Benedek Kiss was born in the village of Akasztó, situated merely ten kilometres from the town of Kiskőrös, and this fact is significant not only in a symbolic sense, for in this environment the life and works of Sándor Petőfi were vividly present, and, primarily through Petőfi’s life and works, the respect and love for poetry was present as well. His mother, who had originally wished to become a singer, knew many poems and would recite them to her sons. She worked as a seamstress, after her husband’s departure she raised her two sons alone, and she undoubtedly sang a great deal while working. When her elder son was only ten years old, she gave him a volume of Endre Ady’s poems as a gift. The child displayed scholarly inclinations at an early age; he recited poetry, performed in plays, and experimented with writing poems. His father had originally wanted to become a priest, and Kiss may have also inherited literary talent from him. He first met his paternal grandfather, who lived in the Nyírség region, during a summer holiday when he was ten. The grandfather taught him songs and religious texts, as well as a long poem about the 13^th-century Mongol invasion of Hungary. As a result, he made his first serious attempt at writing, of which two lines have been preserved in memory: “Julián runs day and night / His horse covered in blood and foam…”

His teachers soon recognised his talent and supported him. Upon entering the secondary grammar school in Kalocsa, he was already writing regularly. His form master was Imre Cziráky, a writer who had resettled from Vojvodina; the young Imre Békési set him loose in the library, and it was Békési who placed in his hands the first collected volume of poems by Ferenc Juhász. Alongside the poems of Attila József, the book of Juhász became the novice poet’s bible. At the secondary school-leaving examination, their headmaster entrusted them with the injunction of humanity and Hungarian identity, and Benedek Kiss has regarded this ever since as his personal motto. During his university years in Budapest, László Nagy was added to the circle of his masters, and he wrote his thesis on him. After Ferenc Juhász he soon came to know Sándor Csoóri as well, who had a profound influence on him both personally and poetically. However, the most decisive event was related to a group of poets known as the Kilencek (lit. The Nine), which was formed by students of the Faculty of Humanities, and of which he became one of the leading figures.

There was another experience, at first instinctive and later increasingly conscious, which tied him to nature. Following Petőfi, this may also be described as the experience of the Great Hungarian Plane. The poet has consistently regarded himself as a man of the Great Plain. Even when, in maturity, he fell in love with the landscape of another region, the Balaton Uplands, and became a vine-grower on Szent György Hill, he still felt that beside the hill, in the Tapolca Basin, the Great Plain, his native land, was also present. In one of his earlier reflections, he vividly connected literary and natural experience: “Nature means a great deal to me, in many different ways: a cradle of life and a sphere of life; a system of signs that speaks for itself; the most general and concrete language. However, what I consider most essential is that I started to sense quite early on, as it seems to me, at least, that the traditional conception of ‘boundless freedom’, which, since Petőfi, has become widespread particularly in this form, is a structure of the semblance of freedom that is ceaselessly built up by the workings of mutually determining laws; or, conversely, it is a golden prison which, through its order and harmonies, benevolently casts the mirage of freedom around itself. Perhaps I could put it this way: I was more receptive to its necessities than to its freedom.” (András Görömbei: Kérdések és válaszok [lit. Questions and Answers], 1977.)

Returning to the 1960s, it was a particularly difficult period for launching a literary career. It was one of the high points of Hungarian literature: although with certain restrictions, virtually all earlier generations and numerous perspectives were gradually granted publicity, leaving little attention or space for publication available to newcomers. By the second half of the decade several cohorts had accumulated, and, in no small measure under the influence of the European events of 1968 and the student movements, the cultural administration finally began to act. At first, anthologies were published, among them an anthology of the Nine, published under the title Elérhetetlen föld (lit. Unreachable Land), which had been rejected for years. The primary reason for rejection was the group’s self-organising attitude, which did not fit into the strongly centralised literary life of the one-party system. Yet the publicity also caused them difficulties, and after the anthology’s publication, these difficulties manifested themselves even more distinctly, partly in public, in connection with the Nine’s view of history and their social criticism. As László Nagy phrased it in his frequently quoted preface: “they do away with pseudo-socialist conceit, national arrogance and madness, yet, having reflected upon the unhappy past, they utter judgement upon the present as well. They bear within themselves the red and the mourning of revolutions cut at the throat.” For the group, the 1956 events in Hungary were another revolution, and the authorities could not understand what their problem was, since, from the perspective of the authorities, the poets were ‘well off’, they were allowed to go to university, work, and publish. For instance, in the anthology of the Nine, Benedek Kiss wrote the following in his poem Cavatina:

