The poetic debut of László Király is marked by, and inseparably bound up with, a canon-forming moment in literary history: the publication of the poetic anthology Vitorla-ének (lit. Sail Song), issued in Cluj (Kolozsvár) in 1967, brings together a poem and a significant event.

The title derives from László Király’s poem of the same name, included in the volume Vadásztánc (lit. Hunter’s Dance), published in 1967 as part of the Forrás (lit. Source) book series, within the cycle Tengerparti város (lit. Coastal Town), and, as the two volumes were undergoing parallel editorial work, later included in the anthology as well. The poem reads: “a fine-eyed net woven with my fingers / sail sail setting out to sea / a vanishing triangle dissolving into the blue sky / a raven returning by evening” (Sail Song). The folk-song-like quatrain, an unpunctuated, softly flowing and gently dynamic mood-image, is framed by prose interpolations and, in the closing passage, reiterated through a variation: “a fine-eyed net woven with my fingers / return o sail borne on the waters / return o triangle dissolving into dusk / return my man my raven”. The prose passages, marked by a lyrical tone, further interpret the image: the ships that break free and glide away at dawn, only to return by evening, function as evocations of the idea of freedom. The sailors depart, yet the women await their return in the evening. The shore sends them forth and waits for their return; and by unfolding this easily lucid, graceful metaphor, it is the homeland that drives away and repels, yet inevitably receives back what it has driven away. “A demand for fidelity”, wrote István Szilágyi.

With his first independent volume of poetry, Király entered the literary field as a member of the group of writers and poets commonly referred to as the second generation of Source [a reference to the book series mentioned above], and four years later, after the publication of two further volumes, he was already at the threshold of canonical status, with more than three quarters of a page devoted to him in a book about the history of Hungarian literature in Romania written by Kántor and Láng. The authors characterise his debut as “creative and self-conscious”, while in the introductory essay Férfiak a parton (lit. Men on the Shore), which opens Király’s first volume, Aladár Lászlóffy, the poet’s friend and the person who inaugurated Király as a poet, offers a warm and encouraging recommendation of both the volume and its author. He regards Király as a seeker of a “new ethnicity”, a poet “fully attuned to his time” and endowed with a “creative sense of form”, who looks towards new intellectual horizons with a “recklessly uncompromising boldness”. As key features of the volume’s outlook, Lászlóffy points to a “new intellectual equilibrium gained through the cosmic expansion of the world” and to a “present that encompasses all times”, arguing that the conjunction of an “ancestral self-respect and composure” with a “twentieth-century sensitivity” gives rise to a poetry that is at once “responsive to its time and masculine”. By the “novelty of its intellectual stance”, Lászlóffy understands above all the desire to interrogate collective, historical memory and experience, together with the poetic realisation of this intention. According to Lajos Kántor, the Cluj-based literary historian, editor of the journal Korunk, and one of the authors of a literary history book about Hungarian literature in Romania, the refinement already evident in the poet’s early works testifies to the fact that László Király had consciously prepared for a poetic vocation, and already at the time of its publication, Kántor identified the poem Sail Song as a standout work. Reflecting on the beginnings of Király’s career, Éva Cs. Gyimesi similarly describes historical sensitivity and creative responsibility as the most essential hallmarks of the poet’s stance articulated in the poems.

The beginning of his career, together with the encouraging and appreciative reception, had a profound influence on László Király’s conception of life. As he later recalled:

“Instead of eating, instead of sleeping, we wrote poems and read them aloud to one another. We spent the money raised by selling the canteen vouchers provided with our scholarships in grimy pubs and second-hand bookshops. I had to read my poem Hunter’s Dance aloud for weeks to all sorts of audiences, Árpád Farkas had to do the same with his poem Cipőfűzőárus (lit. The Shoelace Vendor), while Attila Vári read out his novella Felmentés (lit. Exemption), if I remember correctly, nineteen times with great enthusiasm. Perhaps the strangest thing was that, to the astonishment and alarm of our well-mannered colleagues and teachers, it never even occurred to us to keep our mouths shut. Of course, this did not go unnoticed by the state security services. They could not forgive us for the fact that an inner freedom spoke out from within us, despite all external constraints.”

Together with his peers, among them Árpád Farkas, they wrote day and night, revelling in the joy of feeling that the world could be possessed. Now well past seventy, László Király has spoken of these formative years, of his time spent in Cluj, and of the early fierce drive to overcome everything and claim the world as one’s own, at more than a dozen author-reader events, many of them intended as birthday celebrations. In his recollection, in the early 1960s, in the climate that followed the events of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, the new generation of poets tried to find its own voice cautiously, with Király himself among them. Zoltán Veres, Gizella Hervay, and Domokos Szilágyi were the role models of those at the beginning of their careers at the time. Király and his contemporaries “spoke in a different voice” from their predecessors; many of them had moved to the ‘capital’ of Transylvania from the provinces, and the opportunities offered by the major city, along with the communal experiences it offered, helped to foster their development. They began to write in the late 1960s and the very early 1970s, when politics had become more permissive and, for a brief interval, censorship relaxed its grip, “intervening in publications to a far lesser extent than it had before, before tightening again afterwards”.

As was already evident from its reception, László Király’s debut projected the image of an exceptionally resolute, purposeful, and distinctive poet, one marked as ‘singular’ from the outset. His defining characteristics are clear and unequivocal, the defining marks of aesthetic and intellectual otherness, of difference, are readily discernible. This sense of otherness has remained a constitutive feature of his work to this day, together with the impulse towards bearing witness, the aspiration to ‘faultlessness’, the desire to live up to the moral demands he sets for himself, as well as fidelity, and the explicit affirmation of freedom. Both in poetry and prose, including the level of diction, the concepts of sincerity, integrity, and duty appear as notions to be understood as ethical imperatives, always holding a position of particular prominence. His career shows no moral lapses, and his ethical commitment shows no signs of erosion. However, time, disillusionments, betrayals, conquered dreams, the failures of perception, and the fracturing of the value system inevitably inscribe new and different traits upon a person’s character. What had once been the unrestrained gallop of youth became, by necessity, a more disciplined and purposeful, though stubborn and persevering, ‘trot’. “I am a Hungarian poet from Transylvania. Indeed, even my two imaginary poets, Al. Nezvanov and Zhang Wei [in Hungarian:Al. Nyezvanov and Csang vej; Király’s poetic alter egos], are Transylvanian. Theories interest me little, if at all. I have been, and remain, a follower of Károly Kós ever since my father gave me his book A Varjú nemzetség (lit. The Crow Clan). If you do not already feel it, or at least grasp it, what this means, you have to take the trouble to read up on it,” the poet confesses, as he has reiterated, in similar terms, on several occasions to this day, making it clear that, whether with an openly acknowledged subjectivity, through alter egos, or by speaking from behind masks, he has remained a witness to the fate of his native land. Elsewhere, he puts it this way:

“I have never denied it, and I say it openly and without hesitation, however un-postmodern that may sound, that I also regard myself as a witness, and for that very reason, everything I write is written for others, not for myself. I like it if, at least in my imagination, someone is sitting in front of me who can see me, or at least hear my voice. In this sense it is an endless construction. It is like the Tower of Babel, which will never have a summit, because anything may happen at any moment. This process can never be finished, it will continue as long as my mind is still capable of thought and my hand can still hold a pencil. I call the whole thing a chronicle, modestly speaking, because it is a rather peculiar kind of chronicle, but I hope that those who know how to read poetry will be able to extract from it what we have lived through over these decades, encompassed by accumulated body of my poetry I have written. I consciously assume this role of witness; you might call me an old-fashioned poet.”

Hungarian literature has always had a Janus-faced nature, writes Béla Pomogáts in his study (Korunk, 2015/1), meaning that “from one perspective, what appears as the struggle of a historical human community for survival, from another constitutes the historical continuity and system of higher artistic values; and from one perspective, what is thought, poetic image, and verse form, from another is an exhausting struggle and ordeal”. He argues that this gives rise to the enduring and still active conscious commitment of Hungarian literature to national history and national life, towards the resolution of what Gyula Illyés, László Németh, and András Sütő referred to as the national “questions of fate”, and from this arises that “communal and public ethos” which permeates even “the efforts at form creation, the bold experiments, and moments of carefree play” within this literature. For the written word, he observes, is almost always underpinned by “historical and communal experience and a sense of responsibility”. The poetry and prose of László Király constitutes a salient example of this commitment characteristic of our literature, while at the same time, especially in his poetry, it also exemplifies a creative experimental impulse that is formally inventive and aims to renew poetic traditions. Using Pomogáts’s phrase, his oeuvre “powerfully echoes” national questions of fate and issues arising from his condition as a Transylvanian Hungarian, and his work is also marked by a communal and historical attentiveness, bearing the ‘imprint’ of this responsible commitment. As reflected by László Király’s works, the interacting processes and essential reciprocity of the affirmation of national identity and Hungarian literature may reasonably be understood as evident.

In her 1979 book Találkozás az egyszerivel (lit. Encounter with the Singular), in her portrait of László Király, Éva Cs. Gyimesi writes that for Király, the homeland represents a value not only “for certain reasons” but also “in spite of certain reasons”; his poetry, especially the great early cycles written about the homeland, is also a form of “moral parable addressed to the community, as in the case of every true poet”. Király is characterised by a “a morally robust value system” and a “coherent sense of values”, and the homeland becomes a “central symbol of value” in his work. His poetry constitutes a lyrical rendering of an existence that is consciously assumed and accepted in its “external determinations”.

