The most important message of Sándor Kányádi’s organically evolving poetry is the imperative to love one’s native land. This native land is not an abstract idea; rather, it is the unity of landscape, culture and humanity, formed out of everyday reality, memories and inherited traditions, and realised within a geographically definable territory. The poet, as he himself liked to say, did nothing more than write down what he saw. Yet what he saw, and the way he wrote it down, gave rise to the twentieth century’s most significant body of Transylvanian-Hungarian poetry and to an outstanding value within Hungarian literature as a whole. His poems had an especially revelatory effect in the 1970s and 1980s. It was around this time that, in the aftermath of Trianon [the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, which dismembered historical Hungary and left large Hungarian communities outside the new borders after World War I], Herder’s prophecy regarding Hungarians beyond the borders appeared capable of fulfilment – that entire communities numbering in the millions, such as the Hungarian population of Romania, might in fact disappear.

Yet while existence as a national minority is a determining factor in his poetry, it is not its sole interpretative key. The poet elevated the language of the “province” into a meta-world-literary idiom, and in this at once “provincial” and yet meta-universal language he became capable of shaping into poetry, with universal force, the most fundamental questions of twentieth-century humanity – the elemental desire for existential and ontological homecoming, of which, for him, the most essential component was the existence and fate of the Hungarian community in Transylvania. Alongside – and in spite of – the public engagement and existential immediacy of his poetic world, even those “message-in-a-bottle” poems sent out from the most tragic decades of the dictatorship [the Communist regime in Romania] first and foremost drew attention by virtue of their linguistic and formal richness, their craftsmanship, bold experimentation and virtuosity. Behind and beyond the overt or implied topoi of the “poet of the people”, the “committed” poet, the “poet of national destiny”, there is always present the universality of the poeta doctus – the learned poet. Sándor Kányádi’s poetry – as László Csiki writes – in a sense recapitulates the phylogenesis of Hungarian literature: from folk poetry, psalms and chronicle-songs, through Sándor Petőfi, János Arany and Endre Ady [major Hungarian poets of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries], via the Transylvanian Helikon writers [the interwar group of Hungarian writers in Transylvania], to the principal stylistic currents of the twentieth century, and all the way to postmodern textual literature.

His poetry remains unbrokenly authentic: in its form, its language and its verse construction, it never ran ahead of – nor lagged behind – the level which he possessed emotionally and intellectually; he never sailed into alien or only half-familiar waters, but always wrote of a world he had wholly made his own, a world in which he was completely at home. The arc traced by his poetic career is perhaps without parallel: lyricism rooted in the nineteenth century almost imperceptibly becomes twentieth-century; the rural, peasant world expands into a European-horizoned, universal domain; simple poetry of lived experience is transformed into philosophical, ontological verse.

Virágzik a cseresznyefa (lit. The Cherry Tree Is in Blossom, 1955); Sirálytánc (lit. Dance of the Seagull, 1957)

The career beginnings of Sándor Kányádi and of the first post–Second World War generation of Hungarian writers in Transylvania fall in the first half of the 1950s. Although between the two world wars Transylvanian Hungarian literature had grown into a powerful, polyphonic and clearly stratified field, in which the Helikon writers, left-wing authors and Transylvanist thinkers could all work side by side, the post-war years in many respects became a period of restarting. Alongside the dismantling of established traditions, new forums were built for a dogmatic, sectarian and voluntarist conception of literature.

Immersion in the spirit of the age, and a temporary identification with its ideas, produced a kind of double beginning in Kányádi’s poetic career as well. The ideal embraced by his generation – much like that of the “Fényes szelek” [“The Shining Winds”, shorthand for the post-war, left-leaning youth movements in Hungary] in Hungary – was “Our banner: Petőfi” [a slogan invoking Sándor Petőfi as a revolutionary and poetic model]: simplified “folk” orientation, a more straightforward poetic language, report-like immediacy, direct agitation, and the programme of improving the world. Yet Petőfi’s ethos, his revolutionary puritanism and his desire to change the world, were by no means alien to Kányádi; they were inherently his own. His upbringing was determined by the work-centred value system of the rural, peasant world and by folk culture; into this stable, predictable universe there burst the dominant ideology of the age, with whose proclaimed principles he was at first able to identify. His first volume – Virágzik a cseresznyefa (lit. The Cherry Tree Is in Blossom, 1955) – is imbued with the joy of speaking out, identification with the grandeur of the task, and an unconditional faith in the Party.

According to his own testimony, however, Kányádi’s faith in socialism was already shaken in 1952. His loss of left-wing illusions was further reinforced by the bitter experience of the years following 1956 in Romania. In response to the 1956 Hungarian Revolution [the nationwide anti-Soviet uprising in Hungary], smaller demonstrations also took place in Transylvania, followed by unprecedented reprisals. Disillusionment with the “mother country” was inevitable, for with a demonstrative political gesture it handed over its two-million-strong Hungarian minority to the Romanian Party leadership, which then set about dismantling Hungarian cultural institutions. These events posed a grave moral challenge even to those who had approached socialism with trust: it was no longer possible to relate to power in a spirit of understanding. The crisis of faith is already perceptible in the poems written from 1955–56 onwards, and in the 1957 volume Sirálytánc (Dance of the Seagull).

This volume, in effect, represents a withdrawal, a distancing from his earlier poetic self. In place of agitational, expressive mobilisation, metaphorical poetic speech, genre scenes and moral parables become more characteristic, while attention shifts towards the inner world of the soul. An elegiac, quiet, meditative tone, and the landscape poems of autumn and winter, suggest a darker inner realm: Tűnődés csillagok alatt (lit. Meditation beneath the Stars), Emlékezés (lit. Remembrance), Apróságok (lit. Small Things), Üzenet pásztortűzhöz (lit. Message to a Shepherd’s Fire), A tenger (lit. The Sea), Kóbor kutya (lit. Stray Dog), A kökösi hídon (lit. On the Bridge at Kökös), Öreg kút az utca szádán (lit. Old Well at the Mouth of the Street), A mi utcánk (lit. Our Street), Üzenet pásztortűzhöz estéli szállásra (lit. Message to a Shepherd’s Fire for the Evening Halt), Arany János kalapja (lit. The Hat of János Arany), and the title poem Sirálytánc (lit. Dance of the Seagull).

