1 The Universal Cultural Background of Poetic Expression
Although she composed a substantial body of poems addressing her own era (Ahogy az élet árad [lit. As Life Flows], Arcok, lovak, félrevert harangok [lit. Faces, Horses, Warning Bells], Kié ma itt a város [lit. Whose City Is This Today?], Barbaro), the centre of Anna Kiss’s oeuvre includes works that integrate the civilisational legacies of earlier periods with the archaic and folk culture. Moreover, these works represent the most significant features of the striking originality of her poetic world.
Within European culture, from the Renaissance onwards, a new attitude has emerged with increasing force. This attitude is oriented towards historical retrospection, and entails a conscious aspiration to the artistic reconstruction of past worlds. Beyond the exploration of oral (or written) traditions and artistic imitation, such reconstruction has truly gained momentum in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, first through the invention of photography and the moving image, and later through the development and refinement of computer technologies. With the aid of these tools, following, among other precedents, the historical novels of Romanticism and the costume dramas of the twentieth century, scholars have been able to reconstruct, with varying degrees of accuracy, the major battles, dwelling places, and diverse cultural traces associated with the earliest phases of human history. An ever-growing number of authentic material and immaterial remains can thus be incorporated into such reconstructions.
At the same time, archaic humans were also shaped by mental frameworks. Gaining access to their inner world is far more difficult than approaching material remains. Nevertheless, a method has been established, which includes a reconstruction process based on the myths of so-called primitive peoples, on the analogies of the myths, as well as on the cultural practices and belief systems that may be inferred from artefacts. However, alongside scholarly knowledge, reconstructing modes of operation requires creative work that draws on both the material and immaterial legacy. This process may be likened to a reconstruction process in which an expert sculptor fashions the face of a prehistoric human on the basis of bone fragments.
At its deepest level, Anna Kiss’s poetry constitutes an ambitious attempt to re-create earlier stages of human existence at the level of consciousness.
2 The Fundamental Characteristics of the Poetic World
Fundamentally, Anna Kiss’s poetry is engaged in the creation of imagined worlds and in peopling them. She reintroduces the worldviews of bygone eras into the sphere of present poetic evidences, constructing seemingly authentic pseudo-worldviews and human relations. These worlds are saturated with scenes of everyday life and with forms of quasi-consciousness, which are grounded in rich artistic associations and a profound scholarly engagement, and are able to merge seamlessly, and with considerable plausibility, into the abandoned temporal horizons they evoke. In this way, the author brings into being a world presented as authentic: a populated, stylised, pseudo-archaic, folkloric, and mythical realm, assembled from a wide range of historical and material sources, coherently organised into a unified spatial construct, and drawing on diverse folkloric and archaic traditions. Its constituent elements abound in concrete source materials, primary archaic and folkloric relics, as well as in the magical and mythological features that intersect with them. Moreover, this world is permeated by forms of mental and motoric reflections, imbued with the reality and knowledge of the historical periods invoked, and these reflections shape the actions of the author’s beings, from play and acts of enchantment to processes of labour and the very construction of worlds. Drawing on her linguistic, psychological, historical, and belief-system-related knowledge, the author constructs a realm whose temporal boundaries extend backwards from the nineteenth century, through the Renaissance and the Middle Ages, to the realm of primordial poetry, and which, in almost its full chronological sweep, encompasses the formation of the folk and everyday mental structures of the European individual. Anna Kiss inhabits, traverses, and documents this realm, discovered in the past yet created by herself, like an early twentieth-century explorer or traveller, producing in her poems photographs, reports, documentary records, lyrical pieces, and socio-photographic sketches, through which she illustrates and brings to light the fuller inner life of this world.
3 Antecedents and Related Endeavours in Hungarian and World Literature
With regard to the elevation of folk beliefs, customs, superstitions, and ritual events into literature, Anna Kiss’s most important predecessors, listed here in chronological order and with an indication of the directions of her intellectual orientations, include Péter Bornemisza (Ördögi kísértetek [lit. Demonic Apparitions]), János Arany’s ballads rooted in folkloric heritage, Endre Ady (Özvegy legények tánca [lit. The Dance of Widowed Lads], Lelkek a pányván [Tethered Souls]), István Sinka’s poems shaped by a worldview rooted in folk belief and magic (Látták lúd képében szállni [lit. She Was Seen Flying in the Shape of a Goose], Anyóka kecskén lovagolt [lit. The Old Woman Rode a Goat]), as well as József Erdélyi, Attila József, and Sándor Weöres, who likewise drew on these sources. With regard to Finno-Ugric orientations, Kiss did not directly rely on the Kalevala, but rather on Hungarian translations of the cultic and folk texts of the smaller Finno-Ugric peoples. She also received important impulses from Pál Gulyás’s theoretical work (Út a Kalevalához [lit. The Path to the Kalevala]), from the writings of István Kormos, and from the works of László Nagy and Ferenc Juhász. It is evident that across her oeuvre, numerous linguistic and imagistic motifs are interwoven into Anna Kiss’s writings from the Finno-Ugric folk-poetry translations of Géza Képes and others (including her contemporaries István Ágh, István Bella, Ferenc Buda, Zsuzsa Rab, and Dezső Tandori), as well as from the adaptations of so-called primitive and tribal poetry by other authors, such as Sándor Rákos (Táncol a hullámsapkás tenger [lit. The Wave-Capped Sea Dances]), József Tornai (Boldog látomások. A világ törzsi költészete [lit. Joyful Visions: The Tribal Poetry of the World]), Anna Bede, and László Lőrincz. Certain works by contemporary oeuvres that tentatively move in this same conceptual direction, yet do not reach the same depths of the archaic (József Utassy, József Ratkó, Ferenc Buda, László Kalász, Zoltán Szöllősi), along with scholarly (ethnographic, literary-historical, and historical) writings that entered the poet’s intellectual horizon, may also have provided fundamental motivational impulses for her poetic experiments.