“Old, beautiful, naïve poems…”

The distinctive semantics of Hunter’s Dance lie in its effort to delineate what appears as the only viable model of conduct for the poet. What is at stake here is the determining force of self-awareness and responsibility as the two main guiding principles; in poetic terms, this means that self-awareness and responsibility are not merely descriptive attributes of, for example, the treatment of the homeland motif, but they assume the role of generative poetic motives. In numerous instances, the poet defines these concepts in an almost aphoristic manner, offering a kind of theoretical clarification of what he regards as the sole possible mode of action. The result is a moral Decalogue, formulated as early as his first volume: “Let us confront the questions head-on”, “we must know and understand everything”, “Clench your fist…”, “I must return…”, “feel the earth, the words, the human being; / everything has colour and weight”, “do not know how to live alone…”, “I must be flawless”, “I hate those who lost their faith…”.

It is striking that in these poems, and in most pieces of Hunter’s Dance, the aphoristically compressed ideas, at times bearing the strong imprint of Lajos Kassák, Attila József, and Miklós Radnóti, primarily appear as thesis-like statements, formulated in an assertive, declarative mode. In this phase, Király’s poetic discourse is communicative and conceptual in nature, but it is not overarched by a philosophically elaborated framework. In later stages of his career, these thesis statements are broken down into their constituent elements, and his ideas are enriched by powerful imagery and expanded into large-scale poetic constructions. In his first volume, the structures and elements that do not rely on spectacle, image, or visual attraction are unified by affective qualities, and on the basis of this volume, László Király’s poetry might be defined as a poetry of impulse grounded in experiences of self-evidence. At a later stage, the poet returns to the poetics of stripped-down expression, objectivity, and concreteness, but articulated from a higher aesthetic vantage point.

For László Király, the homeland primarily is not a spatial entity but a temporal formation, with ‘infinite’ and ‘finite’ extensions. The finite dimension is the experiential layer, whose burdens he bears as a heavy weight: he is haunted by the landscapes, faces, and gestures embedded in his personal memory, and he grapples with the scars of childhood etched deep into his soul. About a dozen poems in the cycle Kölyökkor, elhagyott ostorok (lit. Boyhood, Abandoned Whips) give voice to these memories. However, the disordered past, the unresolved historical situations, and the haunting images of war, whose glow and demands remain vividly present even as secondary experience, are more oppressive in their impact. “Once everything passes through us”, he says in the poem Mennek a folyók (lit. The Rivers Are Leaving), composed of multiple cycles, and the person who has been “sitting here for a thousand years” (Tengerparti város, lit. Seaside Town) is drawn by a distance reminiscent of Attila József. In his second volume, Rendhagyó délután (1968; lit. An Unconventional Afternoon), this layer of experience gives rise to several of his more fully realised poems (A halottak emlékezete [lit. The Memory of the Dead], A legnagyobb nyár [lit. The Greatest Summer], Az ivó katona [lit. The Drinking Soldier], Eső [lit. Rain], Aranygolyó [lit. Golden Ball]).

In his second volume, (An Unconventional Afternoon, 1968), the concept of time is expanded with new meanings. The sense of belatedness, falling behind, and irretrievability is not confined to moments of contemplating the deep well of historical time, but also emerges within a more concrete understanding of temporality: the years pass, tasks accumulate, and memories may fade, indeed, they do fade. This acquires central significance for László Király, insofar as he treats time as a relational concept, with childhood serving as the point of reference. “As you grow / everything narrows”, he writes in the poem A szénapadlás (lit. The Hayloft), and elsewhere: “your boyhood / the ploughshare bell / … strike it / it is stranger / hoarser”. In A Végtelen ének (lit. The Infinite Song), a poem that prepares the material of the later novel Kék farkasok (lit. Blue Wolves), in which these experiences are narrated in a more comprehensive prose form, the unstoppable, infinite flow of remembrance courses through the loosely structured waves of avant-garde free verse shaped by the rhythm of sentences, carrying with it the shouts of early childhood, memories of torrential rains, the image of newly built houses, and the clangour of a warning bell. It evokes the bridge over the river Niraj (Nyárád), the carts trudging up the mountain, the mill, the mountain, the landscape, and even those things which are ‘inexpressible’ in words. It is at this bridge that the characters of the novel appear before the narrator and pass by (an image that already flashes up in Hunter’s Dance), it is this mill that the poet seeks out in vain, and the dream-objects inhabiting the poet’s memory also fall into these waters. In addition, this poem is a beautiful, confessional statement of poetic commitment: László Király’s poetic aims and his human and ethical undertaking are one and the same. In the second volume, the structural elements of the poems have become more complex and nuanced, the former tree of commandments puts forth flowers, the branches of prohibition sprout leaves, and communication is transformed into vision. “Treacherous soft snow is falling”, he writes of time (Könyörgés [lit. Supplication]), and “outside, one palace after another collapses, / from their dust, they slowly assemble within, / and the clots of blood are growing”, he writes of creation (Röntgen [lit. X-ray]). In the mountains, words are “great white birds”, and their gathering represents the poet’s sense of solitude and his sense of being chosen.

“I have lived through all that belonged to me”

If the poetry of Király’s early period may be described as poetry grounded in evidences, his next collection of poetry, Ballada a fáradt asszonyokról (lit. Ballad of the Weary Women), published in 1970, as well as the short-story collection that was published in the same year, A Santa Maria makettje (lit. The Model of the Santa Maria), articulates absence. These two books mark a new stage in his career, and alongside formal perfection, the emergence of a new quality of life-perception can be observed. In the poetry collection, Éjszakai utazás (lit. Night Journey) represents a headlong movement of thought through time and history. It is an act of poetic self-examination, an interrogation of the soul, a renewed identification with the chosen task, and a philosophical and objective interpretation of poetic existence. Through bitter, resolute verbs, adjectives, and adverbials, the poem delineates the poet’s condition: “No longer can the feet run irresponsibly / they stand still, having taken root, / and cling to the land / everyone flees from”. His prose undertakes the same task, although the prose works catalogue absence: losses, pains, shattered illusions, and humiliations, as well as memories and visions.

In his poems of this period, László Király attempts to overcome the resistance of the self: revulsion and bitterness are confronted by being spoken aloud. Absence becomes a synonym for solitude in his poetry, and a substantial portion of his poems record the various forms of solitude. His encounters and confrontations with past and present, and the contrast and collision between desire and existence, generate many experiences of failure. The homeland can no longer serve as a refuge: the “strayed / spark-hoofed / foal” must follow its own path (Aszály [lit. Drought]); companions and friends, the “faithful dreamers without dreams, yearning to explode” (Lovasok [lit. Horsemen]), can no longer find one another and wander without a company; the urge to act and the creative will are devalued into mere existence (Szomorú blues az éjszakából [lit. Sad Blues From the Night]); from the failures of personal existence and unfulfilled desires slowly arises a “city with a forgotten name” (A tenger [lit. The Sea]); fulfilled desires are fewer in number, and “nauseatingly” greyer, than they were when only their fulfilment was sought; even the value of congratulations following victory is diminished if congratulations do not come from another victor, if they are merely empty ceremonial acts of “courtiers”, and, in general, they cannot yield inner joy if, instead of reaching the one true goal, one must settle for fragments of dreams, for America teeming with natives in place of India rich in gold. This poem (Elégia Kolumbusz Kristófról [lit. Elegy for Christopher Columbus]) offers a ruthless summation, knotting together all the strands of thought. Among the stylistic markers of this condition, irony becomes increasingly prominent (for instance, in the subtitles), along with a self-irony that frequently sharpens into masochism and distorts experience into the grotesque. Among the elements of the natural symbolism that has been powerful from the outset, snow, frost, ice, frozen vapour, winter, and snowfall appear with growing frequency. The conceptual inventory of object symbolism is also transformed, including stone, cross, iron, armour, axes, staves, knives, and ship’s horn. Adverbials and adjectives carry negative connotations: burnt-out, grey, shuddering with cold, filled with canine howling, without an army, barren, dead, beheaded, diminishing, freezing, wasting, grinning, gaping, clattering. Counterpointing, in the form of poem and its counterpart, is a recurrently employed device, whereby contradictory lyrical situations, attitudes, and ideas are brought into collision, compelling the reader to confront and judge morally these differing attitudes (Akit a harmat hozott [lit. The One Brought by the Dew], Kit nem a harmat hozott [lit. The One Not Brought by the Dew], Ballad of the Weary Women, Legenda nélkül [lit. Without a Legend]). The sentences in the poems, especially in the final cycle (Farsangi maszkok [lit. Carnival Masks]), become abruptly terse and staccato, as though jagged, hard fragments of ice were rattling.

In responding to a question posed by György Gálfalvi, who interviewed figures of the “restless generation”, László Király makes it clear that, in his usage and conceptual thinking, the notion of the homeland has a spiritual variant: the poems in the volume that arise from cultural experiences have an origin in the landscapes of this spiritual homeland. For Király, the exemplary citations, allusive references, or indirect evocations of Lajos Kassák, Sándor Kőrösi Csoma, Bálint Balassi, Mihály Csokonai, Sándor Petőfi, Attila József, Miklós Radnóti, and László Nagy function as a form of energisation. (In his next volume of poetry, Sétalovaglás [lit. Leisure Ride], this experiential layer becomes even more pronounced.) “For me, a spiritual homeland means selecting from our culture everything I consider important, and everything I wish to develop further,” Király says, and his engagements with cultural history cannot be reduced to self-fortification alone. Although they include self-fortification, at this disillusioning juncture in his confrontation with the world, the poet multiplies his own moral strength by drawing on the moral strength of like-minded artists. Kassák may be the most significant individual for Király, representing a miracle born from “austere, compact, iron-wrought” forms and visionary consciousness, serving as a source of formal inspiration. Furthermore, Kassák functions as a symbol of the poet’s fate: “Let the bones of the one who is scourged be made of steel; let the one they seek to bury alive rise again from the dead” (Támadjon fel halottaiból is [lit. Let Him Rise Again From the Dead]). The poem Emlékmű (lit. Monument) amplifies the cruel, negative facts that point to the painfully mundane demise of the poets embodying ideas. In this way, this poem also serves as a warning: inglorious demise is an inherent part of the poet’s fate. The list of the invoked poets (Bálint Balassi, Mihály Csokonai, Sándor Petőfi, Attila József, Miklós Radnóti) further narrows down this line of thought to the fate of the Hungarian poet. Téli alkonysivatag [lit. Twilight Desert in Winter] and Zöld Elefánt [lit. Green Elephant] conjure the spirit of László Nagy, expressing anxiety over the fate of the poetic ideal “guarded between the teeth”, and articulating doubts arising from the contraction and corrosion of ideals, of the “flaming Rose”, caused by “poisoning”. In the latter poem, the Green Angel of László Nagy is profaned into a Green Elephant, dragging down to the earth and burying in snow the winged, resplendent ideal.