In reality, Dance of the Seagull was the poet’s first volume written in his own true voice; this is the book that should be regarded as his actual second, and in fact genuine, début. The censors, however, also took note of it, and in accordance with contemporary practice the volume was withdrawn from bookshop circulation the very moment it appeared. After Dance of the Seagull, a longer silence followed – and beyond the act of silencing itself, this also meant that, as one of the consequences of the pulped volume, the main literary forums avoided publishing Kányádi’s new poems for several years.

Harmat a csillagon (Dew Upon a Star), 1964

Sándor Kányádi dates his consciously assumed, deliberate poetic beginning to the volume Harmat a csillagon (Dew Upon a Star). He turns back to folk poetry and rediscovers an authentic image of Sándor Petőfi and János Arany, finding in the former the ideal of freedom and a plebeian outlook, and in the latter the genius of a weighty, chiselled language, as well as an affinity with a classicising form of folk-inflected poetry and with the landscape lyricism of interwar Transylvania (Transylvanian-Hungarian poets Lajos Áprily and László Tompa). In Petőfi, Kányádi seeks support not merely in the contingent uncertainty characteristic of a young poet’s beginnings; rather, stylistic democratisation and a mobilising, direct-voiced form of (folk) representation – together with the moral ideal of “shared public burden” – become a conscious programme for him. In a series of poems (Ellenvers avagy folytatás [lit. Counter-Poem, or Continuation]), Stray Dog, On the Bridge at Kökös, Dance of the Seagull, he repeatedly evokes the figure who assumes responsibility for public affairs, the inflexible revolutionary of the ideal. Part of the Petőfi inheritance is the consistent demand for the unity of word and deed (Message to a Shepherd’s Fire for the Evening Halt), Bot és furulya [lit. Stick and Flute]).

For him, the authentic basis of poetry lies in the micro-world of the peasant, rural community of childhood, where human being and landscape exist in a mythical and moral unity. With a powerful gesture the poet turns towards his personal past, towards the order of childhood: the mosaic of an ageing village – an old well, an old beam, an old house, an ancient flute, an old shepherd, an old woman – all signal a world that is receding into the past, yet to which he remains bound by love and attachment. The most beautiful and most enduring poems of Dance of the Seagull and Dew Upon a Star are born from the revelatory, eruptive experience of remembering the native village: Old Well at the Mouth of the Street, Our Street, Megrozzant az öreg malom (lit. The Old Mill Has Sagged), Udvarunkon öreg gerenda (lit. Old Beam in Our Yard).

Kányádi’s poems evoking the rural, peasant and shepherd world summon a sociologically precise milieu, yet what truly matters to him is not the documentary accuracy of sociological representation in verse, but the definition of his own relationship to that world – self-identification, the strengthening of emotional bonds, and, emphatically, the exemplary ethic of the rural-peasant way of life. It is the morality, work ethic and harmonious – cosmically complete – order of this plebeian world that, through remembrance and personal reflection, find their way into his poetry:

“In matters of honour, one may always / learn here, and learn until the grave. // Those who were provisioned from here / will not easily be befouled by life, // for here even the mud is – pure.” (Our Street)

His poems – such as Meditation beneath the Stars, Old Beam in Our Yard, Old Well, Our Street – are built from concrete visual elements; yet through the poet’s subjective act of recollection and interpretation they transcend, in their closure and conclusion, into the dimension of “human-moral symbol-formation” – their resolution most often taking the form of an ethical summation.

One of the most beautiful pieces in the volume is the poem Hajnaltájt hazaballagóban (lit. On the Way Home at Dawn), which may be regarded as a synthesis of his poetic preparedness at that time and, in its structure, as an archetype of many of Kányádi’s later works. It opens with the characteristic situational marker of the lyric “I”:“At dawn, on my way home, / old familiar rustlings / fluttered towards me from the linden avenue.” This is followed by the concrete sight and the slow, epic, detailed description of the scene: the passage of a flock of sheep and its shepherd across the town’s main square. The entire poem is no more than a realistic description of a sight and the reflection attached to that sight, yet the “newborn” lamb and the figure of the shepherd subtly allude to a sphere of redemptive meaning. The final line raises this ambivalent image to the height of true poetry and resolves the dissonance: Balkan misery steps out of concrete time and space, reality and the tangible sight gently become ethereal: “And since then I know, I see: / on the arm of the ageing shepherd / that frail, sleeping lamb / was my youth.”

Kikapcsolódás (Tuning Out, 1966); Függőleges lovak (Vertical Horses, 1968); Fától fáig (From Tree to Tree, 1970)

At the beginning of the 1960s, the so-called first Forrás generation appears on the Romanian-Hungarian literary scene [young Hungarian writers in Romania associated with the journal Forrás], and literary historiography links their emergence to the modernising turn of Hungarian literature in Romania. In reality, what happened was simply that by the end of the decade Romanian-Hungarian literature had, more or less, come into sync with major Western European tendencies – more decisively with the dominant Central and Western European literary trend of the 1960s, the revived, radically form-breaking style of the early twentieth century, the avant-garde – and could now draw not merely on regional, but on the sources of the wider Hungarian literary tradition as a whole.

For Sándor Kányádi, too, the second half of the 1960s was, from an aesthetic standpoint, the most dynamic period of his lyric poetry. It is then that he integrates the achievements of various modernist currents, and his voice becomes more articulated and more polyphonic. The striking shift in tone compared with his earlier poetry – history transformed into the personal, and a new mode of relating to the past – is connected to the fact that, while translating the poems of his Romanian contemporaries (Alexandru, Baconsky, Sorescu), he also encountered genuine poetic values that proved stimulative for his own development. He later summed up this influence by observing that his development as a translator preceded his development as a poet. Owing to its Latin affinities, Romanian literature oriented itself towards different phenomena of world literature than did literature in Hungary, and only later did it become clear to him that, through Victor Felea, Ioan Alexandru and, in particular, the philosophically inclined Anatol Baconsky – and through his translations of them – he had in fact also come to know the achievements of the Latin American lyrical revolution: Borges, Mendes, and the so-called complex concept of time, in which, through the complete loosening of temporal boundaries, historical time, lived time, intuited time and experienced time can be re-structured anew within the poem. This freedom fitted well with Kányádi’s own disposition, for it allowed him to incorporate his personal past, destiny and reflections, and through this aperture to bring history itself into the poem as well (Itt járt a háború [lit. War Passed through Here]), Azon az estén [On That Evening], Húsvéti bárány [Easter Lamb], Rege [lit. Legend], Apokrif ének [lit. Apocryphal Song], Barbár szonettek [lit. Barbarian Sonnets], Részeges Agamemnon [Agamemnon the Alcoholic], Néma [The Mute]).

