Aladár Lászlóffy’s poetic career followed a clear and consistent trajectory: after the darker worldview of his early poems, he also voiced the public hopes of the early 1960s. Later, once he realised the true intentions of the Bucharest authorities, he interpreted his experience with an increasingly sharp critical tone. He had to face the reality that his expectations were repeatedly disappointed and, although he wished to remain an active participant in literary life – and even held various offices – protest came to dominate his poems more and more, alongside a spiritual struggle that opposed the traditional historical and public ideals of Transylvanian Hungarians to their harsh everyday experiences. In these ideals – above all in the traditional idea of being Transylvanian (erdélyiség), and in the moral force of Hungarian literature as a whole – he found the means of resistance. The logic of his search for ideals could hardly surprise those who later became acquainted with – or who had already known – those poems which he wrote in Budapest during the days of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution [the anti-Soviet uprising of October–November 1956]. In this way, Aladár Lászlóffy won recognition not only as a poet but also as a notable figure in Transylvanian Hungarian public life – and this was true in Hungary as well.

The poet from Kolozsvár (Cluj-Napoca) entered the scene with a keen interest in public affairs; his work was always infused with this sense of commitment, this political passion, initially driven by his faith in the effectiveness of reformist aims, and later by resistance and protest. His early poems bore the mark of avant-garde influence and revived its traditions; above all, he took as his model the ‘revolutionary expressionism’ of József Méliusz [Transylvanian Hungarian prose writer and critic], who was of considerable importance for young poets both in worldview, as a representative of a ‘purified’ socialist thinking, and in poetics. Lászlóffy not only adopted the freedom of free verse, but also the communal exaltation and revolutionary optimism of the avant-garde movements. He saw it as his task to assess the twentieth-century horizons of technological and social development and, by surveying these horizons, to bear witness to the tasks of the present. His poems naturally expressed trust in technological civilisation, modern scientific thinking, and the belief in a revolutionary transformation of human life. His early works are characteristic in this regard; in his poem A gép (lit. The Machine), this confidence finds explicit expression: “Ember megteremti s megszólja a gépét, / hű segítőtársát, erős menedékét. / Mert már jobbat tervez, minta önnön lelke: / egy-egy motívumát géppé hangszerelte, / de mint pedagógus: legteljesebb képét / kívánja ott látni, s nem hagy addig békét / álmos anyagoknak – amíg minden szerve / meg nem szüli mását az iparban szerte.” (lit. “Man creates and then condemns his machine, / his faithful helper, his strong refuge. / For he already designs something better than his own soul: / he has orchestrated this soul’s motifs into a machine, / yet, as a pedagogue, he wishes to see / its fullest likeness there, and gives no rest / to drowsy matter – until every organ / has brought forth its double in industry.”) Many similar poems could be cited from the early collections – Aladár Lászlóffy’s faith in the achievements of civilisational progress was almost universal among young poets of the 1960s (including those in Hungary). The mistrust that later came to dominate attitudes towards the future was a feeling that would become widespread only later.

Lászlóffy also looked confidently towards the horizons of this development; the promises of the ‘conquest’ of the cosmos and of officially proclaimed ‘social progress’ captured his imagination as well. His interest in cosmic perspectives and the future of humankind did not merely influence his choice of themes; his artistic outlook was also shaped by this concern. László Földes wrote about him in his substantial 1967 essay Én és a mindenség (lit. I and the Universe) as follows: “Lászlóffy is not modern because he is constantly measuring the universe, but because he knows that, if one wishes today to fashion something ‘human-sized’, one must again take measurements from it; the universe must now be included in the measurements of man.” Universal curiosity and knowledge thus played a defining role in both outlook and poetics; at the same time, the sensitivity and nostalgia embodied in the poems protected the poet from the prevalent 1960s rhetoric. Historical (and technical, scientific) optimism and the nostalgia that always lent a more personal tone to his poetic vision, in fact, ‘counter-pointed’ one another; it was precisely this that saved Lászlóffy’s poetry from the rather general political rhetoric of the age. His poem that gave the title to the collection Színhelyek (lit. Scenes) reveals this vision rich in poetic nostalgia: “Csupa nosztalgia minden emberi élet nekem. / Elmúlnak a korok, egymás után – / és én nem tudok betelni… / De milliárd színhelyen szemmel / tartom a történelemlakót. / És elképzelem a teljesség fogadónapját: / lehetnek kijelölt órák, / mikor lépcső ereszkedik értünk, / ajtó nyílik, móló nyúlik elénk.” (lit. “Every human life is sheer nostalgia to me. / Ages pass, one after another – / and I can never have my fill… / Yet on a billion stages I keep / the tenant of history in my sight. / And I imagine the visiting hours of the Whole: / there may be allotted hours / when a stairway descends for us, / a door opens, a pier extends before us.”)