From world literature, historical novels, or novels containing a pronounced historical layer, which contemplate the fate of a particular people or of humanity as a whole applying a cultural-anthropological approach (for example, the prose of Miguel Ángel Asturias, Chingiz Aitmatov, and Gabriel García Márquez) may likewise exerted a strong influence on her oeuvre. Folklore and its scholarly traditions also had a significant impact on Anna Kiss’s poetry. The continuous presence of this secondary anthropological repertoire can be clearly traced throughout her work.
4 The Novelty of Anna Kiss’s Integration of the Archaic and Folklore in Contemporary Poetry
Almost all of Anna Kiss’s predecessors and twentieth and twenty-first century contemporaries rewrite, appropriate, and integrate the signs of folklore and of earlier cultural legacies by situating them along the axis of the present, or by viewing them from the perspective of the present moment. In the lyric poetry of László Nagy, Ferenc Juhász, and later István Ágh, István Bella, József Ratkó, László Kalász, Zoltán Szöllősi, and József Utassy, it is a shared feature that the focus of the poetic gaze searching for folklore remains, save for a few exceptions, firmly anchored in the present. The direction of transformation consistently targets the present world: the vectors uncovered at deeper levels ultimately point back towards the present within the poetic constructions.
By contrast, when Anna Kiss turns to the archaic and folklore as a poetic foundation, she seeks out and further modulates the “original” poetic position itself. She relocates the human status of the poetic subject to an arbitrary point within that ‘invisible’, yet nevertheless, both physiologically and psychologically, co-present ‘residual’ realm of the past, and has the subject create a work there, transposing the present role of self into the past (Szelíd lánygyermekecske [lit. Gentle Little Girl], Világszép Orsolya [lit. Orsolya, Fairest in the World], Égjáró [lit. Sky-Walker], etc.). Although this shift of emphasis is imaginary in nature and constitutes ‘only’ the articulation of a poetic role, since the twentieth- and twenty-first-century human being is irrevocably inscribed into the archaic persona through language and vision. This position, at once exceptional and radical, separates the author’s world, in its principal features, from present society and history; at the same time, it affords an extraordinary degree of freedom and possibility for the creative re-creation of the past, and within it above all of human consciousness (modes of thought, systems of belief, patterns of behaviour, and so forth). One of the most significant outcomes is the poetic reconstruction of archaic worldviews and psychic operations, a process that, in its basic character, is an exploratory process with significant value, running parallel to the anthropological and biological explorations directed towards the historical past. What could previously be inferred only indirectly is thus carried over by Anna Kiss into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as a re-created poetic totality.
In contrast to her contemporaries who interpret archaism and the past through the lens of the present, Anna Kiss transfers this interpretative and constructive position into past worlds in such a way that, within historical periods dating back centuries, and at times even millennia, she reconstructs not the myth or folklore, but the personality living within the myth and folklore and the historical psyche. In line with the perceptual order and consciousness of a once-living personality, absorbed into her own poetic pupil, she bends, blends, assembles, and manipulates the elements of folklore, belief-systems, knowledge, and praxis, remaining governed from the present in physical terms, yet, regarding psychological and poetic intent, staying within the past (Vízszintes szélben [lit. In a Horizontal Wind], Citerákra [lit. To Zithers], Ej, homálya [lit. Oh, Its Dimness], etc.). From the perspective of authorship, the resulting literary work thus positions Anna Kiss as a renative personality, one that is reborn, constructing and reconstructing a human counterpart of herself within particular epochs of the distant past. In terms of selection, combination, and language, this gives rise to an anaphoric principle of artistic existence. Insofar as her integration of folklore engages with myth, it is not a re-mythologisation, as in the case of László Nagy and, in part, Ferenc Juhász or Sándor Kányádi, nor is it a cataphoric integration, found among her immediate contemporaries. In their works, mythological principles, schemes, and contents arise from the intention to elevate the myth into the present and to model the present through it. By contrast, in Anna Kiss’s poetry, the mode of myth-shaping is backward-oriented in time and oriented towards fulfilment, and rethinks the very genesis of myth itself, constituting a ‘pre-’ mythologising poetic construction. Anna Kiss does not create intertexts between temporal strata; rather, she seeks to reconstruct the possible pretexts that give rise to poetry and to contemporary world-consciousness. Rather than presenting time-relations driven by present interests and flashing between distant poles of history, she situates her perspective within a clearly delimited historical threshold, and within it reveals, through the filtration of actions and psychic processes into the poetic, the specific anthropological condition of the human being at a given moment. Across these temporal expanses, her exploratory trajectory retreats as far back as the very genesis of human existence (A nagy madár [lit. The Great Bird], Égjáró [lit. Sky-Walker]). Amid her serious, humorous, and dramatic modes of play, her fundamental aim is to open her readers’ gaze onto forms of human thought, consciousness, and inner life, along with modes of historical perception, deeply permeated by myth, magic, superstition, and the worldview of the given era (Kordészínház [lit. Cart Theatre], A kaszás [lit. The Reaper], Kereplőkre [lit. To Rattles], Teremtés [lit. Creation], etc.).
