Sándor Gál’s work is remarkably wide-ranging: he can lay claim to just under fifty standalone volumes and fully a dozen collected editions. His colourful, extended creative career, from its beginnings to the present day, has made room not only for every literary mode – from lyric to prose to drama – but for almost every genre as well, including publicistic writing alongside belles lettres. An active and prolific life; a rich and substantial œuvre: according to certain monographs and handbooks, he ranks among the most widely read authors of Czechoslovak (today Slovak) Hungarian literature [Hungarian-language literature produced by the Hungarian minority in Czechoslovakia/Slovakia].
His start – perhaps because it did not coincide with the later debut of his generation-mates, recorded under the name of the ‘Eight’ [a group of eight Slovak-Hungarian poets who came to prominence in the late 1950s], with the 1958 publication of the Fiatal szlovákiai magyar költők antológiája (lit. Anthology of Young Slovak-Hungarian Poets) – left him oddly companionless: he stood outside generational formations common creative workshops. Yet his first works were confident and elevated. At once, in the opening cycle – and poem – of his debut volume, Arc nélküli szobrok (lit. Faceless Statues), he sang “the hymn of arrival”, like someone who had immediately found the path marked out for him. There was in it a youthful swagger and a Mayakovskian self-assurance – visible even in the breaking of the lines – in the way he made the uplifting impulses and forces palpable [the following is a literal translation]:
“I came
with a hundred others
through ages
dissolved in peasant blood and bone.
I came from a flood of instincts
swollen with faith.
[...]
Through faith-wars, through race-wars,
I do not know how I arrived here.
I was always a stranger on this earth [/land],
cast out,
a serf and a servant,
at home yet without a homeland,
an eternal wanderer,
a prisoner of nights,
the share-reapers’
first premature child,
hungry for everything!”
“...a people’s fate, past, is with me,” the arriving poet declared, and the declaration amounted to a commitment – to the renewal of the traditions of folk poetry. Although turns of phrase and sentence patterns at times recalled the poetry of László Nagy and at other times that of Ferenc Juhász, the everyday register and sociographic bent showed a closer kinship with the world and ways of expression of the ‘Seven’ and the ‘Nine’ [Slovak-Hungarian poetic groupings known by these names]. It was more than a gesture of homage that he later dedicated perhaps his best-known poem, Homokot (lit. Sand), to poet József Ratkó. The perspective that saw the peasant, village world – at once alluring and repellent – as those “bent double by troubles”, as “ships stranded on the shoal of orders”, was, in its temper, perhaps neither as martial nor as bitter as that of some of the poets mentioned – in any case, the self-image of the “man able to snap chains and break dams” soon changed. Not beyond recognition, of course, and not with the shock of a sudden reversal: the traits had been merely familiar before; afterwards they became defining. He replaced direct address with indirect utterance, and his personal tone with a mode of expression that conceals the speaker’s individuality, stripping them of almost every social and historical attribute. Literary historian András Görömbei, who produced perhaps the earliest portrait of him in his monograph A csehszlovákiai magyar irodalom 1945–1980 (lit. Hungarian Literature in Czechoslovakia, 1945–1980), singled out two important features of his poetry: confessional intensity and a struggle with time. Görömbei regarded the poems of Szabad vonulás (lit. Free Passage) as carrying out a turn that strengthens the idea of “the historical determination of personal life” and heightens the awareness of “loneliness, of the lack of emotional ties that bind one to existence”. Even in Napéjegyenlőség (lit. Equinox) he looked, amid a variety of impulses (Lajos Kassák, Gyula Illyés, László Benjámin, Vinokurov), to the prospects of giving poetic voice to objects and everyday life – above all taking account of the Czech poets who “poeticise the everyday”, and most especially of Šotola, the maker of a “total inventory of things”.
Where critics earlier stressed his following of folk lyricists, later they reached for parallels with the objective lyric poetry associated with Ágnes Nemes Nagy. This poetic ideal had, at the time, won only a few adherents within (Czecho)slovak Hungarian poetry. That Sándor Gál, too, fell under its spell may, besides his interest in Czech poetry, have owed something to poet an critic Árpád Tőzsér’s still-frequently cited study, A lírai vallomás hogyanja (lit. How the Lyric Confession Works), which arrives at the conclusion that the novelty and value of the first two volumes lies in an ‘impersonal’ aesthetic. How well the programme of impersonality fits the poet’s temperament, and what sorts of ‘objectivities’ he might deploy to realise it – exchanging the demand for a human and social wholeness of outlook on life for the inevitably narrower expressive means of a philosophy of existence, the phenomena and elements of the natural world – was, at first, scarcely articulated. In truth, the dilemma emerges only later, and with considerable emphasis, in the sixth volume, Folyó (lit. River), which a few admirers consider to have brought a second birth.