The modernisation of Kányádi’s lyric poetry was also aided by the experience of Illyés’s objectivity [Gyula Illyés – Hungarian poet and writer], the objective lyricism of the Új Hold circle [modernist Hungarian literary group around the journal Új Hold], and Eliot’s impersonality. In the experiments of the 1960s, he too arrived at a form of objective poetry farther removed from his own temperament and habitus – if not with complete lyrical impersonality, then at least with a strong suppression of the lyric “I”. A characteristic feature of Illyés’s objectivity is that the object remains concrete, yet the poem opens out towards mythical, historical and philosophical dimensions. In Kányádi’s poetry as well, the poet’s relationship to his object is preserved, and objects – sometimes almost imperceptibly – also carry a metaphorical surplus of meaning (Tárgyak [Objects]; Villanyhuzalok, víz- és gázcsövek [Power Lines, Gas and Water Pipes...]; Kések [Knives]).

Kányádi’s most significant object-poem, Függőleges lovak (Vertical Horses), is nothing other than the objective description of the sight of a sculpture. The horse is part of Kányádi’s private poetic mythology, a symbol of freedom – and here it is as if another “counter-poem, or continuation” were being written: we see the animal at the very moment of its degradation, of being stripped of its horseness. The perspective approaching from afar might still be Petőfian, but when the lens – shifting from external description – looks up at the sky from the horse’s stunned eyes clouded with pain, it is already twentieth-century, and in a single instant the image rises into the poet’s self-portrait: “Oh, greater than the pain of the vertical horses / is only that tension in the ten fingertips / which, objectively / and in silence, kneads terror / into a statue”.

Alongside a complex conception of time and an object-centred lyricism, the specific dramolettes – dialogic, quasi-dialogic, monologic pieces and cinematically staged poems – also signal the modernisation of Kányádi’s poetry. One type of these dialogic forms is derived from folk ballads (Epilógus egy balladához [lit. Epilogue to a Ballad]; Szerelem, ó, jóságos nénike [lit. Love, O Kindly Aunt]; Ballagó [One Who Walks Away]), while others show a closer affinity with grotesque and absurd drama (Teraszon [lit. On the Terrace], Rum és erkölcs [lit. Rum and Morals], Monologue intérieur nyitott ajtóval [Monologue Interieur with the Door Open], Pantomim [lit. Pantomime]). It is above all in these latter, dramatised, linguistically under-rhetoricised poems – most often featuring a fictive speaker – that strange games of personality and impersonality come to life. In this type of poem the reader no longer “decodes” the text, but must reconstruct it: on the primary linguistic level, fragments of everyday spoken gibberish appear, truncated sentences, incomplete, corrupted elements of communication.

Yet alongside all his lyrical modernism, Sándor Kányádi preserves – and renews – certain verse archetypes: the nineteenth-century genre scene, song-likeness, the structural and figurative elements of folk poetry, and the ballad. A work unique in its kind is the difficult-to-classify poem Vén juh az ősz (lit. Autumn Is an Old Ram, 1965): it can be read both as a gnomic song and as a truncated ballad. Nothing unusual happens in the poem; all its images fit into the order of tradition – the segments of an archaic, bucolic landscape, the changing of the seasons – yet the sight of reality gradually becomes a vision. The 1976 poem Dal (lit. Song) allows the image, through an even finer rupture, to dissolve into vision and then into a mythical interpretation of the world: the charge of two stubborn buffalo evokes the moment of the world’s creation, and beside, behind them, there is the bare footprint, which may signify the poor man’s dominion over the world, his role as a mythical master. These strange, contemplative songs make use of elements of archaism, but they do not incorporate tradition merely as a device; rather, in fully possessing it, they re-create tradition anew.

Kányádi’s lyric poetry, built upon a closed, peasant world, becomes universal as it senses the shattering of harmony (roughly from ’63/65 to ’68/69), in such a way that it totalises the perception of the world (visionary poems, dialogic forms), and, through the impersonal, objective poem, dissolves its local colouring – and then, from around ’68/69 onwards, this totalised, universalised world-image once again re-concretises into the local. After Tuning Out (1966) it might still have seemed that the poet was catching up with those who spoke in ever more modern idioms; Fától fáig (From Tree to Tree, 1970), however, radically contradicted this expectation: it re-anchors itself in tradition, seeking not the particular within the universal, but the universal within the particular – within the provincial – and extends the legitimacy of his early poems, which consciously embraced a folk and folk-like inheritance.

Szürkület (lit. Twilight, 1978)

The volume Szürkület (lit. Twilight) brought unreserved recognition: critics immediately perceived that, through the fusion of tradition and intellectual freshness, the poet had reached the summit of his career, and they regarded his poetry as a high-level, valid realisation of universal Hungarian literature.

The poetic message of the volume is the imperative to love one’s native land, and the provocative assumption of the “provincial”. “I have undertaken it so far, and strengthened in my faith by experience I shall continue to undertake and profess it henceforth as well, that I am a provincial poet, a son of this province, and if there is any virtue, any strength in my poems, it derives above all from the fact that they have sprung from this soil.” [1] Whole sequences of poems bear witness to the overwhelming experience of return, of arriving home, of being at home (Mikor szülőföldje határát megpillantja [Catching Sight Of His Homeland], Mikor Janus elhagyta Paduát [lit. When Janus Left Padua], Folytonosság [Continuity], Portya után [lit. After the Raid]).