Thus, it is the point of origin in cultural anthropology that most deeply engages Anna Kiss; she comes to cherish this time and the terrain thereby reached to such an extent that, as in her other works, she remains there, within the epochs of beginnings, with her whole being. In the field of poetry and culture, with respect to the period she has traversed, she acts much like those ethnographers who grew profoundly attached to the peoples they studied and who, guided by this attraction, returned time and again, or ultimately for good, to the people they glimpsed at various points of space and time, settling among them. Her intellectual movements towards distant times, continents, and human communities revives the acts of Gauguin, Albert Schweitzer, and Vilmos Diószegi.
5 The Poetic Cosmos of the Works
Despite several unsettling features, Anna Kiss’s universe is neither hostile to humanity, nor without an owner or abandoned, nor does it constitute an anti-cosmos; rather, it appears as a ‘totality yet to be completed’ by creative forces and processes. The ultimate completion of this cosmos, including its tailoring to the human condition, also requires, ought to require, human participation, a task at which humanity has been continually striving throughout the entire history. At their deepest, philosophically inflected level, the conceptual and poetic mirrors of this endeavour are Anna Kiss’s poems. Across macro-, meso-, and microcosmic levels, they vividly present the more promising attempts, the stumbling, the misdirected actions that once again result in incompletion, the failures and distortions, and, at times, achievements of a larger scope. At the most comprehensive level, the entirety of Anna Kiss’s oeuvre may be described as a sequence of poetic experiments, and at times acts of world-making, that traverse, and often interconnect, different periods of history. Although in its outward form this poetic world appears as literature, it is not only literature, but also anthropological reconstruction, philosophy, and a form of play that imitates the trials of creation. The chaos or semi-chaos surging behind the works (that is, behind creation oriented towards something that is more perfect), and the semi-cosmos that swirls behind, and repeatedly breaks through, the cosmos desired or imagined in ideas, are the products and existential spaces of human will and action striving to transcend the state of incompletion. In Anna Kiss’s works, humanity continuously imitates, extends, copies, and seeks to complete creation; it toys with it and provokes it, and in the process, despite periodic or merely perceived ‘successes’, commits countless errors (To Rattles, Világok [lit. Worlds], Fabábu [lit. Wooden Puppet], Kéz [lit. Hand]). The macro- and microcosmos, and the society inhabiting them, as well as the other human being or even the ‘I’ itself (the personality placed at the poetic point of focus), stubbornly and repeatedly deviate from, or slip out of, the schemata of those models of creative intention that are imagined as flawless or that momentarily emerge within the frameworks of human attempts, and thus fulfil the will only partially, or not at all. For this reason, in Anna Kiss’s works, the universe itself, as a mirror of the human, continually grimaces back at humanity and responds with ironic retorts, while at the same time presenting ever new challenges.
6 The ‘Feminine’ Gaze of Anthropological Synthesis
Despite its orientation towards tradition, Anna Kiss’s poetry could not have been come into being without the expansiveness of the present, which is indispensable for the reception of the past. In her works, time travel therefore always has a dual intellectual nature. On the one hand, the time traveller is Anna Kiss herself, a person of the present; on the other, it is the women, the ‘people’, and the children of those historical periods whom she embraces within a history rolled forward through time. Her anthropological synthesis thus grows into poetry from two distinct temporal zones, embedding within itself the imagination, myths, beliefs, and emotions, in short, the fuller consciousness, of people of the past, which she is able to access only from the present. Moreover, the characters placed in the past are not sent merely into the spatial and material frameworks of historical time, but also into the terrains of the psyche. This anthropological synthesis navigates the shared sources of psychology, anthropology, civilisational knowledge, folklore and mythology, and the universal foundations of human nature. With this fuller desire for time in her gaze, the author pursues the past while simultaneously moving within the present, and, in the domains of poetic cognition, she is far ahead of her own present. For this reason, Anna Kiss is not merely a poet, but also a psychological anthropologist. She illuminates the tradition she has explored through the universal radiance of femininity, not by foregrounding the political meanings of feminism or its provocative and confrontational gestures, but by articulating, in her comprehensive perception of the world, the features of ‘the woman’ as such (Lepkelovas [lit. Butterfly Rider], Virrasztalak [lit. I Keep Vigil Over You], Éjszaka [lit. Night], kéktollú [lit. blue-feathered]). Moreover, by multiplying herself and her perspective, in her poems, longer poetic works, dramatic plays, and novels, many of her protagonists are women.