This dilemma is borne witness to by Kihalt évszakok (lit. Extinct Seasons), dedicated to the memory of publicist Zoltán Fábry, even if it does not directly link the metaphor of the road to the two verse-types: “the extinct seasons pile up / into a heavy silence; there is no day, / and no night either; no word, no history – / in time all matter is of a single kind.” In the same place he adds: “the road we made was built for someone else”; and though the phrasing is a commonplace, it does not conceal the sense of disappointment. In the next volume, tellingly titled Éden és a Golgota között (lit. Between Eden and Golgotha), the nine-part composition Amíg lehet (lit. While It Is Still Possible) has its lyrical subject say: “why should I not begin with this – / with what is in me, with the fate that grew into my fate, / with the roads that became my road and everything else / that this world with its peculiar history / has burned into me.” To move back “from the existence-minority / into the bosom of the matter-majority universe”, he sets the aim, because “the time has come to say / not with youthful hot-bloodedness but with a mature / man’s discipline what experience / and dawns have herded together”. The analyses of literary scholar László Koncsol and literary historian Zoltán Szeberényi likewise tend to stress the values of these two volumes: on the one hand, the ideological-artistic and thematic unity of minority existence and of individual and communal questions of fate; on the other, a philosophical, meditative deepening. Poet and critic László Tóth, for his part, discerned and praised in the elegiac tonality of Kettényílt napkorong (lit. Split Sun-Disk) the expression of the precariousness of both individual and communal existence. In matters of tone and poetic language, literary critic Zsófia Bárczi, author of the afterword to the most recent selection of poems (Kihalt évszakok), distinguished – across the arc of the career – four variants: first, the song-like mode that revives the tradition of ‘folkish’ diction; second, an elevated, often biblical mode, free-verse-like, recalling the voice of the Psalms; third, a mode that stages the tragedy of a split self, as though a conscious being, stripped of personality, looked upon itself as an object or as space – a place; and fourth, the time-confronting, existence-summing poem that appears as the bearer of a passion narrative, without metaphysical consolation, with the absence of transcendence.
From the standpoint of genre, too, it is an intriguing circumstance that the lyricist’s “world with its peculiar history” is built up precisely at the point when the storyteller’s is. One literary historian presents the author as the one who gives voice to “the identity-deficient state of minority fate”, seeking a shared trait between the lyric poet and the short-story writer. Yet for that, the two paths had to meet and run together for a time, before diverging once again. The question is how far poet and narrator differed from one another in programme and conception. Might not the latter’s beginnings – alongside the obvious Hemingway inspirations – have been most powerfully shaped by a Beat-generation ethos, which saw the typical young figure of the age in the drifting hero, in the characters created by writers Gyula Lugossy, István Csörsz and István Császár, among others? After Nem voltam szent (lit. I Was No Saint), Sándor Gál’s first book of prose, Múmia a fűben (lit. Mummy in the Grass) suggests as much – above all in pieces such as Visszafelé (lit. In Reverse) or Tróger Haver (lit. Layabout Mate). The roaming, vagabond existence appears in no sense as a lifestyle dictated by minority fate, even as, in Slovak-Hungarian literature at the time, there were being written –could be written – the stories of the dramatic post-Second World War fate of Hungarians: the declaration of collective guilt and total disfranchisement [post-1945 measures in Czechoslovakia that treated Hungarians as collectively guilty and stripped them of civil rights], as in the novels of Olivér Rácz and László Dobos. Or that of József Mács, including Adósságtörlesztés (lit. Repaying a Debt) with its programme-announcing title.
As a short-story writer, Sándor Gál would only years later give an account of those fates that had grown into his fate. First he wrote his sociography Mesét mondok, valóságot (lit. I Tell a Tale, I Tell Reality), at points timidly – and unnecessarily – holding back from personal involvement. This village portrait sits within the contemporary literary series that includes, for instance, András Sütő’s Anyám könnyű álmot ígér (lit. My Mother Promises Me a Light Dream), Gyula Duba’s Vajúdó parasztvilág (lit. A Peasant World in Labour), and Gyula Szabó’s Gólya szállt a csűrre (lit. A Stork Landed on the Barn). In its ethnographic interests, descriptions of customs and folklore collecting it also shows kinship with István Horváth’s irreplaceable masterpiece Magyarózdi toronyalja (lit. Under the Tower of Magyarózd). This restrainedly confessional book was followed by his prose pieces leaning towards publicistic writing and reportage – A király (lit. The King), Szentuccája (lit. The Holy Alley), Családi krónika (lit. Family Chronicle) or Tábori lapok (lit. Field Notes) – as well as Ítéletidő (lit. Time of Judgement), a “ballad-toned” story whose effect is shaped by the embedded poem; the cultivation of documentary prose can hardly be read as a sign of mistiming. Rather, it mournfully and sternly calls out the failure of debt-repayment. At the same time, it may be driven by self-scrutiny – the will for “a revision of ourselves”, in the sense of Transylvanian writer and theologian Sándor Makkai. As one of his superb poems, Távolodók (lit. Those Who Drift Away), puts it: “and the neutral sky drifts / with those who depart, / with the unknowing offenders, / with the tongue-bereft hesitators, / who just go, ever go on, / who only ever drift away, / who stagger out of themselves too, / who forget their fathers’ word, / who hide their hidden yesterday, / threshold and gate look after them, / the dark gate-idol gazes at them, / and even their memory turns out / through the mouths of mute doors”. The simultaneous demand for reckoning and for facing up may have been the more resolute the more resounding the successes he achieved, not only as a writer of fine literature but also as a journalist, and the more he managed to win over even the youngest age-group with the children’s poems of Csikótánc (lit. Foal Dance) and Héterdő (lit. Seven Woods), with the stories of Mese a Hétpettyes házikóról (lit. Tale of the Seven-Spotted Little House), and – not least – with the fairy-tale play performed under the title A szürke ló (lit. The Grey Horse).