“In the words, we find one another”

Another condition of this renewal of energy is that the messages of the “old masters” should be presented as a kind of “useful will”, elevating them into parables. The confessional, role-playing poetic attitude offers numerous instances of this in Leisure Ride. In his review, Béla Márkus regards it as a characteristic feature of the volume that the poet “still believes in the meaning of words”, and he does not call the words “two-faced” because they convey something other than “what the poet originally invested them with”, but in reference to the duality “brought about by the pain and joy of dissolving terror”, formulated by Gyula Illyés. The critic considers time to be the book’s defining preoccupation, encompassing “both personal and historical time”. The poet experiences history as the present (already in An Unconventional Afternoon, published in 1968), and thus the perspective of the poems in Leisure Ride is determined by two factors: “the passage of personal time and the slowing of historical time” (László Király, Sétalovaglás. [lit. Leisure Ride], op. cit., Béla Márkus, Magányos portyázók [lit. Solitary Raiders], Szépirodalmi Kiadó, Budapest, 1989).

Although the volume was published later, in 1976, there is reason to assume that its poems were composed much earlier, a point to which László Király himself alludes in the interview already mentioned (Marad a láz? [lit. Does the Fever Remain?], 1977). In any case, there is a close conceptual and formal bond between Rendhagyó… (lit. Unconventional…) and this volume, evidenced by the fact that the theme of time becomes almost exclusive here, and the intention of setting examples and creating new models also comes to the fore. The pieces grouped under Régi mesterek (lit. Old Masters), portrait poems devoted to Gáspár Heltai, Sebestyén Tinódi Lantos, György Dózsa, Albert Szenczi Molnár, Sándor Petőfi, Gyula Krúdy, Gyula Juhász, and Miklós Radnóti, are instances of stylistic play: a multiplicity of ideas and genres. Yet the uncompromised truths and homogeneous ideals of life represented by the assembled masters often appear anachronistic in a distorted present; and thus, the opposing qualities set against one another once again intensify the two poles, compelling an evaluation of values and making a choice. This might explain why Király strives for the precise application of verse forms, and, where necessary, even for using quantitative metre, for, as attested by other poems in the same volume taken into comparison, classical forms are incapable of describing the contemporary experience of being. For example, in A nyugalom érkezése (lit. The Arrival of Calm), every grammatical regularity disintegrates stanza by stanza: punctuation disappears, pauses settle between words, and the semantic function of the units virtually ceases to exist, signalling that the word is no longer the most meaningful medium of creating connection between human beings, and that language is no longer a system of signs but merely agitated stammering, and is no longer capable of giving expression to experience. Yet in the same poem, it can be read that “this night, too, slowly passes”, and once again, the poem is able to take the poet by the arm “in a melodic street”. In Erőltetett menet (lit. Forced March), the same faith is reaffirmed: the words and poetry, as “lovers of fierce utterances” make demands, return time and again, and demand the poet’s attention. Ultimately, the poem A dolgok arca (lit. The Face of Things) is also a confession that the poet’s most sacred weapon is language: fit for elevated play, capable of creation, able to be made radiant, stripped bare to a skeleton, forced into dysfunction, ‘graspable’, ‘malleable’, concealing, and offering relief – a final repose.

Several of the major visionary poems in the volume bring together in concentrated form László Király’s reflections on the instruments and power of poetry, while at the same time incorporating the defining motifs of his way of seeing reality and his states of mind. The certainties of the first two books, written in his youth, have irrevocably disintegrated; the world has shattered into fragments, ideals have been lost, and these changes find expression in the large-scale tableau of the title poem, Leisure Ride. The poem’s basic poetic stance is grounded in the present, while lines pointing towards the future make it clear that the future has already taken place, and that the dancing wonderous steeds have galloped off into the untraceable depths of space and time. This is rendered final in the closing lines through the repeated evocation of the “cheerful riders” and by two words that abruptly and soberly bring the entire surrealistic vision to an end. The single-minded collective unified in belief, untroubled by doubt, setting out to take possession of the world, hopes for a “beautiful and unified” mode of being, with “thoughts untouched by blasphemy, women, trustworthy friends, deeds without pain, and an open mind”, yet all this only exists as a memory, a “fire-red flower” that “pierces the heart”. However, this is not the expression of nihilism, oblivion, or death, but merely the state of acknowledging reality without illusions.

Similarly to Forced March, which unmistakably alludes to Miklós Radnóti’s poem, the supposed, the hoped-for, and the real collide, and within the ‘real’ there is an ever-growing presence of death, the death of friends, of dreams, and of companions. The poet adopts a starkly enumerative tone, yet it is precisely this cold reckoning that intensifies the emotional force of words and sentences, until, due to helplessness and despair, once again fragmented linguistic structures provide the sole possibility of expression. However, this is not a state of annihilation or self-abandonment: the pain is so vivid that it renders any form of resignation impossible. The poem becomes a plea of a man that can rely only on himself and on his inner resources, the plea of one condemned to solitude, who nonetheless grows hardened and more severe by the awareness of loss.

“The childhood dreams have grown up”

László Király’s first volume of prose works, The Model of the Santa Maria, presents itself as a mirror image of the same state of mind. What becomes vision in his poetry, the experience itself, here is articulated within the formal frameworks of a symbolist idiom. In almost every case, Király explores the negative conditions of existence, and the strongly confessional tone indicates that his typically everyday protagonists live through and suffer his own pains, personal losses, and irreparable absences. There are different kinds of loss, yet the writer also suggests that there are no minor and major losses, and that each person believes that their own lack is the greatest. For example, the pointedly everyday protagonist of A Vörös sárkány… (lit. The Red Dragon…), the pedantic, impeccable bureaucrat with an elbow patch who never errs and never dares to assert his will, comes to realise that he never dared to do what he desired most in his life: to remain together in the office with the “round-hipped woman with a thick bun”. The old fare collector in Életem ideje kezedben van (lit. The Time Allotted to Me Is in Your Hands) has been cruelly deceived, stripped of his faith, and denied the promised reward. Iván Gór of A sziget (lit. The Island) has irretrievably lost his only love. And the hunter of A hetedik nyár balladája (lit. The Ballad of the Seventh Summer) loses hatred itself, becoming incapable of what he has been preparing for over many years, avenging the unjust death of his father.

However, the concrete meaning of these texts constitutes only one layer, and in clearer or in less crystallised form, it is the act, or the absence of action, that acquires symbolic value. The woman with the thick bun embodies all the beauty of existence, while within the repressed will reside all the unrealised desires of an entire human life. The story of the old fare collector is a symbol of an entrapped existence, a condition in which the individual can neither hide nor escape, yet their actions can only be substitute acts, and protest and rebellion are taken seriously by no one beyond the entrapped individual. The story of the title short-story may be aligned with the fundamental motif of Dezső Kosztolányi’s Kornél Esti stories: the still believing, hopeful, and pure young man calls the adult man to account for faith, hope, and purity. However, only material props remain of the desires, and the young man therefore leaves his adult self behind at the station, disappointed and wounded. “The childhood dreams have grown up”, Király says in one of the poems of Ballada… (lit. Ballad…), and the short-story lays before us the shards of those dreams. The small group of pieces in the volume (gathered under a cycle entitled Elégiák az egyedüllétről [lit. Elegies for Loneliness]) model theses and moral propositions by building each text upon a distinct creative situation. Works of a similar kind appear in the cycle Elfelejtett, régi énekek (lit. Forgotten, Old Songs), while the parable Jogod és hatalmad (lit. Your Right and Your Power), set in a pseudo-historical milieu, among its many truths, may most vividly intimate that no one may, or no one has, the human right to use their power to commit acts of baseness. One of the purest representatives of this short-story form is Hallani furcsa hegedűszót (lit. Hearing a Strange Violin Sound), in which images and ideas develop so finely and so naturally into the sphere of universality, as in fairy tales. In the short-story, the lonely physician nowhere finds the violin sound that slips away like a blue bird; yet the happiness, beauty, joy, and desire borne on the bird’s wings nevertheless become his, if only in memory. It may be inferred from the text that the melody can only belong to those who have earned it through the nobility of their lives.

Király speaks more forcefully and decisively, with closer attention to social immediacies and in a more down-to-earth register, in his other prose volume, the novel Blue Wolves, published in 1972.

“I consider forgetting a form of vileness”

Within the range of his lived experience, there are elements that cannot be transformed into poetic forms, layers of an epic nature, and not infrequently memory traces of dramatic situations, which strain even the framework of objective poetry, and of objectified and fact-reporting poems. Among others, this is demonstrated by the poem Visszapillantó tükör – Történelmi regény (lit. Rear-View Mirror – A Historical Novel), published in the Cluj-based journal Utunk in 1981, in which Király attempts to transmute into poetry a bloody episode from the recent past, related to the lives of the peasants. The words follow one another without rhyme, devoid of any acoustic rhythm, and, yielding to the material’s inner demands, the author can do little more than record the story’s ‘synopsis’ with an objectifying terseness, as though this episode also came from Blue Wolves.

