“So we have gathered to bend over our fate” – the words of writer András Sütő came to mind as I reflected on how best to present Laura Iancu’s life, career and poetry.
Laura Iancu, a poet and researcher who set out from Arini (Magyarfalu), within the community of the Moldavian Csángós [a Hungarian-speaking Roman Catholic minority in Moldova], was selected – together with a few companions – to continue her studies in Miercurea Ciuc (Csíkszereda, Székelyland, Romania). From there she went on to Budapest, Szeged and Pécs, studying pedagogy, communication, theology and ethnography, and preparing for doctoral work. How long a road those two short sentences conceal – in time, in space, in soul and in spirit – she alone can truly tell; reading her poetry, we can only begin to guess. It is her own singular story; and yet, bowing with respect to all who have walked similar paths, I believe Laura Iancu’s journey resonates with anyone who chooses a path of their own, neither waiting for nor allowing others to prescribe the ‘proper’ direction of travel.
This does not, of course, mean that Laura Iancu’s Csángó identity is secondary to her career or poetry. She walks her own path, but she has not forgotten where she came from: already as a secondary-school pupil she entered into a form of service that she continues to this day. On the basis of her linguistic, religious and folkloristic research she has published widely – including the Moldavian folktale collection Az Aranyréce (lit. The Golden Teal) (2005), as well as Johófiú Jankó – Magyarfalusi csángó népmesék és más elbeszélések (lit. Johnny Sheepson – Csángó Folk Tales and Other Narratives from Magyarfalu) (2002). She has also worked on the visual-anthropological processing and interpretation of archival peasant photographs, with a striking result in the form of a beautiful album, Magyarfalusi emlékek (lit. Memories from Magyarfalu) (2005). A synthesis of her theoretical and research work can be found in Jeles napok, ünnepi szokások a moldvai Magyarfaluban (lit. Festive Days and Holiday Customs in Magyarfalu, Moldova) (2011). As she has said in an interview, she can articulate her experiences and stories from home chiefly in prose (Életfogytiglan – lit. Life Sentence, 2009; Szeretföld [the title is the name of a fictional village], 2011). Since 2006 she has also carried out editorial work for the Budapest office of Moldvai Magyarság [a Hungarian periodical focusing on the Moldavian Hungarian/Csángó communities], and since 2003 she has been the principal organiser of the Magyarfalusi Falunapok [community ‘village days’ festival in Magyarfalu]. I therefore do not believe that, with this in mind, anyone could call her to account for shaping her own fate – or expect her, on returning home, to teach the alphabet. That, too, is vital service and worthy of respect; but I believe each person should fulfil their vocation in the field appointed to them – and chosen by them.
She needed courage, strength, perseverance and talent in order to set out, to move forward, and to endure and work through the often contradictory demands imposed from without and within. Her poetry, too, is complex: it bears witness to a lyrical ‘I’ who relates ambivalently to her own existential position, yet carries that lived experience – with its multitude of inner conflicts – with a quiet naturalness and dignity.
Pár csángó szó (lit. A Few Csángó Words) (2004)
As we take her volumes in hand, we should set aside any preconceptions and expectations. Let us not go looking for a ‘Csángó poetess’, but remain open to the poetry itself. As literary critic Györgyi Pécsi emphasises: “Laura Iancu is therefore not a ‘Csángó’ poet, but simply – without any adjective – a poet, whose powerful attachments and obligations bind her to a personal past that happened to be shaped in a Moldavian village” (Györgyi Pécsi: Kiűzetés, oltalomkeresés. – lit. Exile, Seeking Refuge. Bárka, 2008/3). The title of her first volume, Pár csángó szó (lit. A Few Csángó Words) (2004), is lifted from one of the poems and functions rather as a device for catching the reader’s attention. Reading the poems, the reader will not regret yielding to the title’s pull – nor regret not expecting the voice of the ‘well-known Csángó poets’, or the atmosphere of the magnificent anthology Az ember ott a legfájóbb magyar (lit. A Man Is Most Painfully Hungarian There), with its verse-bound existential testimonies. For she is Laura Iancu, with her clear, quiet poetic voice (first recognised by writer István Ferenczes) and her own path – of which, naturally, the eleven years spent in Arini (Magyarfalu) form an organic part.
Thematically, God, solitude and love dominate the poems of the first volume, most often woven delicately into one another, as in a few lines from Emlékem első csókodról (lit. My Memory of Your First Kiss): “My being became the cathedral of your living hand / I do not demand it: be my altar” [literal translation].