Encouragement and nostalgia

His first collections of poetry – the debut volume Hangok a tereken (lit. Voices on the Squares, 1962) and Színhelyek (lit. Scenes, 1965), then Képeskönyv a vonalakról (lit. Picture Book of Lines, 1967), Szövetségek (lit. Alliances, 1970), A hetvenes évek (lit. The Seventies, 1971), A következő ütközet (lit. The Next Battle, 1974), A hétfejű üzenet (lit. The Seven-Headed Message), and his volume of selected poems published in Budapest, …hogy kitudódjék a világ (lit. …So that the World Might Be Found Out, 1980) – in fact expressed a dual sentiment: the recurring (yet constantly threatened) sense of historical confidence, and, as its emotional counterpoint, a gentle nostalgia. Aladár Lászlóffy’s poetry reached its full expression when he grappled with the limits of realising noble plans and with humankind’s unfavourable historical experience, including the experience he gained as a member of a national minority. With eager curiosity, he bent over the European and Transylvanian past, seeking genuine values, guiding models, and teachings that could promote the realisation of full human freedom and equality. When wandering through German, Dutch, and French cities (he visited West European countries on several occasions, sometimes as a guest of local writers’ organisations or of émigré Hungarian institutions), he did not, prompted by old houses or museum treasures, create lyrical genre pictures; rather, he evoked the conflicts of human history and sought examples with a philosophy-of-history bearing. I think, for instance, of the poems written during one of his Western journeys, through Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, such as Lausanne. Az egyetemi könyvtár (lit. Lausanne. The University Library): “Egy ige az emlékiratait írja. / Egyes szám első személyben őslakó volt, / másodikban legendás szabadságharcos, / többes szám első személyben pártot alapít, / harmadik személyben ősök nyugalmával / vár a jövőben.” (lit. “A verb is writing its memoirs. / In the first person singular, it was an aboriginal, / in the second, a legendary freedom-fighter, / in the first person plural, it founds a party, / in the third, it waits in the future / with the calm of the ancestors.”) These lyrical travel reports always conceal a nostalgia for the way of life of free-spirited, healthily developing Western societies, for those historical values that he could hardly encounter in his homeland. In his historical meditations, the poet declared himself for humane values, and even the bitter irony of his conviction lent sharper outline to this commitment: “A humanizmus nem a kivégzésnemek / technikai tökéletesítésében működik tovább, / hanem a meghagyott fejekben” (lit. “Humanism does not live on / in the technical perfectioning of execution, / but in the heads that have been spared.” – A rotterdami bírák [lit. The Judges of Rotterdam]).