In terms of genre, the book is a fictionalised memoir. Its family tree is notably expansive. Sándor Csoóri’s Tudósítás a toronyból (lit. Report From the Tower), a sociographical novel published in 1963, and Sütő András’s Anyám könnyű álmot ígér (lit. My Mother Promises Easy Dreams), an essay-novel published in 1970, are direct antecedents of Blue Wolves. Although in both works it is an adult person who observes the period of the 1950s, the network-like, intricately interwoven system of village and peasant society, and who seeks the motives and explanations underlying actions and forms of conduct. Menyhért Tamás’s Vigyázó madár (lit. Watchful Bird), published in 1981, likewise branches off from this lineage, and its kinship is all the more evident in that it traverses the fields of childhood and acquires its experience of the period from the vantage point of a child. Gyula Szabó (Gólya szállt a csűrre [lit. A Stork Landed on the Barn], 1974), Aladár Lászlóffy (Papírrepülő [lit. Paper Plane], 1973), Erik Majtényi (Hajóharang a Hold utcában [lit. Ship’s Bell in Moon Street], 1977), Sándor Gál from Czechoslovakia (Mesét mondok, valóságot [lit. I Tell You a Tale Called Reality], 1981), and Gyula Duba (Vajúdó parasztvilág [lit. A Peasant World in Pains], 1974) also adopted a mode of personally inflected remembrance to give voice to the inner urgency of their message. It seems that the demand for reality which, in Hungarian literature of the 1960s, led to the usage of the investigative short novel form to address the era’s pressing questions found its mode of expression in the form of the documentary memoir within Hungarian literature in Romania, albeit several years later. The author of Blue Wolves was guided by the same probing, causality-seeking impulse. The nuanced and modern handling of time in the action enclosed within a framing narrative, the interweaving of realist and surrealistic elements, and a style that alternates between austere objectivity, ballad-like expansiveness, a momentum recalling Lajos Kassák’s free verse and prose poems, as well as the form all make the book one of the outstanding works of our literature, and establish László Király as a promising representative of this modern novel form.

The work’s protagonist, Mihály Harai Kiss, returns to his village to interrogate the past, to lift the veil of oblivion from details and stories that must not be forgotten yet have been obscured. However, the present is new and alien to him; subjective time has preserved the past, but real time has devastated the village living in his memory, aged its people, grown trees and shrubs sky-high, turned the mill’s walls to dust, and covered the attics with cobwebs. Yet, despite the disillusioning nature of the encounter, the shocking experience of the truth that “no man ever steps in the same river twice”, distance proves to be a fundamental precondition of understanding. Having grown distant in both time and space means that, in accordance with the Proustian mechanism of memory, he can take possession of events from the distant past. However, the ethical responsibility inherent in understanding and judgement permits only one task, to seek understanding without passing judgement. The characters of the book, the villagers, do not pass before a judge at that dreamlike bridge, but before their own consciences. The writer merely asks questions, and it is the ‘bridge’ that compels everyone to confess. Király lived through the historical period depicted in the novel, the 1950s, as a child; the basis of his knowledge is therefore childlike experience, a fact that itself motivates the stance of refraining from judgement. Regardless of the things the characters of the ghostly procession did or failed to do, truth has many faces, and none of them embodies a version exclusively leading to salvation. Irrefutable historical constraints can only reinforce this view: the community in the novel had to confront not only the profound social transformations of the 1950s but also the specific conditions of minority existence as a constantly operative fact. The framing dialogues with the watchman repeatedly bring this authorial stance to the reader’s awareness, reinforced by both structure and style: what has happened cannot be undone or reshaped, made better or worse, or redeemed by retrospective explanations; it can only be accepted as it happened. With Adam’s obsession, the writer descends into the well of memory, while the watchman, with Luciferian scepticism and omniscience, restrains and tempers his passion [a reference to The Tragedy of Man, Imre Madách’s nineteenth-century dramatic poem, and two of the poem’s main characters]. This repeatedly recurring motif seems to issue a warning: Mihály Harai Kiss cannot allow the pain of personal memories to influence his conduct. The watchman, with his sober natural pragmatism, reinforces another certainty: sobriety can never lead to the understanding of passion, nor can the contemplative, sceptical outsider comprehend the hopeful figure who stakes heart and soul, the act of creation and the creator. That is, the agonising procession of visions at whose end the work takes shape through the writer. As the critic Lajos Szakolczay observes, “through inward descent, on the night of poetic utterances, the world can be tamed”, and the blue wolves “become symbols of poetic commitment”. Another critic, András Görömbei, puts it this way: the protagonist, Mihály Harai Kiss, as the writer’s alter ego, seeks to impose order with a passion for justice, and for this reason summons up the debris of the events of his life.

In this book, Király handles language and form with a master’s assurance. Where memory and action are vivid and reliable, because they draw on adult experience (his school years, the period and milieu of his becoming a writer), he passes judgement. Where he examines the life of the community, of the village, his mode becomes surrealistically soaring and forgiving. For he speaks of those people whose fate has always been, and remains, his most intimate concern: those who “hold him in the palm of their hand”, and about whom he still could tell a few ‘beautiful’ stories.

“Our past, pleading to be preserved”

Éva Cs. Gyimesi writes that, from volume to volume, László Király revisits and renders his essentially unchanging foundational experiences through concentric circles that open into ever-widening arcs. In Az eltemetett hadsereg (lit. The Buried Army), published in 1978 and widely held to be his most unified and most powerful book of poems at the time, there are no shockingly new, major experiences: the poet seems to be summing up those essential traits of personality that can be built into the work. The novelty lies in his perspective. Király is able to treat the reality of a world where values are being destroyed as self-evident, and all his other utterances are founded on this certainty. This does not mean that there are no moments of distress, at times moments of bitterness, yet it seems that he has already discovered the inner resources necessary for resistance, and the compulsion to articulate drives him towards a comprehensive, visionary poetic discourse. For it is a certainty for him that, even in an age that assaults poetry, truth-telling, freedom of action, and the open avowal of faith, the only possible form of action available to him is to assume and, through the power of poetry, to transmit to others and have others accept a profound faith in the indestructibility of moral freedom. Driven by an impassioned, stirring imperative, his new poems are animated by a passionate commitment to the community, to the preservation of the people’s shared values, language and culture, and a firm awareness of the cohesive power of these values fuels his intensity. Language and culture are not only the means and conditions of a people’s survival, but also sources of moral strength and self-confidence: László Király gives poetic form to this idea in conceptually driven poems richly interwoven with emotion, employing a voice filled with pathos and power. He has arrived at a philosophically grounded synthesis of the experience of assuming responsibility; his poetic attention turns more strongly than ever towards the possibilities of fulfilling the poet’s mission. He is guided by a demand for totality: in the poems, behind the perceptible layers of meaning, there are profound ideological contents at work.

A fine example of hope and confidence persisting despite everything, and of faith in the survival of the community, is the poem Halljátok-e a dalt (lit. Do You Hear the Song?), which seems to evoke Mihály Vörösmarty’s great vision: not one of national extinction, but of ‘greying’, of the indifference of those living under the pressure of necessities, of a resignation that paralyses action. The song rises “without intoxication”; there is neither time nor space for dazzling “flower similes”: only the voice of reason can speak, and the sole remaining option is to wait, while preserving values. This vision has as little hope as the vision of Vörösmarty. The train of thought is set in motion by the conscious acknowledgement of lack, and at several points, the structure briefly flashes up images of vanished rapture, of intimations, of the “lost warmth”, at times situating the symbols in the temporal plane of the present, at times of the past, and at times of the future, before the poem closes with an image abruptly shifted into the present tense; at the same time, this image is stripped of its comforting unambiguity by being cast as a question. Elégia (lit. Elegy), Éjféli eső (lit. Midnight Rain), Régi órák (lit. Past Hours), and Terítsd be hóval (lit. Cover It With Snow) similarly experiment with different modes of waiting, with the deliberate aim of bringing a fate-bound situation to consciousness. The title Hosszú költemény (lit. Long Poem) is allusive: history is endless, and within it the poet’s voice resounds “dully”, without receiving an answer. Yet in the present time there prevails an inviolable law of survival: patience, wisdom, and the absence of hatred, lest the nation turn self-destructive. To this cycle (Midnight Rain), László Király also attaches poems dedicated to poetic predecessors once more called back into being, and to his contemporaries, poems which contain his most resonant lines written about his mother tongue, the “sheltering cave”, the “final refuge” – it is an inviolable law to attend to them.

He also creates another cycle (Határátlépés [lit. Crossing the Border]) out of poems drawing on cultural experiences, of poems which encloses the socially topical message within the form of an artwork related to an oeuvre. László Király’s oft-cited historical sensitivity here is transformed into an attention focused almost exclusively on the present: he writes a pathological portrait of the period, articulating not only personal but generational disappointments and the erosion of faith. For the most part, historical time and setting are insignificant, serving as a creative framework onto which he maps the co-ordinates of the present historical and social conditions. By virtue of their visual impact and associative content, historical images no longer primarily convey generalised meanings (as, for instance, the “buried army” or the “forgotten army”, which primarily symbolise the sometimes enforced dispersal of a generation); rather, Király employs these images to convey scarcely concealed, concrete allusions. He adopts the same approach when he selects works of art from cultural history to serve as the structural axes of his poems: his ‘analyses of artworks’ are generational and national mappings of mood and collective sensibility (Császárszobrok [lit. Statues of the Emperors], Janicsártemető [lit. Janissary Cemetery], Mór oszlop [lit. Moorish Column], Az öreg Pieter Brueghel [lit. The Old Pieter Brueghel], Bosch-album [lit. Bosch Album], Picasso-vásznak az Ermitázsban [lit. Picasso Canvases in the Hermitage]). The historical milieu of the ‘fragments’ and ‘poem sections’ entitled Henrik király (lit. King Henry) is Elizabethan England; however, their true temporal horizon is the present. Within this framework, and through numerous explicit allusions that render his commitment unmistakable, Király, wearing the mask of a minstrel, says everything he wishes to say about human and national existential situations, about love, and about the poet’s task, employing images densely condensed through multiple levels of transposition. Even in this unelaborated form, unelaborated because it aspires to become a full drama, his work possesses immense momentum; its language is classically pure and richly suffused with emotion. It is a work whose analysis is an almost hopeless task: the more perfect the images and the words, the less they can be interpreted through other images and words. It is not perfect as a structure, but it is conceptually honed to a remarkable degree of sharpness.