“Within me ripens the orange time,
Industrious, cheerful summers glow –
Here lurk sly desire, ease, accusation, death.
And if walls crumble, Déva’s walls –
the weeping does not cease beneath the Carpathians.”

In the first volume, even the industrious summers are absent from the death-dance-like vision of Hungary: “A fluttering, wild people, killing itself, / Centuries have nailed sin onto it. // Let Hungary / be painted black / on every map of the world.” It is hardly a coincidence that poems of this outlook are missing from the anthology Költők egymás közt (lit. Poets Among Themselves), edited at the state-run publishing house. A later self-characterisation is exact: “we revolted against the hypocritical authorities, although often guided only by instinct.” (Interview by Imre Békési, Tiszatáj, 2010.)

On the whole, Benedek Kiss’s beginnings as a poet may be regarded as successful. He was able to make his debut in two representative anthologies simultaneously, and before long his own volume, Gazdátlan évszak (lit. Ownerless Season) was published in 1970, moreover as the first work in a new series for first-time authors edited by István Kormos. Its critical reception was mixed; alongside recognition, scepticism was equally present. This was offset by the esteem of older fellow poets: Ferenc Juhász’s introduction in Költők egymás közt (lit. Poets Among Themselves), József Tornai’s commendation, and the encouraging words of the fellow poets of his generation.

The emergence of Benedek Kiss can most accurately be characterised by two notions: poeta natus and poet with a sense of vocation. Viewed across his entire career, this need only be supplemented by the observation that he was not merely born a poet, but became a conscious and scholarly one, shaping his creative path in accordance with the nature of his talent. His poems were marked by a profusion of motifs, images, and melodies, and his irrepressible passion was constrained into a disciplined poetic order by his strong sense of artistic responsibility.

“It is winter; thick god-breath

clouds upon the valleys’ loins,

opium smoke, Moses-beard –

the mountain’s beard falls heavy, torn.

I look up, bury my eyes in mist:

there hides the stone-bison-god,

helmeted, hammered with ice-silver,

my twin-self hiding there,

the Tatras sleeping,

and like Cain, I watch in the blessed smoke.”

The most elementary mode of expression for Benedek Kiss is the song, and song-like qualities remain a fundamental tone throughout his work. As he declared: “The basis of the poem is always the song, the chant. As long as human beings live and sing, whether in joy or in sorrow, there is no reason to fear the obsolescence of poetry in its traditional sense.” (Interview by Attila T. Barna, Magyar Napló, 2004.) He thus moves along a path several thousand years old, but this does not imply conservatism, nor merely the preservation of values. Renewal grounded in preservation applies not only to poetic outlook and technique. Among the generations represented by László Nagy, István Ágh, and Benedek Kiss, preservation also assumes new spheres of meaning in comparison with what had been customary. This preservation is not simply a continuation of the ways of the predecessors, but also an act of re-inscription, a memorialisation of a way of life, a mode of conduct, a culture that has gradually disappeared, and continues to disappear, from our society and the broader region, although it is the bearer of immense material, intellectual, and moral values. One of the finest examples of this stance can be found in his poem Kenyeret anyám úgy eszik (lit. My Mother Eats Her Bread):

“My mother eats her bread
as one who is ever hungry,
and should a crumb fall from it,
hell breaks loose, mercilessly.

My mother eats an orange
as one who sins in doing so,
as one who steals, though not a thief,
and fears she somehow will be caught.