7. Historical Source Fields and Conquered Times in the Course of Her Career
Considered in the chronological sequence of her career, the source fields that shape the essential form of Anna Kiss’s poetry, are, first, the contemporary Hungarian village, then the Hungarian and European medieval village and (in part, in a later phase) city, followed by the ancient Finno-Ugric world, and more recently the archaic memory domains of Asia and the Americas. Initially, it is the world of the village that becomes saturated with magic and myth; then later, from the volume Feketegyűrű (lit. Black Ring, 1974) onwards, as stated in the book’s dedication, “the city has appeared in her imaginative world, specifically the medieval city that is permeated by tales and superstitions.” For example, in the work entitled Disputa [lit. Dispute], she reconstructs a medieval city evolving towards the Renaissance, builds its scenography, and even names its streets, stairways, and inn (Kakukk-lépcső [lit. Cuckoo Stairway], Fogadó a selyembogárhoz [lit. Inn to the Silkworm], Zsizsik utcza [lit. Weevil Street], A Hat Czéh Irodája [lit. The Office of the Six Guilds], Templomocska [lit. Little Church]).
This archaic and folkloric realm, which Anna Kiss simultaneously reveals and peoples, has its own distinctive internal chronological structure, an inner ‘history’, and a spatial extension of its own. Its chronology is shaped by the ages of magical myth-making, the period of nomadism, the European Middle Ages, and the more recent epochs that preserve a strong folkloric consciousness, together with the fragments of consciousness associated with these periods. Spatially, the limes of the poet’s realm extend beyond Europe primarily towards the living spaces of the Finno-Ugric peoples, and later towards Asia in its entirety (Régi, új álomkeresők [lit. Old and New Dream-Seekers], Kelta, hun bronzüstök [lit. Celtic and Hun Bronze Cauldrons], De értjük-e egymást? Kik vagyunk mi, népek? [lit. But Do We Understand Each Another? Who Are We, Peoples?]). In her more recent poetry, the exploration of the ethnographic regions of the Americas has become a defining feature (A Sámán harmadik kérdése [lit. The Shaman’s Third Question], Indiánok naptánca [lit. Sun Dance of the Natives], Az ötödik álom [lit. The Fifth Dream], Indián horoszkóp [lit. Native Horoscope]). She is even capable of reviving transcontinental folkloric universals in a single work (Ősök bárkái a nappal [lit. The Arks of the Ancestors With the Sun]).
Although her oeuvre unfolds in a linear manner, motifs, and at times even passages, from earlier volumes are gradually incorporated into later ones. The organisation of all her works into a collected volume (Gyolcs [lit. Linen Cloth], 2014) clearly attests that the author does not wish to present the values of her career segmented to periods, but rather conceives them in a ‘block-like’ formation, as an interwoven, network-like, and constructed whole. Her children’s books, which at a fundamental level reflect the motifs and methods related to the core elements of her poetry, may be understood as minor planets of this block-like world.
By orienting the Orphic model at times towards archaic folk tradition, at others towards a primitive worldview, mythology, more direct forms of folk poetry, or the small-scale, everyday consciousness of people who lived centuries ago, Anna Kiss settles into a virtual world in which she feels at ease with her whole human being. However, the past she retrieves, like a universal hand rising from the depths of history, even within this esoterically charged space and time, continually offers intermittently flaring vectors and analogical crystalline points of connection to the present. Anna Kiss attends simultaneously to three temporal dimensions, even though she appears to interpret only the time left behind. The harmonisation of the present with the currents of the past is most powerfully realised in her self-stylising or persona poems, which for the most part depict particular states of the human soul or a will to interpret the world, casting arcs of light towards the human present from distances of five hundred, five thousand, or even ten thousand years (Embersólyom [lit. Man-Falcon], In a Horizontal Wind).