Her sense of time is dominated by past and future: images of what has been and what is to come expand, while fixed moments of the present are rare. In the present’s transience, mortality becomes more emphatic; the small mosaics of everyday stories thus turn into ontological questions. Looking back and looking ahead, she searches for the possible trajectories of being, and returns again and again to the question of fate. A continuous inner moral struggle unfolds – “Within me wander in exile / God and Tatar” (Magány – lit. Solitude) – on a road that leads, among other things, from a religiosity that seems to have become too narrow for her in its dogmatism towards a personal faith in God: the shaping, finding and understanding of her own belief. In a sense, this volume is also about becoming an adult, about the journey from “You are still a child” (Őszben – lit. In Autumn) through “Lean on me / I am support” (Még – lit. Still) – about ruptures, the search for a way in love, in faith, and in the narrower and wider world. This quest, the hardships of this enterprise, the pitfalls of human life, are laid before the reader in direct, unadorned, beautiful poetry. It is delicate poetry, wise even in its becoming; it does not strive to pronounce great truths – nor even small ones – perhaps because the lyrical ‘I’ carries within its lived experience the permanence of change. “There is existence in dreams / Here, the intoxication of dreams / That outlive existence” (Hallgatásod – lit. Your Silence) – she writes. Laura Iancu’s poetry is, in itself, ambivalent: natural, yet extraordinarily disciplined. It is genuinely not didactic, but it reflects a firm value-system. The lines of her free verse, often left open, seem unbreakable; the insistently recurring initial capitals are deftly combined with a free handling of punctuation. It is as if the lyrical ‘I’, like a stubborn young colt, wished to stand on its own legs and immediately bolt into the world – as the author, if you like, deconstructs everything so that from its pieces she may create her own poetic universe. All this is accompanied by sustained confrontation, self-scrutiny, guilt and a waiting for redemption; in her ‘God-poems’, personal fate, in an ontological sense, grows into the fate of humankind.
Karmaiból kihullajt (lit. The Talons Let Go) (2007)
In this spirit, though in many respects in quite different ways, the sequence of poems continues in Laura Iancu’s second volume, entitled Karmaiból kihullajt (lit. The Talons Let Go) (2007). “Is there hope in humanity?” (Élet a hajnalban – lit. Life in the Dawn) – she asks, with the volume as a whole placing emphasis on bearing the cross. And although the collection’s melancholic tone and enigmatic quality might seem to point towards a negative answer, the hope articulated in the question nevertheless permeates the poems. For the lyrical ‘I’, this earthly existence is not sufficiently homely to sustain the individual life, while the divine confronts her with her own deficiencies. In the homelessness between the two, space is not inhabitable. The frequently invoked motif of the bird – interpreted in various ways by the reception; see Éva Hutvágner: Saját világ (lit. A World of One’s Own). Új Hegyvidék, 2008/1–4; Flóra Kovács: “Kicsi madár, miért keseregsz az ágon?” (lit. “Little bird, why do you sorrow on the branch?”), http://ahet.ro/content/view/3510/84/ – and the frequent evocation of flight are bound up with this as well. Time thus becomes decisive – in its very indefinability. The lyrical ‘I’ relates ambivalently to past and future, while in the present she repeatedly defines herself, her situation of being; the present is, for her, the time of perpetual struggle. “Only the dead live truly now” (Özön lét után – lit. Flood after Being); “I practise / world-ending / on myself” (A visszajárók – Those Who Return); “to die every day, often enough / until you wake Up There” (fent, lent – lit. above, below). Uncertainty and questions press upon her, yet she seems to know precisely what she does not want. She wrestles with both past and future: she would leave behind some parts of an unprocessed past, while wanting to carefully preserve others through ‘traces’; she would avoid a future ringed with question marks by intensifying it into apocalyptic visions. At the same time, she appears to believe in the inevitability of her fate, and with her conscious and emphatically recurring Christian motif-system she foregrounds the deliberate bearing of the cross, the taking-on of one’s lot. Most of all, the ‘middle time’ – this strikingly apt poem title – expresses the lyrical ‘I’’s existential position. She experiences various permutations of confinement and freedom: freedom within confinement, confinement within freedom – the painful ambivalence of ‘bird-being’. Moving from a precarious naturalness towards a desired certainty, yearning back for the laws of nature, and convinced of the rootlessness and fragility of an imagined security, she contrasts the freedom offered by trees with the cage-traps of ‘possibilities’. Yet the place of take-off is surrounded by death, and even her being-on-the-road is accompanied by deaths – “life: arranging oneself for death / while we mourn our dead / we murder the living” (Stációk – lit. Stations); “the taste of death completes us / for the universe, forever” (Kivételes pokol – lit. Exceptional Hell); “to die every day, often enough / until you wake Up There” (fent, lent – lit. above, below). Memory and the fine grasp of remembering pushes back against passing-away, for instance, in the motif of the trace: “Objects will remember / so will stolen handprints” (Alvó angyalok – lit. Sleeping Angels); “palmprints on your chair” (Tükörben – lit. In the Mirror); “our traces today are still ploughed fields / tomorrow, our graves” (harmat – lit. dew). Flight and desire drive the lyrical ‘I’; in this process it is the road, not the destination(s), that crystallises: “to write: I set out to forget / eternal roads break into me” (ma is – lit. today, too). The severing, the taking-flight has happened; she has a great (length of) ‘road’ behind her, but she has not yet arrived. From this not-yet-arrived-ness, too, arises the solitude and waiting for redemption that were already defining in the first volume – here brought to completion (Irányok – lit. Directions; egyedül – lit. alone; Genezis – lit. Genesis; Virradat – lit. Daybreak; Alszanak – lit. They Sleep; Jákob – lit. Jacob).