“According to Kányádi, it is a matter of world-historical significance that we love our native land, even if this becomes an abstract ethical imperative, even if no other form of preservation remains, for then the native land must be preserved in morality … The source from which all this derives – the myth, as it were – is in fact still unfinished, since the grandfathers and great-grandfathers of its creators, representatives of a historical society, are still alive, or are only now dying out.” (Péter Egyed) [2]

The poet lets his roots reach back across centuries. He evokes János Apáczai Csere [17th-century Transylvanian Hungarian scholar and educational reformer], because, as Éva Cs. Gyímesi writes, “it is not the poetic operative power of language that preoccupies him, but its mere existence – thus his concern for language is not only artistic, but … moral.” [3]: “he stands with his back to us we cannot see his face he had no time to turn /…/ so we follow behind him wherever the light-bundles / of his leaders’ gaze mark the direction and the path before us / we follow, as his students once did, coming from Gyulafehérvár / to Kolozsvár with a single bundle, our staff, our weapon –
the mother tongue.”

He also evokes Albert Szenci Molnár [17th-century Hungarian scholar, translator and lexicographer] and that Transylvanian group of ‘peregrini’ who travelled abroad in order to bring back knowledge for those at home. In his portrait poems (Kodály, Egy csokor orgona mellé [lit. For a Bunch of Lilacs], When Janus Left Padua, Weöres Sándor, Szabó Lőrinc, Arghezi, Kós Károly arcképe alá [lit. Under the Portrait of Károly Kós], T. Á. sírjára [lit. For the Grave of Á. T.], Kufsteini grádicsok éneke [lit. Song of the Steps of Kufstein]), he affirms the continuity of a distinctive, centuries-spanning Central-European intellectual attitude which regarded as its moral duty the cultivation of learning in the service of the mother tongue and the people.

Alongside a thematic narrowing and a certain conceptual monophony, there appears a rich emotional content and a lavishly developed verse culture. In addition to genre scenes, songs, free verse, and portraits, two representative, summative poems of similar structure and of a new quality also appear in Twilight: Fekete-piros (Black-and-Red) and Halottak napja Bécsben (All Souls’ Day in Vienna). Both constitute a synthesis of the poet’s poetic experience: employing the results of montage technique, they are built from a variety of textual units – and, in the spirit of full poetic freedom, interrogate the existence and possible destiny of the Transylvanian Hungarian community in the light of history, culture, tradition and individual fates.

Black-and-Red is a provocation already in its title and in the colour symbolism running through the poem; iconographically, it places the region, the local, in the foreground – black and red are not only the colours of life and death, but also the colours of Transylvania. For a fuller understanding of the poem’s layers of meaning, a few preliminary facts may be helpful. Szék, near Kolozsvár, is an island Hungarian village in the Mezőség [a sparsely populated region of Transylvania]; its girls and women wear a particular form of mourning: black clothing adorned only with small red floral embroidery. The young women of this overpopulated settlement with poor natural conditions, even in the 1970s, still went out as domestic servants, but they were granted time off on “Thursday and Sunday afternoons” and, to ease their loneliness and sense of estrangement, gathered in the town square, where they danced in a circle while singing. After a time, the surrounding houses grew tired of the noise and called out to them to stop singing – and at that point they continued their dance “without music, without song.” This is where Kányádi’s poem begins, which, apparently – as its subtitle also indicates – is nothing more than a descriptive poem: watching this silent dance from the corner of the pavement, the poet tries to infer the melody, the suppressed song.

As Béla Pomogáts writes, the text of the poem “is built out of three creative elements: a description that simply offers an image of the sight – strange within an urban environment – that unfolds before the eyes of the poet standing beside the Telephone Palace in Kolozsvár; a poetic meditation accompanying this sight, through which the emotional arc of the poem – from the dark foreboding of destruction to the hope of survival – is shaped; and finally fragments and shards of folk songs, which speak of the power of communal culture and thereby reinforce the poet’s confidence in survival. Sándor Kányádi’s poem is created out of the montage of these stylistically very different poetic elements, and this montage technique renders the text strongly dynamic, rhapsodic.” [4]

Halottak napja Bécsben (All Souls’ Day in Vienna)

All Souls’ Day in Vienna is a summative verse-symphony – a long poem, a poema – and one of the peak achievements of Kányádi’s oeuvre, as well as of Transylvanian and universal Hungarian literature. In terms of representativeness it will later be matched by the complete version of Sörény és koponya (Mane and Skull), finished in 2002; in lyrical completeness by the sonnet cycle A folyók közt (Between Foreign Rivers); and in its exploration of the philosophy of existence by the poem Valaki jár a fák hegyén (Somebody Walks Atop The Trees). The work also achieved notable success abroad: several English translations were produced, and versions exist in German, French, Dutch, Finnish, Estonian, Romanian and Swedish. Its American publisher compared the poem to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, regarding it as that work’s Central European counterpart.

In every respect the poem is a synthesis: it brings together the fate, past and possibilities of the individual, of the narrower national community, and of humanity as a whole, and the existential and ontic possibilities of being are realised through an organic interweaving of traditional and modern poetic language. All Souls’ Day in Vienna, with its polyphonic structure and its affinity to the avant-garde long poem, is a distinctly (Central-)European, Transylvanian-Hungarian work. It is built upon numerous connotative elements which can only be fully appreciated by a reader familiar with Hungarian culture, history and tradition – even the geographic names require interpretation. The very use of the word ‘Bécs’ [the Hungarian name for Vienna] is already meaningful, as only Hungarians refer to Wien in this way – not to mention Szabófalva [today Săbăoani, Romania], a northern Moldavian Csángó village [a community of Hungarian-speaking Csángós in Romania], which was the birthplace of Demeter Lakatos [the only widely known Csángó poet]. Kolozsvár [today Cluj-Napoca – the poet’s place of residence and the birthplace of King Matthias Corvinus] and Nagyvárad [today Oradea – an important historical Hungarian cultural centre], as well as Rodostó [today Tekirdağ, Turkey – Ottoman exile town connected to Hungarian history], are likewise cities of symbolic meaning, emblematic of Hungarian history and culture. Yet – as Kányádi wrote in Töredék (Fragment) – “even if you do not understand … it is enough if you sense / what is at stake here” – the intricate message radiates even through the sheer splendour of the poem’s linguistic abundance.