In the lyrical ‘codification’ of personal and community values, he appealed to the significant figures of European and Transylvanian culture and philosophy: Erasmus of Rotterdam, Giordano Bruno, Kant, János Apáczai Csere, and János Bolyai. Reflecting on the vulnerability of human culture, he recalled the instructive lessons of history, including the errors and damage wrought by the dictatorial era. In judging this, he generally confronted the principles represented by the ideal tradition with the everyday practice he experienced. He consistently drew attention to those cultural, public, and moral values that he saw as endangered in his homeland, and – since he had no opportunity to give direct expression to a political position – he raised his voice, like other Transylvanian poets such as Sándor Kányádi, János Székely, and Domokos Szilágyi, at least by pointing to cultural values and protesting against their destruction, thereby speaking out against the orgies of a tyranny hostile to minorities and to culture. In his prose poem Az alexandriai könyvtár égése (lit. The Burning of the Library of Alexandria), we read the following: “Only that kind of progressive spirit disturbs me which so deeply despises the Middle Ages – when it is a question of the Middle Ages – yet connives at one another’s failings if, to a man, they have not read Hegel and are living off what they know about Hegel by hearsay. It would be entertaining to see them pottering about on the sky-wide eggshell of synthesis, were it not for the danger that under their nasty boots the Gothic’s glass-thin vaulting will collapse, and their pounding will bespatter with mud the statues heard out of the air in the studios of Beethoven and Bartók.” The legacy of humanist culture – set against the petty experience of a dictatorial system – served the soul’s self-defence, the preservation of that personal freedom that must at all costs be maintained, since the arbitrariness that struck at culture represented the greatest danger to the integrity of the personality. The long poem just quoted suggests that personal existence can fully unfold only within culture (in literature), and that violence directed at books threatens a life worthy of human beings. Éva Gyimesi, in her 1978 collection of essays Találkozás az egyszerivel (lit. Encounter with the Unique), drew attention to the significance of this poem in the following terms: “Here the ‘book’ becomes the medium of a way of seeing that effortlessly superimposes historical situations upon one another, a medium in which even bizarre, anachronistic juxtapositions are motivated by the conviction that culture and human consciousness are continuous. In this way, Hitler and Torquemada, Robespierre, Spartacus and Lenin meet at the opposing poles of repression and progress; the absurdity of their exchanging roles is dissolved by the fact that they are symbolic figures who belong together, regardless of chronological order. The two poles are each a virtual ‘alliance’ of forces at work in history – a diachronic alliance created by historical consciousness. And it is characteristic that in the fate of the victims of repression the poet sees not only the destruction of individuals but also the destruction of the culture embodied in them and of the consciousness of personal continuity: ‘and Torquemada, even had he ordered Auschwitz with its modern equipment from his own head, would have sent the Library of Alexandria to the stake four million times’.”

Such works – rooted in the traditions of cultural history and philosophy – demonstrate that after the call to battle and optimistic prophecies, Lászlóffy assigned a central role to the rigorous testing of ideas and to profound moral self-examination. An elegiac tone pervades his poems as his intellectual confidence grows stronger. His poetry embraced the historical experience of Transylvanian Hungarians and European nations and gave form to a responsible public attitude; with sober political realism, he accounted for the current conflicts of Central and Eastern European societies. His synthetic poetic compositions, such as Helsinki 1975 and Óda az álomhoz (lit. Ode to Dream), indicated that he saw the resolution of these conflicts in the fuller – and, at the time, in his homeland scarcely perceptible – realisation of humane and democratic values. In this latter, sweeping poem – which, as it were, weighs personal experiences and hopes in the balance – we read:

“Néha visszajárok szellem-Európából,

kő-Európából, kép-Európából, könyv-

Európából, kenyér-Európából, csók-

Európából, harc-Európából gyermeknek.

Amilyen okos és nyugtalan vagyok,

sajnálom a fákat, hogy mindig egyazon

tájon állnak, és sajnálom magam, hogy

megint felnövök: felébredek, és

ugyanabba a naprendszerbe

omlik vissza anyagom, ha már ilyen nagyon

kiváltam belőle, ilyen nagyon

kiváltam. Bizony

becsaptak: itthagytak helytállni.”

(lit. “At times, I come back from intellect-Europe,
from stone-Europe, picture-Europe, book-
Europe, bread-Europe, kiss-
Europe, battle-Europe, as a child.
Being as clever and as restless as I am,
I pity the trees that always stand
in the same place, and I pity myself
for growing up again: for waking, and
seeing my substance collapse back
into the same solar system
when I have so thoroughly
parted from it, parted so thoroughly.
Truly, they tricked me:
they left me here to stand my ground.”)