This in-betweenness is reflected in her creative self-reflexivity as well. Self-reflexivity is often aimed at the creative act itself (to highlight only a few poems: irányok – lit. directions; Az elmúlás – lit. Passing Away; Aztán megszoktuk – lit. Then We Got Used to It; Átmenet előtt dolgok – lit. Things Before Transition; frázis – lit. phrase), in connection with questions of being and memory – probing, among other things, what withstands time’s test and what may endure. (Flóra Kovács also points – in “Kicsi madár, miért keseregsz az ágon?” – to the central role of the problem of creation and writing.)
Creation, of course, is not confined to the sphere of personal creativity: the gnawing critique and self-critique turns towards creation in an overarching, universal sense as well. Already in Genezis (lit. Genesis) the sense of derailment becomes emphatic, extending to existential questions of birth, destruction, death and resurrection. She awaits fulfilment, yet seems also to fear it – and, above all, fears that it will not come to pass. Though the Creator is flawless, the human being – by virtue of being human – ruins everything; and although they yearn for redemption, through their own fault they remain unredeemed, and the lyrical ‘I’ too waits for redemption (két éj között – lit. between two nights; harmat – lit. dew). The ‘debates of faith’ she conducts within herself also mean that her tone ranges across a broader spectrum, within which rebellion and – in the best sense – humility can coexist (think, for instance, of Angyali üdvözlet – lit. Annunciation; Félig – lit. Halfway; Tovább – lit. Onward; Isten – lit. God; or the elemental Nagypéntek – lit. Good Friday; and Confessiones – lit. Confessions). Her ‘dialogues’ move in multiple directions – interweaving with her interpretation of existence, and, in the constant Jesus-parallel, with the interpretation of her own role. The inner struggle attached to faith is intensified by the spiritual quarrels of faith and love that intertwine in her imagery (Fűszálak – lit. Blades of Grass; Szeptember – lit. September; Csak holtfüvet – lit. Only Dead Grass; stációk – lit. stations).
Her diction is more mature than in the poems of the previous volume; her versification is denser, and – like the imprints of existence – leaves protruding, unworked threads, not in an aesthetic sense but in the absence of absolute answers. Not that she wishes to provide such answers. She looks to the future with expectancy, without illusions, yet not in resignation in relation both to the realistic world and to her own inner world. On the basis of intertexts, allusions and poetic features, Laura Iancu’s poetry points in strikingly divergent directions. Alongside parallels with Endre Ady, István Pilinszky, Attila József, and László Nagy, Éva Hutvágner rightly notes affinities between the poetry of Ágnes Nemes Nagy and Laura Iancu. And I agree with Györgyi Pécsi’s observation that her “more recently written” poems are akin to “the late poetry of Gizella Hervay, whose fate was tragic and whose sensibility was acutely attuned to tragedy” (Györgyi Pécsi: Kiűzetés, oltalomkeresés – lit. Exile, Seeking Refuge. Bárka, 2008/3).