8. Reconstructive Poetics and Its Variants
The innermost mode of formation and procedure through which Anna Kiss generates distinctive compositional complexes, and new genre-theoretical complexes bends her fundamentally lyrical poetics at times towards a more personal lyricism (Halhatatlan [lit. Immortal], Enyéim [lit. Mine], Kiáltó madár nyomában [lit. In the Wake of a Crying Bird]), at other times towards epic narration (Szarvaskígyó meg liliom a város címeréből [lit. Stag-Serpent and Lily From the City’s Coat of Arms], Babonák falu ördöge [lit. The Devil of the Village of Superstitions], Sarkantyúcsillag [lit. Spur Star]), or towards drama (the pieces of To Rattles and Cart Theatre). Ultimately grounded in narrative genres, the carrier of consciousness that elementally expresses the worldview to be presented or revealed becomes magnetised by the concepts of the allegorical situation and the dramatised narrative. In her works, the relative proportions of these three fundamental qualities determine the generic character and the dominant genre profile that lie beneath the pervasive lyricisation. The author could find numerous precedents within Hungarian poetry in the works of poets who shaped their writing in response to these complex demands: the works of Attila József (Kings of Bethlehem), Sándor Weöres (Vásári kikiáltó [lit. The Market Crier]), and László Nagy (Karikáznak az ördögök [lit. The Devils Are Whirling]) are replete with realisations of the aforementioned poetic strategies. However, immersing in the historical past, Anna Kiss goes beyond all of them in her genre-enriching application of this threefold component system. By blending, in varying proportions, the objective (epic), dramatising, and subjective (lyrical) elements of poetic figure, situation, and story, she creates archaically inflected works that construct distinct worlds and give rise to a broad range of genre variants. These include, among others, imitated or pseudo-myths (Medveének [lit. Bear Song], Kozmikus falvédő [lit. Cosmic Wall Hanging]); dramatically choreographed micro- or macro-narratives (Históriások [lit. Chroniclers], Járatlanok [lit. Untrodden]); magical or mythic short prose rooted in folk life (Nepomuk, Illetlenek [lit. The Unseemly]); and the self-stylising or objectified incantatory songs (Embersólyom [lit. Man-Falcon], Táncnóta [lit. Dance Song], Égjáró [lit. Sky-Walker]). Around the poetic figure, the situation, and the story, according to varying internal proportions, Anna Kiss constructs a mythic, magical, and folkloric atmosphere, together with a corresponding psychological situation. A characteristic example of her aspiration towards genre syntheses arising from compositional procedures is the book Az úrnő ezüst ujja (lit. The Silver Finger of the Lady). In this ‘verse novel’, from a generic perspective, Kiss Anna creates a historical novel in verse set in the age of nomadism and framed within a lyricised novel of consciousness; at the same time, the work incorporates elements of sociography, autobiography, documentary material, and personal confession. Writing from within the third millennium, and functioning as a retrospective and empathetic medium, the author in this fiction records a complete nomadic world within the framework of verse epic, and in the course of this documentation, at times she imitates textual formations of archaic proto-lyricism that verge on breaking free from everyday existence and epic narration. Furthermore, owing to its rigorous immersion in the historical period, the work is a rich and synthesising repository of Hungarian and Finno-Ugric folklore, belief systems, ritual choreography, and other nomadic cultural elements, going beyond the equally attentive practice of period authenticity focused on the everyday practices of life and the faithful description of elements embedded in the praxis of popular life at the time. In relation to the novelistic composition, femininity is once again a defining principle: in the work, everything is organised around the female protagonist. Within the consciousness of the central figure, similarly to the historical figures across the oeuvre, the everyday (the practical) and the experiential dimension of belief (including its primary ‘philosophical’ layer), and historical consciousness are layered upon one another.
In the past ‘worlds’ she depicts, Anna Kiss never places at the centre the worldview of the ruling, hegemonic, ‘scholarly’, doctrinal, or otherwise dominant minds of the period; instead, she foregrounds the consciousness of people living their everyday lives, individuals who did not possess or failed to possess a comprehensive understanding of their age, perceiving it from below or from oblique angles. In other words, she opens up the consciousness of ordinary people (the ‘folk’ consciousness), among other contexts, in the age of nomadism, in the Árpádian period, and in the world of the late medieval, and later Renaissance, small town, as well as that in the village preserving archaic traditional motifs. This orientation is also signalled by the occupational designations of her dramatic figures (Piroska girl; shoemaker and dream-visionary Seraph; swineherd Michael; Cart-driver man, and others). It is not kings, learned humanists, military leaders, or politicians who populate the settings of her works, even if such figures occasionally appear by way of reference, but rather ‘ordinary people’: chimney sweeps, basket-weavers, bonesetters, doll-makers, weaponsmiths, midwifes, nomadic wives (see, for example, Továbbadom [lit. I Pass It On], Fohász [lit. Prayer]).
By means of this method and poetic model, moving backwards in chronology, Anna Kiss fully reconfigures the temporal structure of the folk-inspired and folklorising tradition (folk surrealism, the ‘Bartókian’ model). Through poetic magnets cast into the distant past, she brings into view bodies of knowledge concerning folk life and folk psychology, together with their entire associative systems, while at the same time inscribing into these reconstructions the analytical and playful gaze of the contemporary human subject.