And it is not only Kolozsvár that is an emblematic city in Hungarian history and culture; Bécs too occupies such a role, in all its contradictions – and the two cities are linked by King Matthias [Matthias Corvinus – 15th-century King of Hungary]: “Proud Vienna suffered sore / From King Mátyás’ dark array” (translated by William N. Loew) – as Kölcsey [Ferenc Kölcsey – Hungarian poet, author of the Hungarian national anthem] wrote – and his death too was hastened in Vienna. Yet, in counterpoint, Vienna also proclaims the angelic Mozart, whose music is understood even by “the inhabitants of the most godforsaken les plus lointaines civilizations,” (translated by Paul Sohar) as well as Bálint Balassi [16th-century Hungarian poet and soldier], who inhabited the city with his harlots and his songs. Through this contrapuntal construction, the locations form both oppositions and parallels at once: Bécs and Kolozsvár; the scattering Csángó village of Szabófalva and the terminus of dispersal, San Francisco; Nagygalambfalva [the poet’s native village], the Church of the Augustinians and the black-and-white rural churches; the illusory glide of the aeroplane and the staring multitude of filthy little children. Not only in its settings and figures does the poem open onto a European horizon: its primary language, too, is woven from multiplicity. The poet inserts a Romanian and a German verse-fragment as guest texts, alongside which other foreign-language fragments, or imitations of such fragments, also function meaningfully within the poem.

At first reading, the poem may appear to proceed by free association; in reality it is strictly ruled by an inner order, and only within this bound framework can the seemingly erratic chain of associations unfold. Mozart’s Requiem, which sets a text by Thomas of Celano [13th-century Italian friar, author of the Dies Irae sequence], not only motivates the poem but is present throughout: the entire work is, as it were, “orchestrated” upon it. The individual segments of the poem are not merely summoned by the movements of the Requiem: the poem as a whole also conducts a polyphonic dialogue – even a debate – with the music.

The most obvious difference is that Mozart composed his Mass for the salvation and eternal rest of the dead, whereas Kányádi writes for the living national community – for those who create and sustain mother-tongue culture, for those whose very existence is an apocalypse. The Requiem is a sacred act; its prayer for salvation presupposes faith in a higher ordering principle. The poem, by contrast, presupposes that the moral consciousness of human earthly life may find compensation, and that a moral world order may be restored.

In this poem, Sándor Kányádi harnesses a form widely associated with Western Europe (the avant-garde montage poem, with its simultaneous and polyphonic technique) to a distinctly East-Central European message. He exploits with complete freedom the possibilities offered by twentieth-century avant-garde montage technique: the rhapsodically surging, emotionally charged poem, with unrivalled virtuosity, reveals the manifold historical, cultural and human experience of a people’s struggle for survival. Free verse and folk song, children’s song, regölő [archaic Hungarian ritual chant], genre scene, idyll, psalm, supplication, contemplative prayer, mobilising verse and visionary dramatic miniature of fragmentary structure, impassive description, pathos, irony, confession, lyrical compassion and indignant anger – these dense, filmic cuts render palpable the emotional and intellectual journeys across space and time.

Sörény és koponya (Mane and Skull, 1989)

In the 1980s, the Hungarian community in Transylvania was forced to confront the idea of national extinction. The wave of emigration reached its peak: some fifty Transylvanian Hungarian writers left Romania, and with their departure the will to live was, in part, broken. The notorious thesis of Sándor Makkai [Transylvanian-Hungarian writer, bishop and essayist], according to which “to be a minority is morally impossible, and there is no solution to such a way of life”, increasingly served as a justification for flight. In that decade, Romania allowed publication only of children’s poems by Kányádi, the region’s most popular poet; the poems that had accumulated by 1989 were published under the title Sörény és koponya (Mane and Skull) by the Csokonai Publishing House, Debrecen, Hungary. “He has unquestionably reached the peak of his career so far – writes the editor, Ibolya Cs. Nagy – before this poetry the critic is, in truth, disarmed: these poems are virtually untranslatable; alongside the hair-fine precision of poetic imagery, any kind of explanation is clumsy, fragmentary, crudely prosaic or else vapidly aestheticising.” [5]

The poems speak almost exclusively of the real danger threatening minority culture, language and human existence, of the terror inspired by what he perceives as a nationalist-socialist expansion, and they name with greater articulation that visceral fear which the tens of thousands of refugees also signalled. In these poems, Kányádi poses – in an Adornian sense [Theodor W. Adorno on the problem of poetry “after Auschwitz”] – the question of the contemporary task of poetry: can one write poetry while Auschwitz is still ongoing? The answer, inevitably, is yes: he writes “on fingernails”, refashions earlier poems, like Master B. The heroic role is a false illusion, he says – but, crucially, the sacred, community- and language-preserving role of poetry is not (Pergamentekercsek [lit. Scrolls of Parchment]).

The sacred scandal of existence appears, through the use of a world-literary meta-language and symbol system, in the most varied verse forms (ghazal, rondeau, sonnet, prayer, bagatelle, romance), with virtuoso rhyme and metrical technique (a sequence of pure assonances, the Hungarian half-line octosyllabic metre, simultaneous versification). Formal and linguistic virtuosity, the rich variety of versification and the multiple tonal registers (from irony to noble pathos) marshal, through the very means of poetry, the immense value that would vanish together with the language and the people who speak it.

