungarian or Romanian expressions that deviate from the Hungarian standard: „Hiába süt reám a Nap, hiába takarózom be a gyapjú csergébe, reszketek, fázogálok… de én abajgok, mást nincsen mit csánjak, imádkozgatok, mondom a tatöl nosztrut, peregtetem a rózsafüzért, románul, hát, hogy így tanoltam” (lit. “The Sun may shine upon me in vain, and in vain I wrap myself in the woollen blanket; still I tremble, shiver… but I bear it, for there is nothing else I can do. I murmur my prayers, whisper the tatăl nostru, let the rosary slip through my fingers – in Romanian, aye, for that is how I was taught.”). Whether Csángó or Székely speakers recount their lives and past, each narrative carries bitter pain – partly due to the inherent tragedy of the story, partly due to its long-standing unspeakability. Eleven-year-old Kató Margit Árva begins her life testimony thus: “Írtam egy verset. Ez a vers arról az őszről szól, amelyről évtizedeken keresztül csak álmomban mertem beszélni, de még akkor is rettegtem, nehogy hangos legyen az álombeli beszéd. Ez a vers arról a negyvennyolc évvel ezelőtti őszről emlékezik, amikor a felcsíki medencében feltűnt egy gyilkoló csapat… Olyan jóra a sorsom soha nem tudott fordulni, hogy feledni tudjam azokat a napokat.” (lit. “I wrote a poem. It speaks of that autumn of which, for decades, I dared speak only in my dreams – yet even then I trembled in fear, lest my dream-voice become audible. The poem recalls the autumn forty-eight years past, when a band of killers appeared in the Felcsík basin… My fate has never turned so fortunate that I might forget those days.”). Profán rekviem Bálint Istvánért (Profane Requiem for István Bálint, 1994) likewise evokes the murder of one of the Maniu Guard’s innocent victims. In this piece, the authorial intervention is at its strongest: the narrative of remembrance is explicitly structured according to the order of the Latin liturgy, while lyrical elements and objectivity are counterbalanced by brief contemporary newspaper reports. Although these report-novels stand on their own as complete works, they also serve as thematic studies for Ferenczes’ most substantial, most intricate prose work in the genre: Székely apokalypse, written in 1993–1994.

This documentary novella recounts actual events. At the end of the Second World War, following the collapse of the German–Hungarian front and before the arrival of the Soviet army, a power vacuum emerged in Felcsík. Into this vacuum entered an irregular, ragtag, vengeful Romanian detachment of some two hundred men, intent on exacting retribution for the detriments suffered during the entry of Hungarian forces after the Second Vienna Award. Their first station of terror was Szárazajta (Aita Seacă), notorious for the gruesome massacre that took place there, from where they continued unopposed towards Csík (Ciuc), Gyergyó (Georgheni), and the interior of Székely Land. At the centre of the work lies Csíkszentdomokos’ (Sândominic) passion narrative. On Friday, 6 October 1944, as the village awaited the end of the war and prepared for peace, the irregular and vengeful horde descended upon the settlement in search of weapons and soldiers. As a result of their brutal manhunt, two days later, they executed nine men and two women after subjecting them to severe beatings and torture. The youngest victim was an eighteen-year-old boy with a mental disability; the oldest was an eighty-four-year-old woman, Ágnes György. The terrified villagers were forced to witness the execution; the next day, the marauders plundered whatever valuables they could seize and drove off the villagers’ livestock.