His artistic public role and his conception of literature came under attack in the period around the Velvet Revolution [the 1989 peaceful transition that ended communist rule in Czechoslovakia], evidently because he was seen only as a spokesperson for communal fate, and not as the creator of an ‘impersonal’ aesthetic. In his literary-historical surveys, Lajos Grendel, who judged his work unfairly in more than one place, could therefore place Gál’s short stories, in general terms, alongside the novels of László Dobos, Gyula Duba and József Mács, writing that it was largely these that shaped the profile of Czechoslovak Hungarian prose. That classification would have been honourable enough – for elsewhere he did, albeit ambivalently, offer praise: in his view, up to November 1989 the programme-mindedness of Hungarian literature there “had a measure of justification”. The writers mentioned strengthened the Hungarian minority’s sense of identity, and “it would be folly to deny that there was a great need for this”. To the question of why should not be necessary in the present what was necessary in the past, we receive no answer. There is only the assured declaration: the prose model of Dobos, Gál and their peers “will not be, and cannot be, the canon of our prose writing”. The prophecy embedded in the rebuke may have prompted Sándor Gál to draft a kind of letter on the aesthetics of silence, saying that it clarifies everything in time and – as he emphasised in italics – “then not only real, but spiritual cannibalism too will come to an end”.
That he received unjust, near-judicial opinions with extreme gentleness – with an old man’s wisdom – was no doubt connected to his severe illnesses, to his returns from clinical death. They may have made him conscious that “the gallant years march on”, and that he had set out “towards the final order”. The moment for a personal reckoning arrived. Short prose still tempted him enough to novelise his soldiering experiences – for instance, to make a late attempt at blending the colours of comedy in A Kerek Nagyasszonyhoz címzett fogadó (lit. The Inn Addressed to the Round Great Lady). As a short-story writer he fell silent, and his diaries, too, grew ever more spare: instead of reports of facts and analyses they became, rather, mood bulletins. The titles of the poetry volumes – A következő halál (lit. The Next Death), A hívás igézetében (lit. In the Spell of the Call), A rák évada (lit. The Season of Cancer) – make unnecessary the fretting of a perceptive critic both about the canon and about whether they “can be interpreted from the perspective of current strategies of literary understanding”. The closing line, which can also be read as an existential summing-up – “and there are no questions / only acceptance” – will be understood by those who can. The reader, as strategist of life, may recognise: it cannot be recorded in a story, it cannot be located in space or time, that “behind everything stands death”, the “horizonless nothing”. In terms of the objectification of feelings and experiences, this means, indeed, that the aesthetic has once again become ‘impersonal’. Out of the impersonal and the unreal, out of the immaterial, the poet creates the poetry of an oppressive passing away. The lyrical ‘I’ speaking under the spell of death’s call seems to bear out Heidegger’s claim that the world-picture does not mean a picture formed of the world, but the world grasped as picture. The paradoxical formulations attest an intellectual summation, using varied poetic means – without the slightest trace of self-deception or self-pity. Elements of sight and vision pass into one another in a light etherealness, though the procedure is not merely the object-projection of mood. A vivid example of such objectification is the winter tree: “I am empty / between my branches the wind / shrieking searches for itself.” His composition Szél (lit. Wind), published in a separate volume, would likewise have been – would still be – worth attention for similar reasons: in it the world, as one admirer analysed, loses its folk locality and character, and, set between creation and the end, “rises into the object of a cosmic geomorphology”.
It is a pity that this ascent – and other value-creating gestures comparable to it – has remained without echo. After thirty-four years, László Tóth could repeat what he once raised in his review of Liliomos kürtök (lit. Lily-Emblazoned Horns): “it is surely time for a career-portrait that assesses and presents Gál’s writing to date in its full scope and interconnectedness, one that could meaningfully designate the place he occupies in our minority literature and spiritual life, and the role he has played in shaping these.” Indeed, it is time – so that one of the most industrious and versatile creators of Slovak-Hungarian literature need not continually project before himself the image he condenses, in one of his poems (titled Ez is ítélet – lit. This Is Judgement Too), like this: “and drifting away now one can see / the survivors as they / trample down the horizons”.
[2012]