The poet’s journey to Latin America provides a further opportunity to speak with even greater exactitude about his own people, while at the same time it conveys a painful lesson: in the fate of the indigenous Indians he perceives the future awaiting his own community: “the Indian and the Black / kneel alike to build a fire / just as the shepherd on the Harghita / counts upon his fingers / if there is any difference in the heavens / here the Great Bear rises in the evening / above them the Southern Cross” (Dél Keresztje alatt [lit. Under the Southern Cross])

The Under the Southern Cross cycle, and one of the most important poems of his entire oeuvre, Between Foreign Rivers, both represent a confrontation with the future. The sonnet cycle re-situates the basic scenario of All Souls’ Day in Vienna, but it magnifies only a single strand – the motif of judgement, guilt and victimhood – and seeks its answer on a philosophical, metaphysical plane. The poet addresses the Lord of Creation directly, yet in this address there is more gentle, quiet, sorrowful reproach over undeserved, crushing punishment, and doubt intensifies regarding the possibility of restoring a moral world order: perhaps the Lord too has withdrawn, has been displaced from the governance of creation, and those “with Cain’s fist” may carry out fratricide unchecked. In All Souls’ Day… he invoked King Matthias as his advocate; here he himself petitions for a precarious, uncertain mercy – not for his own existence or safety, but for the survival of the language:

“and not only me, the language too
which for a thousand years has sounded in blessing
but even had it sinned
let Your mercy look upon its merit
do not sift it out like chaff
from among the hand-picked grain
grant it hope, that like a maimed limb
it shall not be cast upon the rubbish-heap”

Alongside its meta-world-literary language and symbolic system (Under the Southern Cross, Szürke szonettek [Grey Sonnets], the cycle of Űrsorompó [Space-crossing Gate]), the volume Mane and Skull, as its counter-pole, once again reinforces the specific qualities of the provincial, and provocatively returns to an objective fidelity in the poems of the Vannak vidékek (There Are Regions) cycle. These poems, in matter-of-fact descriptions and/or confessions, bear witness to everyday life, to a dying world reminiscent of life in a reservation. The genre piece, the visionary poem, the song, the landscape lyric – through manifold transformations, modernised and etherealised – become elegiac, plaintive, psalm-like farewells to a community condemned to extinction, and, at the final moment, like a kind of Noah’s Ark, they gather in human faces, destinies and requisites (Éjfél utáni nyelv [After-midnight Language], Oki Asalcsi balladája [Ashalchi Oki's Udmurt Ballad]).

After the concern for linguistic survival that characterised the 1970s, the anxiety of the minority poet in the 1980s turns to the question of biological survival. The pieces grouped under the title Históriás énekek odátra (lit. Chronicle Songs for Over There), in their very naming paradigmatically connected to the most tragic tradition of Hungarian literature of national fate, are the messages of a drifting Palackposta (Message in a Bottle): cries for help. A bujdosni se tudó szegénylegény éneke (lit. The Song of the Poor Lad Who Cannot Even Flee), with its “horizonless horizon – ‘we wait, like the dead, / for Judgement Day’ – points in the same direction as the farewell poems of the volume, and to that place in universal Hungarian literature towards which Kölcsey, Vörösmarty, Babits and Illyés also pointed: towards the grave of the nation.” (Béla Márkus) [6]

Kányádi’s historical and chronicler’s songs revive the lamentations of medieval Hungary ravaged by Turkish and Tatar incursions, and they also summon into the poem Ady’s archaising jeremiad, Krónikás ének 1918-ból (lit. Chronicle Song from 1918). By the end of the 1980s, the Romanian party-state had renounced even the principle of “live and let live”:

“even the wagon-fortress is burning now
there is no hope of a relieving army”

– the poet cries out in the opening of the Krónikás ének (Chronicle Song, 1988), dedicated to Gyula Illyés [Hungarian poet and essayist], and, invoking József Attila, Mihály Tompa, Sándor Petőfi and the Bible, he summons the Transylvanian Hungarians to their final moral stand – without even the faintest hope of survival. The Chronicle Song is one of the most significant jeremiads of twentieth-century and universal Hungarian literature:

“The cathartic power of the Chronicle Song lies in its unsparing confrontation with tragedy. […] The poet’s creative force manifests itself in such an assimilation of a rich system of references that, while signalling its sources of inspiration, nevertheless creates a markedly Kányádi-like composition. Thus the references carry a double meaning throughout the poem: on the one hand, they organically connect the author of the Chronicle Song to that current of universal Hungarian culture which grapples with questions of national fate; on the other, they offer an almost palpably vivid report on the present existential condition of the Transylvanian Hungarian community, and on the poet struggling within it for survival.” Finally, the poem allows us “to recognise perhaps the most tragic trait of Hungarian literature: that it revealed its moral greatness in historical situations that seemed utterly hopeless.” (András Görömbei) [7]

„Egyberostált versek” – Valaki jár a fák hegyén (“Sifted and Gathered Poems” – Somebody Walks Atop The Trees), 1997

The 1990s – the decade of the political transition [the 1989–90 collapse of communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe] – created a new situation for literature in many respects. There was no longer any need for poets and writers to convey words of encouragement for human dignity in coded messages. “The very heavy burden of ‘shared public responsibility’ drops from the shoulders of literature, and now it can be shown whether it can become interesting, whether it can say anything of interest, whether it can stand on its own. What had literature been about until now? About birth, life, death, joy, sorrow, love, the landscape. And, in addition, for us, it was also about the fate of a national minority. Now we leave out this latter element and let us see whether it can still say anything meaningful about the rest.” [8]

The 1997 volume of “sifted and gathered” poems, Valaki jár a fák hegyén (Somebody Walks Atop The Trees), suggested that the main trajectory of his poetic development had come to an end. With this book – edited into a strictly single-volume oeuvre – it is as if the author himself considered his poetic work essentially complete. In this “one-volume” edition, only seventeen poems (mostly occasional, shorter pieces) are dated to the 1990s – yet here too appears one of the major achievements of the oeuvre, the title poem of 1994, a philosophical and transcendent summation.

Somebody Walks Atop The Trees (translated by Peter Zollman) is the reconciliation of the poet’s search for God, of folk religiosity, and of the scientific worldview. In Kányádi’s poetry up to the mid-1960s, there is scarcely a trace of the folk Protestantism that shaped his childhood; yet from the middle of that decade onwards, biblical and psalm-like allusions and invocations appear emphatically in his poems, such as Hipotézis (Hypothesis, 1964); Tűnődve áll a férfi (Pondering Stands the Man, 1964); Húsvéti Bárány (lit. Easter Lamb, 1965); Ne szólj (lit. Do Not Speak, 1965); A XC. zsoltár (lit. Psalm XC, 1965); and the 1967 poem Isten sírján (On God’s Grave). The dilemma is not simply the epistemological question of God’s existence or non-existence. Its deeper meaning lies in the fact that faith in God created its own institutional system, Christianity shaped European culture, and the Reformation, in turn, shaped the mother tongue; it provided community and peace of soul – and this certainty was tragically shaken both historically and within the individual in the second half of the twentieth century. In his poems, Kányádi restores and strengthens the symbols that sustain community (biblical imagery, the figure of the Redeemer), and in the end, as it were, he also restores God to those life-giving, strengthening symbols.