Poetic ripeness

The poet’s journey progressed steadily, while his poetry grew deeper and achieved full maturity over time, as seen in his collections from the 1980s: Hol én, hol idegen (lit. Now Myself, Now a Stranger, 1982), Ledőlési határidő (lit. Deadline for Collapse, 1985), and, after a hiatus of several years enforced by the tightening of Bucharest’s literary policy, Keleti reneszánsz (lit. Eastern Renaissance, 1993) and Kőfalon kőszó (lit. Stone-Word on Stone-Wall, 1994). The title-poem of the first, Now Myself, Now a Stranger, is a confession, in a tone of humility, of fidelity to his homeland: “Itt tudok legjobban, lehajtott fejjel ott lenni, / ahol az erő s az értelem egyszerre AZ. Valaki / azt panaszolta, hogy / soha senki nem lehet AZ! / Én is idegen vagyok magamtól, mikor megértek, / mikor éppen értem ezt az egészet s gondolok / valamit, amit fel is lehet érni. / De itt. Lehajtott fővel. / Nem akarok tudni semmiről már, ami árnyékot / borít ezekre a gondolatokra. / Ne kérdezze semmilyen kételkedő, hogy nemlétező / szavaimat mikor egészítem ki a semmi pontos / olvasata szerint. Tudom én mi történik. / Ez alatt a lapom alatt se megtanulni, se elfe- / lejteni nem lehet semmit. Olyan egyszerű: itt / tudok legjobban lehajtott / fejjel mindenütt lenni. / Hol én, hol idegen – / s dolgozunk mindahányan.” (lit. “Here I can best be present, head bowed, / where power and intellect are at once THAT. Someone / once complained that / no one can ever be THAT! / I too am a stranger to myself when I understand, / when I happen to grasp it all and think / something that can in fact be grasped. / But here. With head bowed. / I no longer wish to know anything that would cast a shadow / over these thoughts. / Let no doubter ask when I shall complete my non-existent / words according to the precise reading of nothingness. / I know what is happening. / Under this page of mine one can neither learn / nor forget anything. / It is so simple: here / I can most truly, head / bowed, be everywhere. / Now myself, now a stranger – / and all of us go on working.”)

The loyalty he felt towards his native land and the Transylvanian Hungarian community was always accompanied by an appreciation for the historical values of European culture. This creates a dual identity – Transylvanian Hungarian and Hungarian European – that is naturally intertwined, in line with the identity-forming traditions of Hungarian (and Transylvanian Hungarian) poetry. One might think of poets such as Endre Ady, Mihály Babits, Attila József, Gyula Illyés, or from Transylvania Lajos Áprily and Jenő Dsida. The European and Hungarian traditions together provide resources, in contrast to the harsh everyday experience. This is particularly evident in the poems of Kőfalon kőszó (lit. Stone-Word on Stone-Wall), such as Lélekvándorlás (lit. Transmigration of Souls), which references, in mutual connection, Habsburg castles and Dante, the Rhine and the ancient East, Bolyai and Liszt – the ‘keywords’ of European and Hungarian tradition alike. The community of national and universal historical and cultural heritage is evoked in poems such as Ének István királyról (lit. Song about King Stephen), Keleti reneszánsz (lit. Eastern Renaissance), Szeged, alsóvárosi templom (lit. Szeged, Church of the Lower Town), or in those poems which argue, through the universal values of the national tradition, for a specifically “European Hungarian” way of thinking and of conduct – such as Széchenyi, Kosztolányi, Adyval, tüzes szekéren (lit. With Ady on a Fiery Chariot), or Az összeférhetetlen Tótfalusi Kis Miklós néma válasza a még mindig meghasonlott eklézsiának (lit. The Irreconcilable Miklós Tótfalusi Kis’s Silent Answer to the Still Divided Church), in which, drawing on personal experience, he concludes that the intellectual must represent not the considerations of others but his own higher truth:

“Lehet, hogy összeférhetetlen…

csak ki vállalja még helyettem?

Lehet, hogy éppen ez az ára:

nekem nem telik más hazára.

Mert lehet, összeférhetetlen

tehet csak olyant, amit tettem,

hogy világ-mennyhelyek után a

legfőbb út százszor Kolozsvárra

vezetne, bármi lesz a sorsom,

ha gyűlt kincseim hazahordom,

hazámba, eme vesztes égbe,

beletörődni a veszteségbe.”

(lit. “Perhaps I am irreconcilable –
but who would bear it in my stead?
Perhaps this is precisely the price:
I cannot afford another homeland.

For perhaps only one deemed irreconcilable.
can dare to do what I have done:
after the world’s celestial havens
the highest road should lead, a hundredfold,
back to Kolozsvár,
whatever fate may yet be mine,
if all the hoarded treasures of my life
I carry home – into this losing sky,
to learn at last the art of loss.”)