9. Forms of the Individual-as-humanity and Genre Variants
In order to apprehend this world with the greatest possible authenticity and with psychological credibility, Anna Kiss constantly assumes historical personae, that is, she creates archaic and folkloric roles rooted in distant pasts. She herself becomes the archaic or nomadic chronicler, the bard, the charmer, the shaman, the táltos [a figure in Hungarian mythology, a person with supernatural power similar to a shaman], the world-creating hero, the demon, the folk healer, the witch, the mythical hero, the culture hero, the adept of magical practices, the poor man living within the network of enchantments and related hidden forces, the garabonciás [a character in Hungarian mythology, a type of sorcerer or itinerant charlatan endowed with diabolical powers, among them the ability to conjure storms], or an animal figure endowed with magical inspiration. Beyond self-stylisation, yet as integral elements of her own creative poetic world, these characters are also created as second- and third-person presences within genres permeated partly by epic and partly by dramatic features, though fundamentally poetic in nature.
The individual-as-humanity constructed by the poet thus takes shape as a composite of a multitude of distinct human roles, positioned at widely differing points in space and time. This form of human consciousness, permeated by mythic awareness, shamanic, artisanal, and demiurgic traits, as well as by magic and superstition, which the author evokes in her poetry and assembles within herself as a creative subject, is generated through the staging of human consciousnesses dispersed across history. The modes of perception summoned from these roles intersect across the poems of Anna Kiss, radiating the historically antecedent human time. These creative radiations, which give rise to a wide variety of poetic forms and construct the structure of past time from layered and cumulative, yet also chronologically orderable, montages of temporal segments, together with the spatial clusters or smaller units attached to them, therefore entail a corresponding demand for generic complexity. With regard to Anna Kiss’s heroes, evoked in stylised or in realist registers, at times speculating, acting, and thinking in the manner of ordinary people, at times clumsy, stumbling, and faltering, at others assuming dramatic, magical, or heroic roles, it is often exceedingly difficult to determine with certainty whether these heroes are moving within a lyric poem, a play, a poetic sequence, a verse novel, an imitated stage play, a farce, or some other genre, or at the intersections of several genres. Consequently, Anna Kiss’s poetry can scarcely be measured by the concept of linear time operative in traditional epic and dramaturgy: its imagistic and conceptual world repeatedly shatters the clocks governed by Newtonian physics. Instead of temporal progression or forward movement, her works are far more characterised by the backward movement of time, its vibration, stasis and hesitation, its collapse, network-like organisation, the intermingling of its fragments, or their condensation. The title of her collected volume A másik idő (lit. The Other Time) encapsulates these creative intentions with particular precision. The texture of Anna Kiss’s poetic and temporal weaving demonstrates the spatiality of time and its anthropologised (or anthropologisable) aspect. The central creative role is that of the pearl-diver who retrieves anthropological contents and transposes them into poetry, of the time-travelling poetic subject encountered at the most diverse and unexpected points, and of the duplicable self that exists simultaneously in the present and in the past.
Anna Kiss possesses extensive knowledge of this world in both ethnographic and anthropological terms. Throughout her entire oeuvre, alongside the poet seeking orientation, a fervent scholarly engagement with the segments of the past, their memories, and their fragmentary remains is also evident. Among other things, her works abound in objects, belief systems, worldviews, characteristic illnesses, and practical procedures of the past. In her use of language and imagery, the knowledge derived from scholarly and specialist studies related to this field is likewise reflected. Above all, the poet demonstrates an outstanding familiarity with the entire textual corpus of Hungarian folklore, including ritual practices and the texts that exist exclusively in conjunction with them. She is thoroughly familiar with laments, incantations, ritual texts, children’s games, and other belief-related or ritual forms. She is also well versed in the world of archaic myths and epics, and possesses an exceptionally detailed knowledge of Finno-Ugric folk poetry. These genres are incorporated into her poems through transformations that at times take the form of imitation, at others of creative reworking, stylisation, or mythic expansion. Accordingly, her characteristic genre forms include the stylised pseudo-folk song, the ‘Bartókian song’ (Ítélkező [lit. Judging], Setét nagy rózsa árnyék [lit. Great Dark Shadow of the Rose], Dance Song); genre scenes imbued with folk or archaic folklore (Kendersziget [lit. Hemp Island], Sötétpej ló [lit. Dark Bay Horse], Hazug lúd [lit. The Lying Goose]); the re-created, mythicised epic or epic fragment (Medveének [lit. Bear Song], Dödö dödö, Tovább! [lit. Onward]); the condensed and abstracting archaic-philosophical poem (Jel-folyam [lit. Flow of Signs], Jelenések [lit. Revelations]); the mythic poem of existence (Great Bird, Sky-Walker, Cosmic Wall-Hanging); and a wide range of synthetic, hybrid genre variants composed through dramatic-epic structures that also incorporate elements of puppet theatre and folk performance (Cicerbita nimfa [lit. Cicerbita Nymph], Bábos Dániel [lit. Dániel the Puppeteer], Kásaevők [lit. Porridge-Eaters]). Further characteristic forms include the mythic-folk stage play (Chroniclers, Untrodden), as well as stylised compositions open to multiple generic orientations (Az ásító róka dombja [lit. The Hill of the Yawning Fox], Orsolya, Fairest in the World). Her longer poems of archaic-folkloristic conception often bring into view the fragments, insertions, choreographic elements, or schematic outlines, of an imagined and reconstructed grand myth (Onward, Túl a sakktáblán [lit. Beyond the Chessboard]). A paradigmatic example of this mode is her well-known work Bear Song, built upon a well-known Finno-Ugric motif.