The worries eat my mother thus:
each one bites and gnaws at her,
they tear at her, though she’s but
a tiny morsel for their growth.”

Preservation is not only commemoration, but also steadfastness, a protest against the tendencies of social systems that are alien to the human being and to humaneness. “To erase the past once and for all” was the demand after 1945 based on political fervour and ideology, which sought to eliminate virtually the entire past contained within national frameworks for the long-term vision of communism. Preservation, therefore, is not conservatism but a struggle for human and national integrity, a struggle that began to unfold in literature from the 1950s onwards, and which was described using the concepts of the folk culture and national identity. This essentially pertained to the folk-national foundations of the nation’s life. And this concern has persisted into the present, well into the twenty-first century, at a time when different economic and society-shaping tendencies constrain our existence, when globalism, even without explicitly declaring so, would dismantle our national distinctiveness.

The long poem Böjti szél (lit. Lenten Wind) is a summation of the first major phase of the career of Benedek Kiss in both conceptual and poetic terms. It may be described as a meditation on history and nature, as a poem of Hungarian identity, or as an ars poetica, one that provides the most concise formulation of a poet’s fate: “Song serves, and is made to serve.” This is the sole example of the long poem in Benedek Kiss’s oeuvre. He sought and found a solution in which the dramatic quality is not organised or heightened by any special mythical core, but rather by the directly felt ‘scourging Lenten wind’, which unfolds before the reader those lyrical sequences that rush towards some form of resolution throughout the poem:

“Earth! Gaia with riven breast,

protect yourself, our mother.

Enchant yourself into song, into melody,

let the branch above us bud into a bird,

and on Orpheus’ pipe

let orphanhood be played.”

As a young poet imbued with a sense of vocation, Benedek Kiss formulated his experience in the following way: “The fundamental experience of my generation is the self-consuming, hopeless meditation” (Poets Among Themselves, 1969). A decade later he wrote: “it was precisely action that was permanently absent from our lives” (ibid., Görömbei). Another decade on: “You run up against walls again and again, you are ground and tormented by contradictions, and I think this experience is hard to live through and continually reshapes your outlook. In this way, I increasingly moved from thinking in large unities towards the personal, towards psychology, towards the world of smaller things.” (János Csontos: Együtt és külön [lit. Together and Apart], Széphalom, 1988). Naturally, the poet’s outlook changed, but it was not the concern with communities that was abandoned; rather, it was the blazing faith that had hoped for the triumph of truth and had believed that poets with a sense of vocation might contribute to it. Existence within society and within the framework of Hungarian identity continues to preoccupy him. His 1986 poem Petőfi lázálma az eljövendőkről (lit. Petőfi’s Fever Dream of What Is to Come) includes the following lines: “Fifteenth of March – / a thousand truncheons […] The dark gleams / and Világos darkens.” [The passage plays on the dual meaning of ‘Világos’: it is both the name of the place where the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 ended in defeat, and in Hungarian the common adjective meaning ‘light’ or ‘clear’.] His late poem Szeressétek e nemzetet! (lit. Love This Nation), written in the twenty-first century, also deserves mention.

What came to characterise this phase was not duality but an organic cohesion. As a young man, he had greater faith in the world and in himself, whereas as an adult he has deeper knowledge. And the ageing man, entering the phase of his ‘late songs’, may undertake an assessment of life both in his private existence and in his poetry, in which a harmony between perception of being and interpretation of being can be achieved. Yet this insight already flashes up in early poems, most fully in the song Akkor fegyvert, pénzt, ruhát (lit. Then Weapons, Money, and Clothes…). Here the man of faith and the man of knowledge are present at once; the world is taken possession of and transformed into a place of belonging, yet the results dissolve, and only one thing remains: the Sun itself, the world with its values. Above all, a cyclical natural and social existence appear here as philosophical ideas. Birth, life, and death are marked not only by movement but also by a certain dynamism in which values are honed and flare forth in the light of the Sun. Existence is the existence of a human being endowed with consciousness, with the capacity to shape himself. And in the end, this human being may decide upon the essential questions of his life with a certain degree of freedom. They may decide whether they wish to be a moral being, and whether they are capable of valuing the limited framework of life that is given to them. From this follows a respect for life and a capacity for the joy of life, both of which are characteristic features of Benedek Kiss’s entire poetry.