“Light falls upon your face, my love”

Containing short stories and other short narrative pieces, variations on László Király’s most sacred themes, the new prose volume published in 1981, Fény hull az arcodra, édesem (lit. Light Falls Upon Your Face, My Love), embodies the “certainty of threat” (Béla Márkus). The theme of one of these variations is drawn from the psychology of artistic creation. More precisely, these pieces may be described as the confessions of a writer-creator determined by his fate, situation, and task, acknowledging that he can never free himself from this determination. The other major thematic strand is the social and communal mode of thought that found powerful expression in The Forgotten Army, here appearing in the guise of symbolist prose and of an epic form that can be parabolically expanded within the domain of interpretation. The volume contains only four pieces, among them the novella-length Az örök hó határa (lit. The Permanent Snow Line), not Király’s finest work, but at this point, this piece introduces the greatest number of new elements.

“Everything has to be begun anew, for whatever may happen, this struggle will never come to an end; that is the only certainty, nothing else,” ponders the hero of the work, Antonio, as a letter is slipped under the door of his room (his prison?). The letter is signed by a girl who was shot by the enemy’s soldiers, invisible yet everywhere, waiting with weapons always at the ready. Someone already stands in her place to continue the struggle, which is a didactic consequence, functioning at once as parable and example, yet it is precisely such basic situations and ethical self-evidences that Király is able to render vivid and to charge with meaning. Awakening from a gentle, peaceful dream spent in “fields of conversation”, in the opening scene, Antonio, the leader of the partisans, suddenly realises that he and his small group are in mortal danger. In The Model of the Santa Maria, another text that models a similar situation, the soldiers march past their leader, the commander, in unified formation and in the same direction; however, the group breaks apart and they are confronted with a choice: to surrender and accept the future, reserving the memory of a well-fought, righteous struggle, or to go into hiding, to “try to slip through the ring”, and to wait. Those who surrender are shot by the enemy, and the author suggests that this path is not viable. Antonio chooses the struggle, a war of concealment, and he wishes to reach “the permanent snow line”. The boy, the embodiment of innocence?, of youth?, or his double?, follows him, yet he falls at the snow line. Antonio is taken in by groups of young people in the city, the new generation, still unified and single-minded?, who take over his role for a time?, forever? And there is the mysterious girl, the symbol of love?, who perhaps did not die in the mountains, having been granted by Király the ‘one per cent’ chance of survival reserved for those who surrender.

This piece is characterised by an unprecedented tolerance, a new element has added to the process of value preservation, there is a new gathering that establishes continuity by its very existence, a renewed alignment around what is good, beautiful, and new, the acknowledgement of the succeeding generation, or the demand for its presence. This narrative is not without flaws, the discursive voice sporadically takes control over the narrative strands, and the realistic and mediated layers of meaning do not fully cohere, but conceptually it remains a highly noteworthy product of László Király’s system of ideas.

The most exquisitely beautiful and exceptionally delicate short story in the writer’s entire oeuvre is the volume’s title piece. Two figures, a woman and a man of no discernible age, wrapped in nondescript, loose, cloak-like black garments, flee from one place to another. Through snow, in biting cold, across a vast, inhuman wilderness, alert to danger, hounded, exhausted. However, this emphatically realistic setting gradually begins to lose its sense of reality, and in the house of an old schoolmaster who gives them shelter, the bathing woman, revealing herself with an unrestrained purity, appears as a surreal vision: her golden hair sweeping the ground, as though it were concealing some nameless fairy. And when the reader comes to accept the story as something other than they first believed it to be, when they start to think that the story is just a dream, a play of the imagination, bluntly realist signs bring the reader to the realisation that everything did occur: in the early-morning snow, there are fresh footprints, the hoofprints of the horses of the fugitives, marking their path of departure. With remarkable delicacy, the writer moves between intimation and knowledge, between the existent and the elusive, he suspends the images within the sphere of timelessness and eternity, and transposes the fairy-tale-like concreteness of flight and persecution into the dimension of the eternal. Its concreteness is that of a fairy tale, yet within the fairy tale, there resides the essence of the experience of all ages, the tale as primordial form. Who is the man, and who the woman? Who is the gentle-faced, beautiful woman? Perhaps the tale itself? Poetry? The poem? Gentle, beautiful, and pure poetry, the song, the chant, which must be hidden, concealed, covered in a black cloak, made to flee through snow and frost, among mountains echoing with wolf howls? To be revealed to those who understand, love, and shelter it, and then to be carried onward in flight? Is the man the poet himself? The Minstrel, the Chronicler, who believes that one day the trials will end, that “we shall arrive, and light will fall upon our faces too, light will fall upon your face, my love”? This hope, cast into the unfathomable depths of time, into an undefined future, is already close to hopelessness, were it not for Király’s enduring belief in continuity. A faith that not only regards time measured on a historical scale as open and necessarily mutable, as a furnace burning through ever new formations, but also believes unwaveringly in the indestructibility of culture. In this short story, Király imbues prose with an almost classical quality (Béla Márkus), detaching the created world of the work from space and time and turning it into a “trials of conduct”; he does not rely on “local colour”, but rather poses a challenge for the reader to recognise where overwhelming forces lie and why the struggle exists at all.

The volume’s other two short stories, Házam küszöbén (lit. On the Threshold of My House) and Tiszteletkör esti városunkban (lit. A Long Circuit Through Our Town in the Evening), fall short of the conceptual and formal value of the preceding pieces. In On the Threshold…, alongside the confessional, self-analytical passages, the dialogues are more colourless and less rich in ideas, and in A Long Circuit, in which the Dream has fragmented into tiny dream-shards and lost its value, is ‘merely’ adequate, compared to the exceptional clarity of Light Falls Upon Your Face, My Love.

Viewed as a whole, László Király’s volumes published up to this point in time indicate a period in which he turns to symbolist-allegorical prose and to an intellectual poetry of a visionary scope. His outlook is shaped by a legitimate poetic and authorial self-awareness, sustained by an unceasing engagement on behalf of the community.

The formative years and the subsequent productive decade represented by the mentioned books encompass only the first third of his career, and although the next decades yield many further volumes, it is nevertheless these early works that are most frequently cited and most often discussed, and which constitute László Király’s most distinctive works according to many critics. There is some justice in this assessment, given that the works discussed so far have defined the main features of Király’s outlook and have provided a firm foundation for the formal experiments of his poetry. In the volume Leisure Ride, the poetic outlook has already become clearly articulated, displaying a firm attentiveness to being, and strong formal definition. “Király’s experimental approach and the diversity of his formal means point to the layered nature of the cultural tradition, since each type of his poems alludes to a particular historical period, to some person or event, or to an element of everyday life or folk culture. Each piece constitutes a manifestation of collective memory, a staging of the communal self, posited in opposition to something else, and giving rise in certain poems of Leisure Ride (and of other volumes, above all Ballad of the Weary Women, The Forgotten Army, and Amikor pipacsok voltatok [lit. When You Were Poppies]) to a linguistic world where war is the dominant condition. Through confrontation with a given situation, the essential elements of identity reveal themselves, and in Király’s poetry, it is precisely this revelation that takes place, transforming every textual memory that characterises the community into poetry,” writes Csilla Szihalmi (Hitel, January 2012).

Nevertheless, this consistently undiminished experimental drive and sensitivity to form, which never unsettle his stable outlook, prove capable of opening up and rendering visible genuinely new poetic dimensions precisely in his later works: in the mask-poems, the poetry of doubles, the multiplication of the self, the poetic articulation of solitude, a dryly ironic mode of speech, the poems with rigorously pared forms, and the playful engagements with poetic form. The strongest evidence for this is found in the volumes When You Were Poppies (1982), A téli tábor (lit. The Winter Camp, 1984), Skorpió (lit. Scorpio, 1993), and Beűzetés (lit. Inward Expulsion, 1995).

“With the Memory of Swords”

László Király: A Soul Marked by Attachment

Even solitude anchors him to that land and place, to that world which, despite its deformities and fragmentariness, is the creator and kindler of this heart-wrenching loneliness. Bitter disillusionment does not drive him away; rather, it holds him fast; escape is not an option for the poet. Király loves the house and the homeland that enclose him. Thus, there is no contradiction in the fact that the poems of a poet who does not abandon his community increasingly speak in the austere, icy tones of a man being pushed to the margins. For it is precisely the freezing communal reality of this era that he experiences and endures, the arrogance of power that humiliates individuals and communities alike, experienced as part of the minority condition, that fuel his sense of abandonment and drive him back to the memories of the “golden ages” of the past. Although “Everything Whole is now broken”, László Király does not flee from fragmented existence into some cosmic, self-pitying rootlessness; rather, he clings to the integrity of the past. The “rear-view mirror” becomes a key symbolic image in his poems, highlighting and bringing into focus the experiential world sunk into the past, bringing dulled emotions back to life, and rekindling smouldering passions. The poet reaches back to past periods of time, reanimating in poetry those memories whose “presence is already barely perceptible in spaces and times of the present”, as it can be read on the cover of When You Were Poppies. As quoted above, Király states that he was never alone. He was never alone because he could cling to his poems and to the memories of the past. The volumes mentioned offer compelling evidence of this.