The author seeks to expose these still-unhealed wounds through two temporal planes and multiple modes of narration, with the precision of a chronicler. In a tightly structured composition, Ferenczes alternates between survivors’ present-day oral histories – often juxtaposing several recollections of the same event – and vivid realist narrative passages in which he himself recounts the past. His prose vision is precise and evocative, strictly confined to the historical moment; the reader learns no more than what contemporaries could have known. Yet the witnesses, speaking from the present and wrestling with their emotions, now recount the tragedy as history: they do not merely remember, they also interpret. The two superimposed temporal layers, alternating in the slow rhythm of ballads, epics, and laments, hold up an unflinching mirror to history and to the boundless cynicism of power. The documentary novella does not rest content with uncovering the past or allowing the long-suppressed pain of the witnesses to be voiced after half a century of enforced silence. It also investigates the aftermath and the shameful absence of expiation. Only Népi Egység, edited by Gyárfás Kurkó, reported on the events with relative accuracy; the military court of Brassó (Brașov) delivered a perfunctory verdict, despite the fact that the Maniu Guard was ‘officially’ deemed an enemy of the socialist Romanian state. “From the trial I remember only that my mother was summoned, and later to Bucharest as well… But whom could she recognise? No one. My mother said: Son, we dare not recognise anyone… The fear lived so strongly in us, we were so afraid, that everyone walked with lowered eyes, as though the victims had been the murderers, the guilty ones,” recalls one survivor. The Székely apocalypse opens with a prologue that, through the account of Balázs Orbán, relates the ominous tragedy of Prince Báthori, who was betrayed and killed by his own men at the boundary of Csíkszentdomokos; for seven years, blood is said to have welled up from the soil at the site of the deed. In the epilogue, the chronicler-author Ferenczes inscribes the lament into mythic memory: in the autumn of 1944, eleven innocent Hungarians were killed at the village boundary, their killers having “barely suffered any punishment for their terrible deeds… A few years later, the widows and orphans of the eleven innocent people approached the common grave and erected an iron cross, on the plaque of which they engraved the date of the execution… and the names of the slain.”

Documentary-Essays of the 2000s

Starting in 2013, Ferenczes published his unique documentary-memoir in Kortárs magazine under the title Veszedelmekről álmodom (lit. I Dream of Dangers), in serialised form, which is expected to become the crown of his prose oeuvre. The new work seems to be focused on his family’s history, his extensive ancestry, his schoolmates, and his genealogical research. This time, unlike his previous work, which relied on oral histories, Ferenczes places greater emphasis on documents, archives, the contemporary press, and birth certificates. He approaches the memoirs in the first-person singular, assuming a personal interest in the narrative. The forthcoming work promises an exciting chapter on the Hungarians in Bucharest between the two World Wars. The Székelys, forming a significant colony between the wars, helped build the Romanian capital, with Ferenczes’ father, a builder, also taking part in the construction.

Ferenczes soon noticed the often-heartbreaking stories of Székely girls who had come to Bucharest as domestic workers, which led him to begin researching the possible Hungarian connection of the 20^th century’s most significant poet, Tudor Arghezi. He uncovered a remarkable mystery in Romanian literature: Arghezi’s mother’s identity, which had been hidden and which even Romanian literary historians were unaware of. The results of his research, an episode from the memoir series Veszedelmekről álmodom (lit. I Dream of Dangers), were published in a bilingual edition by Hargita Publishing House. After a lengthy investigation worthy of a romantic adventure novel, István Ferenczes discovered and proved, with documents, that the mother of Tudor Arghezi (1880–1967), the most significant Romanian poet of the 20^th century, was actually named Rozália Ergézi and of Székely-Hungarian descent. This revelation is significant because Arghezi himself never truly knew or disclosed the full details of his parents’ background, particularly his mother’s. For the first ten years of his life, he remained silent about them, or, when he did speak, he did so in contradictions, hiding his origins. As a relentless, dedicated investigative journalist and an empathetic sociographer, with a solid intuition as a poet, Ferenczes plunged into the research. The book Arghezi ← Ergézi is not a rigorous literary-historical work or biography, but a sociographer’s, essayist’s, and lyrical poet’s book, as well as a fascinating philosophical and intellectual travelogue. He not only recounts the conclusion but also vividly describes the convoluted journey to reach it: the dead ends, the futile efforts, and the joy of finding each small piece of the puzzle. At times, where there is a lack of definitive facts, Ferenczes turns to “the truth of the poet’s self,” referring to the Arghezi poems. This section of the book is equally exciting as Ferenczes tries to catch the poet in his oeuvre, using a series of his poems to justify his intuition that Arghezi “really loved that woman” because, when he was hiding her, he was protecting her from prying strangers. The precise truth and the once tangible reality have become impossible to uncover, but Ferenczes’ Arghezi ← Ergézi book undoubtedly became a sensation in Romanian–Hungarian literary history in 2015.

[2016]