A respect for all existence penetrates and flows through the poems down to their micro-elements, to the images, almost to the level of sound. This is true on the planes of perception, emotion, and thought alike. The most elementary level of experiencing existence may be the experience of nature. Nature once again becomes part of the human being, and the human being once again becomes part of nature, and in this way, human experience of time and human consciousness enter into the image of nature. This richer complex of associations permeates those relationships of the lyrical self that prove most formative: those that bind one to a companion, to family, to friends, to the nation, and to humanity.

“I am

a fragment:

a fifteen-millionth part

of a trampled field of flax –

yet I ached

as if I were the whole,

and I throbbed within myself

with the Whole.”

This is what he confesses in Számvetés-féle félúton (lit. A Reckoning Halfway Along), which opens his 1985 volume, shyly yet emphatically giving voice not only to his love of homeland, but also to a mode of thinking grounded in the entirety of Hungarian identity. As another poem puts it: “Of woman, of God, / of Homeland, I feel in the manner of the Great Plain, / in the manner of the Great Plain I think.” (Járok a nyárban, [lit. I Walk in Summer]) Space and time can expand to immense proportions, and their interplay is revealed in a love poem (Találkozás, [lit. Encounter]) in the following way:

“And I sense rising above me: five thousand years

behind you, my sister – I am your younger brother –

where our father stares into the flame:

green fields,

green-green Mesopotamia.

A tale rocks on its vast knees,

earth, lore.

On the meadow of centuries

my sweat-soaked stallion gallops back and forth,

you weep,

you wait,

you weave a dream,

a sheet, a veil.”

From the very outset, love poetry constitutes a distinctive value within this poetic world. Over the decades, it moves from jubilant songs to an elegiac conception of happiness. Love and affection merge into one another, and the marital relationship is elevated to one of the highest values, as exemplified by the opening lines of Amikor átfordul a naptár lapja [lit. When the Page of the Calendar Turns]:

Your eyes dawn upon me, and slowly

morning spreads within me.

I love it when you switch off

the moon above my head

and, with your gaze,

set the sun upon its way.

The picture would be incomplete if sorrow were not almost always present with equal emphasis alongside the joy of life. Initially marked by a more tragic tonality, this sorrow gradually takes on an elegiac character, at times appearing darker and more rejected, at others more bearable. A perfect example of the former is the poem Reggel (lit. Morning). In this poem, the idyllic reveries and elements of everyday existence merge inseparably with the tragedy of assembly-line existence, fusing into a bitter synthesis that presents human life as essentially devoid of meaning:

“You’ll see, there will be another peace-struggle today,

and whether you will it or not – you die in it,

and you die in wars,

in dull serenities, in radiant storms,

yet you must go on – work is waiting for you,

you plane your crutch for old age,

until, planed legless at last,

the workshop spits you out.”

The other type of outlook may be exemplified by the poem Babits Mihály a szőlőhegyen (lit. Mihály Babits on the Vineyard Hill). This poem constitutes a deliberate allusive play on the classic poem of Mihály Babits which confronts transience. In contrast to the cry of anguish in Ősz és tavasz között (lit. Between Autumn and Spring), here it is the calm that spreads across the vineyard hill at evening, in the awareness of death, that becomes the determining, final experience:

“Up here, on the vineyard hill, I am at ease,

where the clamour of the city cannot reach me.

Alien – alas, everything is alien

in the world, and yet every nerve in me

still longs for home, for kin.”