For the most part, it is the dream, the half-dreamlike blurring of contours, and the journey that provide the framework for the unrestrained play of poetic associations. Images flash up and vanish, and Király does not engage in philosophical interpretation or conceptual explication. The poetic diction is austere, condensed, and objective, with thought compressed into aphoristic density. For instance, in the opening poem, the lines that lend A kővadászok klubja (lit. The Club of Stone Hunters) its title, a single image broken into stanzas through varied repetition, already delineate the interpretative orientation of the entire volume: Király turns towards a world that once existed. Through gradation he lends dramatic emphasis to an image that is in itself disarmingly beautiful and innocent: the phrase “when you were still poppies” in the second section acquires the adverb “once”, in the third the word “still” reinforces the sense of loss, in the fourth stanza “but you were once” underscores the once world-embracing faith and resolve of the former poetic community, and in the fifth section the tone shifts to explicit admonition: “And remember: you were poppies, / and wove yourselves into the fabric of summer-time Europe”. The poppy thus becomes a “symbol of value” (János Borcsa). (The image evokes the memory of an international poets’ meeting and also reappears in the volume’s prose poem, a lyrical prose piece entitled Magánbeszélgetések [lit. Private Conversations]). The poem may also be read as a counterpart to Árpád Farkas’s widely revered poem Köszörű időben (lit. Time Is Like a Grindstone): what there takes the form of a question (“will the fever remain, boys?”) here becomes admonition, exhortation, reminder, and even hope, that in the “pagan snowfall”, looking in the “rear-view mirror”, “trees, stones, animals, companions, those who wish to overtake and those who fall behind” may rekindle within him the happiness of “unselfconscious creation”.

The subjective-poetic diagnosis is depressing: through dramatic self-characterisations and self-reflexive gestures, László Király sketches his own sorrowful image in the poems. “The words should be precise, unsparing”, yet “your flashing rhymes have deserted you, / you did not keep watch over them”, although, as both self-encouragement and encouragement of others, he states that “there is warmth and strength in the words”, and words are weapons, and there is “no sadder sight than gawping, / furloughed old soldiers” when the time has come for “the great poets’ meetings” (Az alvók [lit. The Sleepers]). Elsewhere (Tavasz [lit. Spring]): “A word that does not exist or has been lost. / Memory has renounced it”; yet, according to the prose poem entitled 1977-ben (lit. In 1977), “Sound sleep was not devised for poets”. In the poem Utazás–1 (lit. Journey 1), the image and symbolism of the earlier Vitorlaének (lit. Sail Song) re-emerge: “the spacious white sailboat, / as we sailed towards the heart of Transylvania”, and the poem Reggel (lit. Morning) from the volume Scorpio is also a variation on this motif: “And we’re on the shore, on the shore again, / waiting for a waving hand, / from the haze enveloping the sail. / Hallo!”

Király’s poems set in sharp contrast the melancholic, corrosive moods of collective and personal hopelessness with the affective registers of hope that cling to the poems, to poetry itself. “But one must step out of the frost of the non-valleys”, the exhortation urges; one must once again give names to “cloud and wind. / To bird and grass, to the radiance of wine” (Szeszélyes május [lit. Capricious May]); and the window frame, which may direct the gaze anywhere, also emerges, as a key image of the poet looking back into the past, as a symbol of hope of consolatory visions: for “happy is the day that / greets us with a happy memory” (Költő ablakkeretben [lit. Poet in a Window Frame]). Elsewhere, the “memory of swords” surfaces, the memory of combat, of a time when poems were weapons, allowing to assault the world “like insurgents” (1980. szeptember 30. [lit. 30 September 1980]). However, set against this, stands the sober, wise, and depressing certainty: “Upon the heroic brow of naïve warriors / a cooling peal of laughter is sprinkled” (1980. november 26. [lit. 26 November 1980]).

In the poems, the images are organised around a single, austere statement: “we have forgotten ourselves. / The wrinkles have smoothed out on our faces”; still “the song is eternal, its speech pure and intelligible”, followed once again by a dispirited inventory: “but from whom should I now demand an account / of my youth squandered on something else”. From twenty-nine mosaic fragments, Érzelmes utazás (lit. Sentimental Journey) weaves a loose and fragmentary composition, displaying a contrastive, internally opposed affective-emotional state, a constellation whose elements appear to be unrelated. In several instances, through an abstract formal procedure, familiar cultural and canonical texts are inverted: for example, a line from the psalm A Mighty Fortress Is Our God is reduced to a lower-case, godless, profane enumeration, in which the name and presence of God are replaced by fragments of a compulsive life: to be, to do, to go, to take, to eat, nothing. Király’s paraphrase of the Lord’s Prayer is a “sober counter-prayer”, an anti-supplication, a line-by-line negation articulating a condition of abandonment by God. In the volume When You Were Poppies, “a dreamed poet”, Al. Nezvanov, appears in fourteen mosaic fragments. He is “another self of the poet, created by me”, as Király writes, an alter ego who accompanies Király as a faithful double in the volume The Winter Camp, and thereafter appears in every book of poetry written by Király. The other mask is also present and remains with the poet, the mask of Tanya Smirnova [in Hungarian: Tánya Szmirnova], a real or imagined Russian lover of the poet, or perhaps merely another double. As in Scorpio, the voice and its modulation create the impression of a single volume divided into three parts, unified by the same rigorously splintered grotesque idiom and articulated from the near and far shores of an in-between existence. Király is locked in a sustained struggle with himself, never giving up, never laying down the pen, but never giving any sign of that former “unselfconscious” joy of writing poetry, or of the happiness of existence itself. The earlier energetic openness, marked by a readiness to perceive possibilities, is overlaid by angrier tones of a sense of defeat and a continual consciousness of loss (Zoltán Bertha), most notably in the volume Scorpio.

At the same time, these poems display an extraordinary richness of form, expressivity, and poetic variety. These poems of distorted logic and fractured structure represent a distorted age. Agitated, fragmented poetic constructions, unorthodox grammar, botched stylistic elements, associative backflips, and conceptual plays are repeatedly arrested by single, incisive statements that cuts into the reader, by alarmingly wise summations compressed into a line or half. Incomplete syntactic constructions, omitted predicates and objects, ellipsis, severity, bitterness, and laconic utterances: scarcely breaks the silence of his solitude, limiting himself to the bare articulation of what is already evident. Some of the poems are stripped of their semantic functions, resembling fragmented concrete poetry (februári, márciusi, júniusi, októberi [lit. February, March, June, October]), and there are counter-poems, ad notam Attila József, Nezvanov and Prévert, as well as Kafka and Dante; reports, cries, strummings, letters, lines, the “hundred lines” of solitude, and the hundredth one is nothing but “utter silence”. Drawings and photographs which show “the X-ray image of a century bearing pressure trauma”. A shattered present and the intact features of the past just glimmering through: two times, but only one of them is valid, the other, the present, merely an inventory of absence. A fragmentary life rendered through fragments of verse, for “the fragment is the wholeness of nothing”. “I loiter among sentences disintegrated, / locked into the drawers of eternity, / hidden beneath my skin…” (Júniusi forgács [lit. June Fragment]), and “everything has gone wrong”, but with a pencil burned down between his fingers, “letters ensnare me forever – / the spell of an ending that never ends”.

According to Zoltán Bertha (Erdélyi magyar irodalom a nyolcvanas években [lit. Transylvanian Hungarian Literature in the 1980s], op. cit.: Zoltán Bertha, Gond és mű [lit. Care and Work], Széphalom Könyvműhely, 1984), the poet attunes his poems concerned with “withdrawing into memory” into an almost “classical hum”. Although this expansively developed, elegiac poetry evokes the “bitterly sombre” moods of the poetic subject’s everyday life, it simultaneously renders the process of a generation’s “loss of historical illusions” and collective mood arising from this loss. László Király focus remains on the native land, the homeland, and the nation, but he does not shy away from conceptual thinking, on the contrary, he seeks conceptual clarity. In an interview (Lövétei Lázár László beszélgetése a 65 éves Király Lászlóval [lit. A Conversation With the Sixty-Five-Year-Old László Király, by László Lázár Lövétei] Székelyföld, 2008/11), he states with emphatic irony and insistence that “concepts must be defended incessantly, and protected from the impurities that relentlessly attach themselves to concepts. If writers have any duties, this is certainly one of them. I hope that the words can preserve their own light, even if the blind and the deaf are incapable of seeing or hearing these things. I mean even the words people and nation. I think that true pathos is only mocked and scorned by the petty rabble. Grandeur is alien to them, and they fear it because they cannot rise to its heights. They fear myths as well; hence they proclaim myth-breaking. They say no to legends, soaring, dignified conduct, solemnity. I do not envy them. They view poetry with suspicion whenever it shows signs of any poetic quality. And since we are here, let me irritate them by making my own position clear: I am not averse to pathos; I value symmetry and balance; I like to lift my gaze upwards from time to time; and I do not regard as heroes or exemplars those who rant or loiter about rubbish dumps. And let me make this clear…: I belong to a nation, even if this nation often does not behave in a manner worthy of a nation.”

“Somewhere there. Sometime back then.”