It is the “Somebody” who watches over the order of the world, who “lights your star and makes it fade”, who creates and completes human life and, according to merit – very subtly, almost imperceptibly within the poem – also judges: the soul of the worthy he carries on in a new star, the unworthy he compresses “to a grain / a dark abandoned piece of grit”, annihilating it, that is, restoring the moral order of the world. Heaven and earth, above and below, the microcosm and the macrocosm, respond to one another in harmony. Folk superstition merges seamlessly into the Christian theological and scientific worldviews, interpreting and mutually reinforcing each other’s truth. In the poem Somebody Walks Atop The Trees, just as in Between Foreign Rivers), the poet withdraws into nature. Like Adam, in a kind of pre-human world, in a pre-creation silence, in a pantheistic sacred space, he calmly accepts the realisation that “somebody walks atop the trees” – that is, that our world is under protection.

Őszikék és posztmodern szövegirodalom – Felemás őszi versek (Late poems and postmodern Text-Literature – Mismatched Autumn Songs, 2002)

In the second half of the 1990s, the poet’s publications once again became more frequent: not only did the oeuvre expand in quantitative terms, but – to the reader’s surprise – it also underwent a marked renewal. In the 2002 volume Felemás őszi versek (Mismatched Autumn Songs), one encounters a series of major poems such as Mane and Skull expanded into a two-part poem, Eretnek táviratok (lit. Heretical Telegrams) cycle, Levéltöredékek (lit. Fragments of a Letter), Konkrét költemény (lit. Concrete Poem), Marin Sorescu hazatérése (The Homecoming of Marin Sorescu), as well as smaller masterly pieces, such as the title poem itself, Ólomrajzok (Lead Sktech), Sirám (lit. Lament), Mint öreg fát az őszi nap (lit. As the Autumn Sun upon an Old Tree), Szelíd fohász (A Brief Invocation) and Triptichon (Triptych to Romanian Poet Nichita Stănescu). The formal renewal of his poetry is linked to the dominant tendency of the 1990s, the formal achievements of postmodern text-literature – yet, remaining unfailingly true to himself, he continues to build essentially his own characteristic “Kányádi line” of verse, that is, once again he reshapes form to match his own.

The new works articulate precisely that the fundamental questions of the human being have not changed across ages and epochs, and neither has humanity itself: among other things, even today we must make decisions and adopt a moral stance (Concrete Poem); with the change in political circumstances the “water-management” problems [a metaphor from Gyula Illyés] have not ceased; the question of the survival of the national community and the language community remains just as alive (Heretical Telegrams).

Földigérő / kokár / dapántlika (lit. A ground-long / tricolour cockade / ribbon), Concrete Poem, and the Heretical Telegrams cycle most powerfully demonstrate, within the poems written in the 1990s, the impact of postmodern textual construction and the poet’s changed relationship to the poem itself. In these free-verse-like texts Sándor Kányádi moves furthest away from the formal markers of traditional lyricism and adopts a new, playful-ironic, self-ironic position: the confessional lyric utterance and reflection of the speaking “I” are replaced by a narrative mode of discourse filled with countless distancing, deflecting, boldly disconcerting and distancing effects. The narration continuously provokes language as well: extra-literary, prosaic text-types dominate the poem’s idiom (telegram, diplomatic communiqué), and linguistic nonchalance is a deliberate strategy. There is no longer any “social commission”: the poet may use his boundless freedom for anything. And most surprisingly, Sándor Kányádi evidently feels at ease even within the limitlessly liberating freedom of the postmodern. Yet perhaps only the serenity, the unrestrained joy of play, is surprising. For this kind of textual construction – the sliding of the most various temporal and spatial levels into one another, philosophical, metaphysical, mythological and concrete-real – was already familiar from an earlier phase of his career, from the late 1960s, as was the joint application of linguistic and stylistic multiplicity, inherited from the avant-garde montage poem and the incorporation of “guest texts” into the verse.

At the same time, even these postmodern-leaning para-literary formations give rise to distinctly Kányádi-like poems: the boldly free-associative, demythologising, profanising texts are built upon the foundations of the genre-piece, the visionary poem and the parabolic mode, or upon versions of these that have passed through many transformations and further developments.

The poet makes full use of the complete poetic freedom offered by postmodernism in the Heretical Telegrams cycle, dedicated to Zbigniew Herbert [Polish poet and essayist]. The sequence is above all – as poetry about poetry itself, the mystery and metaphysics of poetic catharsis – a playful, splendid formal display. On the impressively rich and representative scale of form and style, Sándor Kányádi plays with virtuosity, as though demonstrating his mastery of craft: philosophical free verse, witty monologue, psalm-like tale, nonchalant sonnet, characteristic “cogito”-poems, a tour de force of translation, a lament, and finally a joint communiqué, then a heretical telegram – all combine to form the cycle, whose prevailing tone becomes the “ironic pathos” and “lyrical distance” [9] so specifically characteristic of Central European literatures.

Yet at this point the characteristic writer’s fate shaped by Central-European existence enters the scene, along with the visceral pain of the Herderian nightmare afflicting small nations [Johann Gottfried Herder’s prophecy that small nations and their languages would disappear]. In reality, this is what draws the two poets together, and places them in friendship with one another: the perpetual sense of inferiority, “oh, our often laughable / Central-European sense of universality”, the nightmare-awareness of the possible loss of language and the scattering of the nation have not changed in the region since the time of Báthory [Stephen Báthory, (1533–1586) Transylvanian prince who later became King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, emerging as one of the most successful rulers of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth]. Thus, the carefree, liberated poetic play turns back into the gloom of reality. The cycle continues with an unexpected twist, in sarcastic irony, through a new medium of communication – e-mail – and the poet uses the instrument of modern technology for the same “purpose” as the believing soul in traditional religious devotion: to turn towards God. But to e-mail heaven is absurd; to await a reply is even more absurd. Only the content of the message is not absurd: the plea for protection of a national minority.