Beyond the vineyard hill related serene poems, the wine songs, the playful dedicatory poems to friends, and the numerous works of children’s literature, it is the exaltation of existence and the life-giving force of a hope that persists against all odds that are most fully radiated by one of the finest Hungarian poems of the turn of the millennium, Nyáresti delírium (lit. Summer Night Delirium). This is another vineyard-hill poem. For the contemplating individual, “the world becomes a distant image veiled in mist”, and the sensations and imaginings of rapture and exaltation permeate him. Almost dissolving into nature, infinity becomes perceptible, and from this arises genuine rapture, the simultaneous experience of the finitude of existence and of the sublime:

“I sit below the basalt hill,

the vine tendrils tremble;

I watch the flight of hang-gliders,

raise a glass or two,

swatting at the mosquitoes,

while infinite being hums all around me.

Butterflies, midges swarm,

the star-studded sky descends,

and like brooding war-horses,

when they stamp the ground heavily,

I listen to the silence of the great walnut trees,

I listen to the beating of my heart.”

Upon reaching the phase of the late songs, the joys and sorrows of life become most organically united in the poems addressed to God. In prose, the poet articulated this experience as follows: “I was clinging on in the current, and I reached the shore somehow. And in some way, I felt that I had grasped God’s toe. I was searching for someone whom I could believe in, someone you can believe in. And that someone was God. He has sustained me ever since, often amid doubts, but in a sustaining way.” (Békési, ibid.) Bearing the cross of diverging paths, within the polyphony of Napi gyász, napi vigasz (lit. Daily Mourning, Daily Consolation), ‘a human being’ lives his days in sadness and in happiness; yet the devotion of Esti ima (lit. Evening Prayer) may still find voice:

“Dear God,

who are around me and within me,

who exist in my dog’s eyes

and in the spines of the cactus,

and who, incidentally,

set the immense Universe in motion,

I thank you for another day.

I have not grown rich,

nor have I become a beggar,

but my wife’s broken ribs

have healed a little today too.”

In the 1950s, Hungarian poetry underwent profoundly divergent yet equally formative shifts in outlook and poetics, bringing about a near-seismic renewal of Hungarian poetry. At one extreme stood an objectivist poetry striving for impersonality; at the other, a dramatically amplified lyrical self and a visionary, symbolic, and mythic mode of expression. As a result, the young poets of the 1960s were able to choose from several possible paths. The finest among them sought some form of balance, a reconciliatory synthesis. Benedek Kiss did not unite the tragic and the idyllic through the grotesque, but through an elegiac sensibility. He rendered objectivity slightly mythic, and in turn rendered myth objective. In the world of the late twentieth century and the opening of the new century, at times rigorously rational, at others boundlessly irrational, where both extremes proved equally inhuman, he created a humanly proportioned poetic world, which has proved both relevant to us and emotionally compelling not only in its outlook, but also in its poetic and linguistic means.

The origins of children’s literature may be traced to the most ancient forms of literary expression. It was only modern bourgeois society that sharply separated the literature of children, young people, and adults. While the pedagogical justification for this distinction is beyond dispute, children’s literature cannot afford aesthetic concessions. It is a rare gift when a poet or writer is able to speak in a fully realised way to the youngest audiences. Benedek Kiss not only possesses this gift, but has made active use of it almost from the very beginning of his poetic career. In high-quality children’s poetry, the song is the most common genre. A manageable length, easily comprehensible statements, rhythmicity, melodiousness, and playfulness all facilitate reception, and many of the ‘adult’ songs of Benedek Kiss share the same qualities. This effect is further enhanced by the illustrations, notably the works of Viola Berki, Dóra Keresztes, János Kass, and Virág Kiss.