In addition, the world of Anna Kiss can often be likened to an anthropological theatre or puppet theatre staged retrogressively in time, set within abandoned phases of history, and operating on a microcosmic or macrocosmic scale. In this theatre, she is the director, while her transfigured personality variants (or projections of her states of mind and knowledge) constitute the majority of the characters on stage. She is at once the choreographer, the conductor, and the set designer of these poetic cosmoses. In her works, by continually rearranging the elements of a large, mutable mosaic system, she strives towards a Renaissance-type ideal of totality. The psychological situations persistently drawn into her works articulate fundamental human emotions and states, often within dual frameworks, setting grief against pain (Revelations); exclusion against joie de vivre (The Great Bird); lamentation against glorification (Most légy! [lit. Be Now]); and a free consciousness and will to freedom against captivity (Táltos bika [lit. Táltos Bull]). The more closed or shorter lyric pieces, which integrate folklore (Judging) and, after the poet’s early period, as foundational models of the oeuvre, function at times develop towards the mythical, at others towards epic or dramatic genre scenes, and subsequently expand into micro-dramas, full dramas, or genres with an epic orientation, or transform into the listed models, substantially expanding and multiplying the range of Anna Kiss’s genres (Átváltozások [lit. Transformations], Négyes oltár [lit. Fourfold Altar], Visszatérő [lit. The Returning One], Revelations).
For example, Revelations is a work that draws on multiple folkloric forms: the flower song, the ballad, the lament, the complaint song, the folk song, and the folk beliefs that shine through them. The poem entitled The Returning One is a stylised work of archaic atmosphere, interwoven with medieval and Renaissance motifs and features, and richly imbued with balladic features. In the section entitled Játék (lit. Play) of Fourfold Altar, one of Anna Kiss’s recurring themes, the play with creation itself, takes on a constructed form: “Slowly you turn the sky from your left hand to your right.”
Among her longer works with an epic orientation, the motivic antecedents of The Great Bird can be found partly in the Kalevala, in particular in the notions of the world-creating bird, and partly in folk songs, in the motif of the bird calling to its mate. The work as a whole explores the origin of things and, through them, the beginnings of concepts. Employing the characteristic devices of myth-making, the poem gives form to the origins of human-bird existence, and of female existence, and bears pronounced zoomorphic and theriomorphic features. A work driven by a similar poetic project, entitled Cosmic Wall Hanging, in its precise structure, effectively transcribes a sequence of folk weaving patterns into a poem. Through these singular, time-traversing works, Anna Kiss almost creates, or rather substitutes for, the missing individual pieces of Hungarian-language archaic poetry that have not survived (preserved only in fragmentary form). Through her poetry, certain sections or fields of the textual and literary space related to the early forms of Hungarian language, long remaining as a void, are continuously refilled and supplemented, following the works of János Arany, Béla Vikár, János Kodolányi, Gyula Illyés, Sándor Weöres, László Nagy, and István Kormos.
10. The Crux of Her Significance
The poet’s distinctive contribution to the integration of folklore and archaism into Hungarian poetry is of exceptional value. By reinterpreting the ‘Bartókian’ model, concurrently with Domokos Szilágyi, she opens up new horizons for the poetic assimilation of archaic and folk culture. The essence of this approach lies in the fact that she does not assimilate folkloric codes into a contemporary authorial perspective and language; rather, by elevating these codes into the epistemological horizon of the present, she re-assimilates them. In other words, instead of incorporating these codes into frameworks of understanding and modelling directed towards the human and social contents of the present, in a manner reminiscent of the traditional procedures of the ‘Bartókian’ model, she repositions them, starting from the epistemic standpoint of the present, within an inferred state of consciousness. Anna Kiss identifies the sites for the re-creation of this world at various points in history: in the Middle Ages, in the period of the migrations of peoples, or in prehistory. At once reconstructed and created, this world primarily refracts into the present through anthropological analogies.