Sörény és koponya I–II (Mane and Skull I–II, 1975 and 2002)

The volume Mismatched Autumn Songs likewise concludes with a great summative poem, the two-part Mane and Skull. The poet intended this work as the crown of his oeuvre, the summation of his entire poetry, and a personal symbol of fate. Its first version appeared in the 1989 volume of the same title, which later became the opening section of this final, two-part version. According to its dating, the poem was written and refined over more than a quarter of a century – from 1975 to 2002.

In its monumentality, polyphony and ambition towards totality, Mane and Skull stands as a counterpart to All Souls’ Day in Vienna; its structure, composition and internal architecture renew the compositional principles of that poem. Yet its novelty does not lie in formal innovation but in its weight of thought, in the deepening of its metaphysical and existential-philosophical dimension. In its ultimate summation it stands closest to the late, tragic poems of Mihály Vörösmarty [nineteenth-century Hungarian poet], while in its intimate, memory-laden personal recollection it places human existence and Creation itself upon the scales.

The poem’s fundamental question is how a human being can live together with the spiritual burden borne by a living conscience – in one’s personal fate, in one’s immediate environment, in history – and how God can live together with the knowledge that the crown of His creation, the human being, is a flawed construction, a corrupted creature. It is not the redeemability of the world that preoccupies the poet, nor the Christian idea of redemption, which in any case probably did not touch his poetry in a strictly spiritual sense, but rather the fact that one must live together with immeasurable human suffering, and with the knowledge of that suffering, while the compassionate, solidarity-bearing human being is powerless and God remains silent.

The poem’s imaginary time arc stretches from birth to death, from Creation to Apocalypse. Through the act of remembrance, both personal fate and the most dramatic chapters of human history appear, in order to prepare the extremely bitter, total declaration of disillusion that closes the poem: “there is no hope”. Even at the end of the millennium, Sándor Kányádi situates the human being within a vast heritage: our fate is interwoven with history, with the created landscape, with myths, with animals – yet this heritage does not merely denote virtue; it also includes the legacy of evil, and that evil is the human being himself, humanity’s destructive nature. Having lived through the great left-wing illusion of the perfectibility of the human being, the poet here records a new disillusion: the post-industrial age likewise proclaims the perfectibility of man, yet when science and reason – divorced from morality and allied with “evil will” – are no longer content to annihilate merely peoples or groups, but are capable of destroying human existence as such. In All Souls’ Day in Vienna, the poet had still trusted in the possibility of re-creating the world – that a better world, a better human being, might be created; here he leaves open the chance of re-creation, yet denies that the human being himself can ever become better.

In Somebody Walks Atop The Trees the poet closed off the exit towards the cosmos. Here it is as if he were denying that our world stands under protection at all. The earlier, more Pascalian, hidden God now comes very close to indifference: He is silent. In Kányádi’s poetry, deep solidarity with the victims and the fallen is axiomatic; therefore, even before God he raises the question – one that is difficult to tolerate even through deeply believing Christian eyes – of why He allows the existence of evil, why He remains silent. The Kányádi poem even here does not speak of an immanent God, but of a transcendent one. God is always outside the human being, standing above humankind, holding the creature in His hand. And – this is the poem’s greatest surprise – the poet reaffirms hierarchy: God may be neutral, yet even the silent God is an absolute. He returns to God the right of creation and destruction: create a new world, but without man. The condition of existence, then, is humility before God – more precisely, the recognition and demonstration that the human being who takes God’s place, the “man-god”, is not the master of the universe.

This large-scale, existential-philosophical poem is also the summation of Sándor Kányádi’s organically unfolding poetic path: folk tradition and modernity, heritage and contemporaneity, continuity and renewal, life-like realism and transcendence, the personal and the universal – figuratively speaking, the synthesis of Nagygalambfalva and the cosmos. Mane and Skull rises among the finest philosophical poems in the history of Hungarian poetry. By the end of the millennium, the new failures of the human being had become evident, and the poet cannot relinquish his right – or perhaps his duty – to think in terms of the whole world.

[2012, 2016]

[1] Árpád Páll, Költészet és politika (lit. Poetry and Politics). On Sándor Kányádi’s experiences at home and in the wider world = in: Harangszó a mélyből (lit. Bell-ringing from the Depths), Budapest, 1991, Magvető (Magvető Publishing House), 214.

[2] Péter Egyed, Mítosz és kísértetjárás között (lit. Between Myth and Haunting), Igaz Szó, 1979/3, 247.

[3] Éva Cs. Gyímesi, Kányádi Sándor = in: Találkozás az egyszerivel (lit. Encounter with the Unique), Bucharest, 1978, Kriterion Publishing House, 88.

[4] Béla Pomogáts, Megtartó hagyomány (lit. Tradition that Sustains) = in: Kisebbség és humánum (lit. Minority and Humanity), Budapest, 1989, Tankönyvkiadó Publishing House, 198–199.

[5] Ibolya Cs. Nagy, Önfelmutatás és harangzúgás. K. S.: Sörény és koponya (lit. Self-Revelation and the Tolling of Bells. On S. K., Mane and Skull). In: Kérdez az idő (lit. Time Asks), Miskolc, 2002, Felsőmagyarország Publishing House, 137–138.

[6] Béla Márkus, ?„irodalom csak játék az egész”? (lit. ?“Is It Literature or Just a Game?”) = in: A betokosodott kudarc (lit. The Encased Failure), Budapest, 1996, Széphalom Publishing House, 29.

[7] András Görömbei, Kányádi Sándor Krónikás éneke (lit. Sándor Kányádi’s Chronicle Song) = in: A szavak értelme (lit. The Meaning of Words), Budapest, 1996, Püski Publishing House, 188–189.

[8] Zoltán Tibori Szabó, Az íróembert nem választják. Beszélgetés Kányádi Sándorral (lit. A Writer Is Not Elected. Interview with Sándor Kányádi) = Kritika, 1997/9, 13.

[9] Árpád Tőzsér characterised literary “mittelség” [‘in-betweenness’, Central-European cultural and aesthetic mediacy] in this way.

Sándor Kányádi

Selection of works