He has a nation and a native land, a childhood and memories, and all of these exert a powerful pull on the poet. In several of his studies, Zoltán Bertha elaborates a characteristic feature of Hungarian literature in Romania, namely that the art of the second generation associated with the Source book series preserves this critical orientation: they give voice, almost “in a classically refined form”, to the “substantive values and distinctive constituents related to Transylvanianness”. Although their poetic language ranges from the elevated and pathos-laden to the domains of formal experimentation, they do not advocate the erosion of the ethnic and linguistic tradition, and they draw attention to the afflictions of national existence, to oppression and limitation, and to the ethnic, cultural, and linguistic attrition that appears to have hardened into a lasting condition after the hope-inspiring months in the 1990s. In his own austere, economical, dense, and at times fragmented, poetic idiom, László Király preserves a compelling image of his native land, drawing on memories of inexhaustible depth.

“Childhood never leaves you”, the poet promises in the opening poem of his first book; and considering his oeuvre, this claim finds further confirmation in Akasztóhegy (lit. Gallows Hill), the volume published in 2010, that assembles poems addressed to the native land. There is little reason to avoid the compelling task of engaging more closely with the experience rooted in the native land that accompanies the poet’s entire career, given that dozens of volumes are available and that poems belonging to this thematic domain form a cycle in almost each of his books, from the early years to the present day. László Király speaks readily and with inspiration about his native village of Sărățeni (Sóvárad) and its inhabitants: human beings, animals, birds, plants, waters, mountains, past, real and imagined events, the entire realistic and surreal Sărățeni universe. In the aforementioned interview conducted by László Lázár Lövétei, he retells the poem Valahol ott (lit. Somewhere There) in prose and recounts the “hay-wagon poem”, his memory and experience of “Years rushing past. / Autumns, winters, / Silences, springs, summers”, a recollection that can be only told using words reduced to austerity through repeated evocation. “The names of the hills, field tracts, boundary lands, and streams were probably among the first things to stir and entice my childhood imagination”. the poet says. “Endrebérce [lit. Endre’s Ridge] is already beautiful in itself, but why was it called that? And the area below the ridge is presumably called Endre. How can a boundary land be called Endre [a Hungarian masculine given name]? God forbid that I should ever find out. We used to go there in spring to pick daffodils, which the people of Sărățeni called ‘kankós’. We trampled the whole beautiful, yielding meadow, to the ‘delight’ of the mowers. It was beautiful. […] We took the dried flax to the factory, then we set off at night, and I lay on top of the high-stacked hay wagon, while my grandfather walked ahead of the cows, singing, so long as he thought I was asleep. He knew Kuruc songs [Kuruc refers to a group of armed anti-Habsburg insurgents in the Kingdom of Hungary between 1671 and 1711], I would never have guessed it. He was a man of few words, but not a gloomy one. […] Csere, Virgó, Endrebérce, full of stories, tales, legends, poetry, the becoming human.” For Király, childhood functions as a ‘passport’: an inalienable possession without which neither departure nor return is possible, and its pages display “placid waters”, bramble runners, paths, and mountains etched by streams. The native land unfolds as a ballad of a disgraced girl, the drone of carrion flies and the “Saturday evening peal of bells”, “puppeteers in the square”, and magical “old attics”. Objects appear whose mere naming exerts an effect, and the images of an endless catalogue (Régi padlások [lit. Old Attics]) do not follow grammatical or metrical rules but are propelled line by line by a rhythm evocative of slow, unforced speech. There is no punctuation, no initial capitals, no full stops. Like memory itself, it may begin anywhere and vanish at will; everything is just somewhere, at some moment. This is the poems’ “autumnal shedding”, for “only precision matters: this is how things were” (Long Poem), and the poet recounts a ballad, in quatrains of calm, even cadence. Within the poem’s formal devices, Király employs a morphological pattern characteristic of fairy tales: the story begins “before the old house in Sărățeni”, sitting on the steps, with time itself moving backwards. Parents come alive, photographs summon their youthful figures, the sight of sheep torn apart by wolves, “red-eyed tax collectors”, “haggard-faced, weary militiamen”, hidden food, the coerced silence – a starkly objective case-history of an era. “There are no horses, no hay is crunched”, every sound and stir of the long poem, like the “cries of childhood” in The Infinite Song, drifts somewhere in time.

Király’s poetry has long ceased to tolerate the unchecked surge of emotions; the diction pulls the register down, preferring understatement to any elevation of style, and his pathos is a variant of pathos: it is on the verge of overflowing, yet never overflows. The images are starkly simple, this is how it was, the poet lulls neither himself nor the reader, and if the memory or narrative is painfully constricting and tearful, he adds beneath the title a genre-marker that shifts the poem towards the absurd: (ballet). Thus, the story of the old man returned from the war, hobbling on one leg, ashamed of his wooden prosthesis, standing before his stunned family, at a loss and ill at ease, becomes an acerbic, bitter, new kind of ballad. The poem Virradat ([lit. Dawn]) likewise reveals this kind of shaken intensity that the poet may harbour, for here he voices a confession of love: “On one side of me, there is always the native land, / the place I come from and return to”; however, the objectivity of the diction, its restraint, allows no sentimental softening. The poem’s closing is an affirmation of a stern, critical, constructive love: “Standing in the saddle I rear up, / and with a cracking lash I rouse / my native land reddening into dawn”.

He continues to write poems centred on the Sărățeni universe to this day, and in his 2013 volume Készülődés Pazsgába (lit. Preparations for Pazhga), once again includes a chapter devoted to Sărățeni (Kerti reggel [lit. Morning in the Garden]): the room in which the grandfather died and the poet was born becomes a symbol of permanence (Nyitott zsalu [lit. Open Shutters]). In contrast to the end-of-the-world imagery of Szürke naptár ([lit. Grey Calendar]), the everyday tasks of Sărățeni come to the fore: grass awaiting mowing, a defective gutter, the cellar stairs requiring repair, the poorly cut branches of the walnut tree, since “this is what happens when I am never there”, and what does it matter where “the Union” is heading if there are other kinds of problems: “what am I to do with the large, empty barn?” The elevated is accompanied by the prosaic: measured against the world’s troubles, the troubles in Sărățeni assume disproportionate weight, and employing a deflating, good-humoured irony, the poet is able to calibrate the value of things with precision. The “mournful bellowing / of animals long gone” renders the apocalyptic menace insignificant. “Can you forget?” the poem asks (Vén szülőház, ősszel [lit. The Old Parental House in Autumn]), and sitting on the steps of the old parental house, the poet spells out the word ‘no’ with chess pieces, without the word being spoken aloud; only the cockchafer buzzing above the “memory-holding” courtyard sounds out the answer. “Private free man”, this twisted word fixes a defining trait of the self-image: loyalty is inviolable, the attachment is unbreakable, and decisions are matter of the private individual and grounded in free will.

According to László Bogdán (Háromszék, 3 July 2010), in this poetry of the native land, László Király “rearranges his old and new poems in a kaleidoscopic manner”, and “from the vantage point of sixty-seven years it is no longer worth asking whether it was worth it. Sleighs jingle away in lost worlds, and across the Transylvanian snowy fields, the phosphorescent shadows of blue wolves glide past. The centre of the royal poetic universe rises into view: Sărățeni. Yes, the garden in Sărățeni. The landscape that has utterly and irrevocably found a home in these beautiful, unforgettable poems. […] Once everything was still intact, […] and László Király’s poetic world, devoted with talent and great resolve to the construction of a Sărățeni mythology, was whole.”

Another critic, Attila Sántha, has also been drawn into the spell of Gallows Hill (A szülőföldből kihajtott ember magánya [lit. The Loneliness of a Man Grown out of His Native Land], Bárka, 2013/6), László Király’s poetry of the native land, which articulates the longing of a person “irrevocably torn from his community, his village, from Sărățeni that belongs to us all”, a yearning to return to the place “where everything is still whole”, where “old peasants gifted with beautiful speech” live, “whose lives have not been scattered”, “unlike the poet’s own”. For Király, being torn from the native land signifies “the longing that gives rise to inspiration, a suffering refined into poetry”. “A love for this lost world, which has been condensed out of the stories handed down by parents, relatives, and local people, runs through each of his lines…”. “For László Király, the native land is both the source of love and of tragic existence, and he can exist neither with it nor without it”, Sántha writes. The poet does what he must, he writes out his own inner struggles, his personal way of the cross.

“Are we departing, or are we arriving?”

After the crushing decades marked by a sense of menace, a constant feeling of endangerment, and the image of eternal snow frozen beyond time and space, the ‘dictator-toppling’ regime change (András Sütő) opened up new and less constrained modes of expression; yet these new possibilities did not fundamentally reshape the poet’s outlook, his art, or his poetry. There is not any essential thematic shift, since alongside the allegories of the early years, which appeared primarily in prose works (Az örök hó… [lit. The Eternal Snow…], Fény hull… [lit. Light Falls…]), Király’s poetry, even during his so-called ‘metaphor period’, never relied on indecipherable imagery. His terse precision and his use of concepts that remained clear despite their multiplicity of meanings made his symbols decipherable. “Political changes do not influence the quality of poetry, though there is often an expectation that they should. It was difficult to avoid taking a position on certain questions, and for that reason, the occasional appearance of an unconventional work was more striking than it is today. […] However, I wrote both before and after the changes, because that is what I committed myself to. For a true artist, there is no unproductive period, or if there is, the real causes are not to be sought outside.” Elsewhere (in an interview by Lővétei) he says: “At the time of the regime change, I did not have drawers filled with texts that I had to conceal under the dictatorship. I do not claim that it was impossible to speak during the years of the dictatorship, and therefore the righteous remained silent. I can point to a wealth of excellent writing as evidence, to the credit of Transylvanian Hungarian writers. The reasons for deliberate silence may be revealed to us by those who remained silent, though I doubt it.”