Just as Sándor Weöres’s poems that became children’s poems, or were conceived as such from the outset, form an organic part of his oeuvre, so too many of Benedek Kiss’s poems are able to function both as children’s poems and poems for adults. In his first collection of children’s poems (1976), Esti vers fiamnak (lit. Evening Poem for My Son) occupied a central position. This poem, framed as a prayer, was also included in volumes addressed to adult readers. The same collection contains Virágzene (lit. Flower Music), which would not be out of place among poems for adults, while Virág a szélben (lit. Flower in the Wind) might be transferred into a book of children’s poetry. Further evidence of this oscillation between age groups is provided by Március perzselt mezőin (lit. On the Scorched Fields of March, 1989), a ‘collection of poems for young people’, which, though not aimed at children, is certainly suited to adolescents. At the same time, Benedek Kiss has also written works that are directly addressed to preschool and early primary-school children and that have long enjoyed popularity among these age groups, such as Vonatózó (lit. Train-Riding), Zene-bona, szana-szét (lit. Musical Hubbub, Scatter-Splatter), Szegény ember szerencséje (lit. Poor Man’s Fortune), Számoló mese (lit. Counting Tale), Színek vándorlása (lit. The Wandering of Colours), and Fénnyel, füttyel (lit. With Light, With Whistle). He has written verse tales (collected in the volume Dimbes-dombos, madaras [lit. Hilly and Hollow, Full of Birds]), and produced a highly successful prose fairy tale titled Korong Matyi álma (lit. The Dream of Matyi the Potter’s Wheel). This work is subtitled Álom Kovács Margit kerámiáira (lit. A Dream Inspired by the Ceramic Works of Margit Kovács). The carefully composed visual material provides the framework of the tale, narrating the dreamlike, adventurous journey leading towards the victory of Matyi, who is successfully learning to throw clay on the potter’s wheel at his father’s side. In the workshop, the child imagines a heap of clay as Old Father Earth, and one day they strike up a conversation. Old Father Earth then addresses the boy: “It is a great thing to be human. To be a good gardener, a fine soldier of the harvest, His tree will find everyone who seeks for it. You too will find it, my son: do what is good and true and beautiful.”

An account of Benedek Kiss’s oeuvre would be incomplete without mentioning his wide-ranging translations from Bulgarian. He first visited Bulgaria in 1970, when he and Ferenc Buda each spent a month in the country during a state-approved stay abroad (Buda shared with Kiss the two-month stay that had been authorised for him). At that time, he was not yet contemplating more substantial translation projects, with the exception of the poems of Gencho Hristozov, whom he had met earlier in Budapest, where Hristozov studied Hungarian on a scholarship, and with whom he formed a lasting friendship. From 1976 until the end of 1990s, he visited Sofia on several occasions, first with József Utassy, and later with Endre Rózsa, typically on month-long scholarships, where they formed friendships with many poets and started to translate one another’s poems. These journeys were typically combined with extensive travel across the country: travelling in cars provided by the Bulgarian Writers’ Union, they visited Haskovo in the south, the Black Sea coast at Burgas and Varna, and the must-see Plovdiv. They never attained full proficiency in Bulgarian; nevertheless, they were able to communicate with their poet friends. With the assistance of specialists in Bulgarian studies (above all Péter Juhász and Zoltán Király), they gathered a substantial corpus of poems, and upon returning Hungary, they worked extensively on it, publishing a significant part of the translations. It should also be noted that at the time the Bulgarian Cultural Centre in Hungary was directed by the distinguished Bulgarian poet Nino Nikolov, and that all three writers were regular participants in the events organised by the Cultural Centre, not only attending the events but also actively contributing through literary performances and other forms of involvement. Of the three, Benedek Kiss undertook the greatest amount of translation work, often with extensive reliance on dictionaries. In addition to four independent volumes and a radio play adapted from a classic novel by Elin Pelin, his best-known poetry collection was published under the title Az én Balkánom (lit. My Balkan). His translations of Bulgarian poetic works, issued under the title Önrekviem (lit. Self-Requiem), enjoyed wide popularity, as did his Balkan folk-tale collection for children A Gólya Szilján (lit. Silyan the Stork). In addition to these volumes, he was a major contributor to numerous literary anthologies. His commitment was reciprocated by his Bulgarian friends: a volume of Benedek Kiss’s poetry was published in Bulgarian under the title Kripta pod ezika (lit. Crypt Beneath My Tongue). Among the current generation of committed Bulgarianists, a particularly significant role is played by György Szondi, with whom Benedek Kiss maintains close professional relations.

[2014]