Within the folklore-derived and archaic domains she retrieves from antiquity, Anna Kiss often seeks out more unsettling layers and signs that diverge from the traditional ‘Bartókian’ model. She turns to pagan-era beliefs and superstitions, to the memories of witchcraft, to the deeds of ghosts and their psychological effects, to the fragments of totemic belief, and to a bizarre or oppressive legacy evocative of a syncretism between human, animal, and plant existence (Lepkelovas, [lit. Butterfly Rider], Rókák a vetésben [lit. Foxes Among the Crops], Kéz [lit. A Hand]). Despite their playfulness, in her works, the elements of cosmos-making inherited from archaic myth frequently falter and erupt, while the harmonising proportions formed within them are displaced from their original purposes. Through folklore and archaic experience alike, the poet conveys a world and a set of mental motifs that, though oriented towards the ever-projected future of civilisation, remain as yet unformed, charged with chaotic background forces, and fundamentally ‘imperfect’. In the world brought into view in this manner, human striving may become distorted, turn grotesque or paradoxical, or remain unfinished. From this archaic, folkloric source of motifs and world-images, malevolent forces, uncontrollable instincts, forms of magic that resist interpretation, as well as pain and tension also surge forth, and this ungovernable world for the most part belongs to demons, witches, and devils (Setét malom [lit. Dark Mill], In a Horizontal Wind). This is a continent of a damaged and perpetually destabilised world, situated beneath the philosophical vault of metaphysical and scientific worldviews and composed of layers of folk culture and poetry born in Europe and on other continents (Üzenet szeretteimnek, [lit. Message to My Loved Ones]; Komédiások, [lit. Comedians]). This domain of folklore, marked by maleficent forces and infernal spheres, recalls the most unsettling underworld, rooted in folk sources. represented in the works of István Sinka. For instance, the poem A Vénasszony tudománya (lit. The Crone’s Lore) is a negative act of world-creation (the generation of disorder, the destruction of the cosmos) carried out by utilising the forces of chaos; in other words, a form of deconstruction, also discernible in numerous other works by Anna Kiss, constructed from archaic and superstitious elements.
In another group of the author’s poems, metaphysics dominates the human time, soul, and events drawn into the works; yet this metaphysics is fundamentally less Christian in orientation and far more archaic in its origins and character. These works are imbued with a tragical meaning, with pathos, and with the radiance of human dignity illuminated by hope. As powerful counterexamples to the cues marking chaos, monumental alternatives have been constructed within the author’s oeuvre (The Great Bird, Bear Song, Az úrnő ezüst ujja [lit. Silver Finger of the Mistress]). However, in her works of a predominantly dramatic character, the author reaches the borderlands of metaphysical thought concurrently with the insights of postmodern perceptions of the world and aesthetics, yet grounded in fundamentally different cognitive base and historical framework than those paradigms. The anthropomorphic centre is still present, but it exists under constant disturbance, amid provocative forces (Dark Mill, Foxes Among the Crops). In the author’s metaphysically oriented works, the hero is still capable of mastering and comprehending the processes of existence; however, in this latter creative sphere, the effects of unregulatable forces, the image of a struggling humanity, and the dictates of apparitions come to prevail, albeit mostly within grotesque and playful frameworks. These forces do not entirely destroy the individuals endowed with sovereign will, but they permanently unsettle the human world. In this way, Anna Kiss not only withdraws from her own historical moment and from the purer lyric mode conceived in the modern sense, but at times, in a distinctive manner, also departs from the anthropocentric worldview and from the tradition of the creation myth.
Through the oeuvre she has produced to date, alongside rewritings of inherited poetic legacies that turn towards the grotesque, the absurd, playfulness, or the nonsensical, and that dismantle metaphysical structures, Anna Kiss elaborates a potential branch belonging to the phylogenetic development of folk poetry that is more archaic and holistic, and that has never fully come into existence, persisting as a latent possibility, embedded within language, the imaginative world, and forms of personality. Certain parts of her works may be read as fragments of a once-possible myth. Drawing on motifs from primeval, medieval, and more recent periods alike, the author creates a reconstructed poetic castle over the fragments, shards, bricks, and broken tiles.
The strand of her oeuvre which decentralises anthropomorphisation likewise performs a compensatory role, by bringing into being the forces of chaos and unrest. Yet it is not the lacunae of folk poetry that are primarily being addressed by her works; rather, these works substitute for the ‘lost’ notebook pages of Péter Bornemisza and his unknown Renaissance contemporaries, who lived in close proximity to this tradition and were attentive to it, but who discovered a world in the psychic depths of popular life that was profoundly entangled in processes of deconstruction. Kiss’s works supply the missing pages of a chronicle that bears witness to hitherto unknown, or wilfully unacknowledged, faces of the human being and its world. In several respects, these works also resonate with certain conceptual positions of the late twentieth-century intellectual and aesthetic movement in world literature known as postmodernism, a movement whose Hungarian variant, to a considerable extent, emphasised its distance from folk, archaic, folkloric, and mythic traditions, foregrounding a decisive break with them.
Across both strands of her poetic vision, Anna Kiss’s poetic realm represents an exceptional achievement within contemporary Hungarian poetry.
[2014]