Over the years, new, old, and ‘new-old’ poems have been added to the volumes, and the poet writes (Gyilkosok nyara [lit. Summer of Killers]): “At the bottom of the bag lurk / some treacherous writing tools, a notebook among them, / unmoved by the false oath of / ‘Not a letter this summer.’” Király continues to write and to create works with undiminished vigour, and there is no metamorphosis in his poetry signifying any regime change.

In his later volumes (for example, Preparations for Pazhga, 2013; A Bethlen bástya dallama [lit. The Melody of the Bethlen Bastion], 2015), there is a stronger impulse towards summation, towards a cataloguing of the course of his life: he constructs mosaic- and kaleidoscope-like images of past and present, and present-day events gain communal and social resonance through individual, tightly wrought poetic lines. Király’s occasional strange images and stylistic inflections register the symptoms of past and present, as well as personal and collective, destinies with diagnostic precision and unmistakable clarity.

The tone of the poetic voice, the modulation, timbre, and pitch, and, as a consequence, the forms of the poems, the range of formal variants, and the alternation of aesthetic qualities add new features to the artist’s portrait. As for poetic devices, the intensification of irony, of a cutting, idiosyncratic but ultimately benign sarcasm, and of self-diminishing self-irony can be observed, and the volumes present an abundance of lyric genres. The volumes include cross-rhymed quatrains employing characteristically Hungarian, accentual verse forms (though sometimes they employ quantitative metre), expressive free verse in the tradition of Lajos Kassák, objectivist, concrete poems marked by playful use of line breaks, and ‘nail poems’ [in Hungarian: körömvers; a short, aphoristic Hungarian poetic form] (most often half nail poems, recalling Sándor Kányádi). Király visibly delights in ranging freely among genres and is inclined to efface the boundary between verse and prose. According to Zoltán Bertha, László Király has opened up paths along which “classical, elegiac formal craftsmanship and avant-garde or anti-poetical, under-stylised formal disruptions can come into contact and organically interpenetrate each other; as can passionate, experiential confessionalism and mediated postmodern role-play, or philosophical rigour and an ironic-grotesque mixing of registers (“Az én vezérem is a bensőmből vezérel”, beszélgetés Király Lászlóval [lit. “My Guide Also Guides Me From Within”, A Conversation with László Király], Magyar Napló, 2008/4). His alter egos, Nezvanov and Zhang Wei, who may be one and the same, both the poet himself, have never abandoned him, and although Lajos Szakolczay has found ‘the real’ Pazhga in the Komi Republic, it is more likely that Pazhga is in Sărățeni, as the poet’s attention returns, ever more insistently, to his native land (Magyar Napló, 2014/1).

The possibility of speaking openly can make poetic language more concrete, and if the poet chooses, poetic games and playful poems can shed the constraint of metaphor, the poet can name specific individuals, for instance, his “Securitate man [a person working for the secret police agency of the Socialist Republic of Romania] famous in the whole Niraj Region,” Sergeant Tótzoli (Elmosódó vázlat [lit. Blurred Sketch]), and the imperatives of Tizenkét pont [Twelve Points] can unambiguously articulate the power-related, methodological, and strategic credo of the dictatorship, leaving no doubt as to their former reality. Szemtől szemben [lit. Face to Face], Azt kérdezték [lit. They Asked], and Tartalomjegyzék [lit. Table of Contents] can be read as records of real interrogations of the young poets from Cluj, Árpád Farkas and László Király, of the modalities of denial, of the configurations of nothingness, of the “sealed mouth”. Now, Király can write things as they were and as they are: “That’s how it is. From time to time / an encounter from long ago resurfaces, with my informer / code-named Adolf Hacsek,” and that “the name of my interrogating officer / was almost always Ferenc / in that great Grey House, how could that be? / What they did not promise – / if I were to join them. Perhaps…” (A sas szeme [lit. The Eagle’s Eye]). The quatrain Változat a Walesi bárdok ellen (lit. Variant Against the Bards of Wales) functions as a counter-poem [to János Arany’s well-known poem The Bards of Wales, written in the 1850s] and paraphrase, delivering a severe judgement on guilty, contemptible cowardice, on those who, in abject complicity with the dictatorship, aligned themselves with it and thus, in one way or another, served it through passive compliance. Even grammar itself serves the work of de-heroisation: “No Welsh bard went singing / To the grave of flames, / For they screamed and howled: / ‘Long live King Edward.” Férfiaknak való (Lit. It Is For Men) resembles a wall-mounted image, a profane memorial plaque that in its layout evokes memorial plaques, but its frames resemble barbed wire, representing a shocking poetic game.

Most of the poems constitute the poetical essence, extract, condensation, concentrate, of the dictatorship, depicting tableau-like scenes of the continued existence of former Securitate officers, interrogators, and members of the ‘thought police’, furious rewritings, falsifications, and denials of things once occurred and of things that have passed. The forms are varied: epigrammatic jabs, poetic pamphlets, stylised narrative texts, long-form recollections, and demythologised, depoetised personal memories stripped of their former tormenting qualities. These are distanced, hard-edged narratives, marked by an elevated, bird’s-eye perspective, yet they are disturbingly vivid and uncomfortably intimate, often contain stories that frequently develop along an extended narrative arc, and neither irony nor self-diminution can lessen the severity of the judgements. The poet surveys the world’s darker and brighter aspects from a position of cool intellectual distance, everything “that exists, every necessity, and everything out there / trembling in the June heat” (Előérzet. A bazsarózsák szétszedése [lit. Premonition. Taking the Peonies Apart]). What is called to account is not only social and communal crimes, the sins and moral failings arising among them, but also human frailties: self-appointed poetic geniuses, Europhiliacs dabbling in -isms, or compatriots nurturing little volcanoes within their chests, all come under the scrutiny of his pen. Király plays magnificently with stylistic elements, poetic forms, and tonal qualities; yet it is precisely this sharply ironic mode of address, this masterly lightness, which creates the illusion of detachment from things, and together with the ‘everyday words’, this attests to the unforgettable, ineluctable nature of his memories. He employs flawless, pure rhymes, at times clusters of rhymes, with meticulous prosodic care. In essence, the poem A „C” korszak bája (lit. The Charm of the “C” Era [a reference to the Nicolae Ceaușescu era]); is a propagandistic song, full of perfect rhymes, superb forced rhymes, and Chastushka-style rhymes [a traditional musical genre of short Russian humorous folk song], in which, as a further ironic twist, the poet encrypts the dictator’s name in a footnote, even though this conspiratorial act has become absurdly anachronistic (‘C’ refers to the speech-impaired dictator).

In his above-mentioned review, Lajos Szakolczay writes that this “master of language had to let a great many things perish in order for absence to become a value-generating concept”. And that the poet “strips the Hungarian language bare using privative suffixes, and by means of inventive (metaphorical) word-linking, drives the language almost into a realm beyond gibberish”, but he is also able to hint at forgiveness and at power that arises from self-assurance.

The truth may be inferred from what Zhang Wei of Pazhga and Sărățeni says in the evening meadow: “LET THERE BE AN END TO WAR / I bury my weapon / LET THE ENEMY GO HOME / and the rice will grow”. This constitutes a more condensed and more substantial reworking of an earlier serene apocalyptic vision, which suggested that within the private sphere of the poet, the repair of a rooftop was far more significant than the prophecy of total annihilation; however, in the new version, the old master’s message has become universal and is suggestive of forgiveness.

Yet perhaps this intimated attitude is not forgiveness, but rather the contempt of a person who sees and understands everything, and, with a detached superiority, says, I know what you were like, I know what you did back then, what you are doing now, and what you will do, and there is no forgiveness, irony permits the offences of the guilty to be overlooked, but not to be forgiven. There are simply other matters of greater importance: the roof, the sheds, the rice. Király himself seeks to set the world in order: “I write myself a world war / and I win it” (Quadriga-I.), and he increasingly works this through in dialogue with himself, wearing different masks, considering the things that happened, that are happening, and that will happen. It is as if he were writing dry yet melancholy-tinged late poems on a house stairway, among peonies, “listening inwardly for secret sounds” (Tisztelgő [lit. Paying Homage]). “These poems reveal the shadings of human attitudes in situations of liminality” (Éva Farkas-Welmann, Király László költészetének dallama [lit. The Melody of László Király’s Poetry], Magyar Idők, 15 December 2015).

By selecting lines from the ‘new-old’ poems of his most recent volume to date, The Melody of the Bethlen Bastion, and placing these lines one after the other, the reader may assemble a gentle yet wise parainesis, a form of self-admonition, a trajectory of fate, a timeline, a testament, an inventory of the inner world’s reordering: “an old-fashioned afternoon”; “in an old cinema”; “an old, yet living afternoon”; “how hard it was to grow accustomed to silence”; “How hard – weighting towards death – / the body became in the compulsory silence / that fell upon it”; “what a perfect art this is, / dancing barefoot in the frost”; “Are we departing, or are we arriving?”; “is the vein-straining concentration / of thought and attention worth it”; “We believed in something”; “A great silence is constantly in preparation”; “Wordlessly, the word truly ebbs away”; “invisible-inaudible, inconceivable / memories are cast in bronze”; “youth is radiant, blinding”; “Do not take with you skywards / your sniggering, crooked benefactors”; “Alone, Chang. Repeat it: / – A-lone”; “The present / merely piles up, / crowds together blindly – / yet is already harmless, / with all its filth”; “AT THE SEA / AT THE LAKE / AT THE WELL / AT GOD’S IMAGE / TO STARE / PERSISTENTLY / DO NOT CEASE”; “I stop the old, clock at home – / it should measure time no longer.” “It just appears: – past, not reality. / Just something. Invention. Imagination. Dream.”; “The body collapses; perhaps / it does not happen, does not happen, perhaps – / time hums encouragingly, hope.”

[2016]