Free verse remains for her the most appropriate expressive form, but the lines become more disciplined. The tension-making, enigmatic effect of punctuation – and of its omission – persists; here, however, it is employed more boldly, even within a single poem. Laura Iancu’s poetry is remarkably puritan: there are no superfluous words, no over-explained thoughts, no rampant imagery. Her verse-texture is often frayed – as if an imprint of in-between being – yet, as literary critic Ferenc Vincze writes, this is also the result of a desire for authenticity. The sometimes near-axiomatic formulations – or, as literary scholar Zoltán Bertha writes, “reduced, gnomically stripped or polished verse-closures; endings built on suggestive paradoxes, aphoristic, sententia-like statements, or simple confessional namings of feeling” (Csángómagyar sorsköltészet. – lit. Csángó Hungarian Fate-Poetry. Polis, 2007/11) – strengthen the reader’s impression that truly “only those words are set down on paper that have ripened, whose validity cannot be questioned” (Ferenc Vincze: Iancu Laura: Karmaiból kihullajt. Kortárs, 2008/7).
Her images, in their very austerity, brace themselves against the chaos surrounding human existence. Out of the subjective confessional quality of her poetry, a mature value-system becomes apparent; and the representation – at times visionary, at times tangible – of the destruction and wasting of these values turns towards readers as a series of signs and question marks.
Míg kabátot cserél az Isten (lit. While God Changes Coats) (2014)
The volumes Névtelen nap (lit. A Nameless Day) (2009), Kinek a semmi mindene (lit. Whose Everything Is Nothing) (2012), and Míg kabátot cserél az Isten (lit. While God Changes Coats) (2014) hold an abundance of questions as well. These are, for the most part, ontological questions, often induced by anxiety in the face of existence. Under the pressure of birth, death, sin and punishment, the lyrical ‘I’’s dominant mode of utterance is dialogue: an endless conversation with God and Jesus, arising from fear, protectiveness and a constant sense of lack. It touches and permeates private life and the individual, but also lost and vanishing communities – and, at times, humanity itself, as an apocalyptic vision. The dialogues sound – indeed cry out – with greater force in the cold spaces, in the clean snow, in the creative solitude of night and dawn. The mood and atmosphere of the poems arise from the tension between the finitude of fragile human existence and possibility, and the horizons opened by a biblical image-system. The resolve to help carry Christ’s cross is a taking-on of fate. It is also a descent and an ascent – the path of creation. The creator’s, the hermit’s, the holy fool’s way is a solitary one, who – even with the flame of a single match or candle – bring light into the world with their faith. In their own manner, they sacralise the world: human relationships, spaces, even the concept of homeland. In these volumes the concept of homeland expands too. The earlier search for a place in an ‘old’ and a ‘new’ homeland opens out into the existential search of the human being cast out of Eden, pointing questions at the universe. And yet night and dawn are also times turned inward, in which the dialogues speak as though we were secretly opening a diary, eavesdropping on a self-revealing confession. The fragile human being speaks then in their own purity – and it is this purity that radiates from Laura Iancu’s language. In linguistic and formal terms, too, these poems are more concentrated, at times aphoristically terse: “A secretly creating God / arrives with witnesses” (Ó- és Újszövetség – lit. Old and New Testament); “My mouth full of unfinished prayers. / Every road leads into fairytales, Mother” (A gyermek – lit. The Child).
Even in the mature poetry of her most recent volume, Laura Iancu’s lyric has preserved the clear, wonder-struck attentiveness with which she once turned towards her father to hear his stories of the city. Her attraction to the unknown, her curiosity, have not diminished – only the direction of her questions has shifted. The questioning person thinks – and searches: for home, homeland, a partner, friends, shelter, peace, and forgiveness.
Neither thematically, nor in the light of the trajectory of her poetry, is it surprising that she found drama to be the most fitting expressive form with which to preserve the fate of Ince János Petrás. The work, struggle and story of this Minorite monk, a Moldavian Hungarian Catholic priest, are inseparable from the collective tragedy of the Moldavian Hungarians, oppressed in their physical reality, their language and their religion. The play contains excellent dramaturgical solutions as well. The human being who articulates inner struggles and desires renders credible the figure of the monk fighting a heroic battle. As guardian of the Moldavian Hungarians’ faith and language, he left behind a vast treasure through collecting and publishing the folklore riches, customs, beliefs and linguistic particularities of those communities. The author does not merely perform a respectful gesture: she understands this tragedy of fate as part of her own selfhood. Out of the dialogues, what emerges is not a historical tableau but a genuine drama.
One of the most distinctive features of Laura Iancu’s work is authenticity. It is no small cross to bear in a false and labyrinthine world.
[2015]