His late poems, as the foregoing will have made clear, were primarily moral statements; they conveyed news of the communal experience, challenges, and inner struggles of the abandoned Transylvanian Hungarian community – and of the development of its strategies of self-defence. This might explain why the formal style of Lászlóffy’s poetry became noticeably simpler; the previously expressive mode of expression was replaced by a more traditional formal culture (the ‘Nyugat-style’ poetics of inter-war Transylvanian Hungarian poetry, continuing the legacy of the journal Nyugat). Perhaps only the freedom of image-association preserved the earlier, decisive urge to innovate and experiment. All this is apparent in that larger poetic structure represented by the volume Symphonia antiqua (1995), complemented by the constructivist-like graphics of the distinguished Cluj-Napoca artist András Heim. The poet’s monographer, Klára Széles, explained Lászlóffy’s intentions in her 2007 monograph Mit látsz egy íróasztalon (lit. What Do You See on the Writing Desk?) as follows: “We are confronted with a poetic work that takes shape in a single, ordered volume. Or rather: we have before us a volume-length sequence of poems that can be regarded as a single work of art. The title itself, ‘symphony’ (indeed Symphonia, using the original Greek form, though in Latin letters – everything has its function), signals and assumes a principle of composition that is closely linked to the internal organisation of the poems. To this quasi-generic designation, the poet adds the qualifier ‘antique’ (indeed antiqua). In this context, the specification can evoke not only references to ancient Greco-Roman history or to works of art, but also the ‘antiqua’ Latin upright typeface, so that we may consider the volume as a ‘symphony of letters’.”

The author of this analysis connects Lászlóffy’s work with the spirit of postmodern poetry, yet at the same time distinguishes it from this, highlighting that the volume-length sequence of poems is naturally situated within the previously known context of the Cluj-Napoca poet’s oeuvre, and that the postmodern mode of vision and of expression preserves this naturalness. The lyrical symphony is thus a summative poem, a constructed compendium of previously evident intellectual and rhetorical qualities. In Klára Széles’s words: “We see the ever-present – and always relative – horizon; the boundedness of our vision at any given moment, and the dizziness of the limitless. The subject – or subjects? – of the poems is more Protean than ever. The non-human, what is around and before (and perhaps after?) man, nature itself becomes both witness and ‘actor’, both setting and drama. Seemingly outside man, yet permeated by him.” The poet became acutely aware of the uncertainty of cognition and judgement, of the fact that the correctness of his conclusions and determinations could be disputed, and the uncertainty of history’s course could be alleviated, if at all, only by the timeless calm of natural existence. As he writes in the poem Madártávlat (lit. Bird’s-Eye View): “Látszólag minden aggva s megromolva / s új, jobb erények előtt hull a porba. / Valójában a tökélyt is temették, / kik észrevették, kik észre se vették. / Se jobb, se rosszabb nem volt ennél semmi, / kinek csak ott adatott megszületni. / Madártávlatok tudós közönyével / előbb-utóbb mindenki másról érvel.” (lit. “Seemingly all things are old and decayed, / and fall in dust before new, better virtues. / In truth, even perfection has been buried / by those who saw it and those who did not. / Nothing has ever been better or worse / for those to whom only there was given birth. / With the learned indifference of bird’s-eye views / sooner or later, everyone argues about something else.”

Transylvanian elegies

In fact, this description equally applies to the worldview and poetics embodied in the final volumes of verse: Repülés a zuhanásban (lit. Flying While Falling, 1997), Felhősödik a mondatokban (lit. Clouding Over in the Sentences, 1998) and Bársonyok és Borgiák (lit. Velvets and Borgias, 2000). The worldview is more elegiac than hopeful. However, the poet experienced the historical changes in his homeland – the collapse of the tyrannical regime – as a liberation. Over time, he had to accept that the political culture and social mentality that had permeated the decades of dictatorship had not changed as radically as the overthrow of tyranny might have allowed. Due to centuries-old Romanian social reflexes, the prospects for establishing a genuinely democratic political system and public life remained limited. The poet’s more recent public experience, both in his homeland and in Budapest, led him to the conclusion that the radical transformation of Central European history had not created a new order capable of humanising the region’s societies. Hence, inner peace must be sought in the same places as before: in nature, among books, and in intimate human relationships. In the title-poem of Felhősödik a mondatokban (Clouding Over in the Sentences), we read: “Felhősödik a mondatokban. / Ahogy a délután leszáll, / a kedvem körül minden ott van, / mint megszokott-szép régi táj / s mint összegyűlt, örökre álló / nagy vonatokon, hegyeken, / ott ülnek némán: kővé váló / család, barátság, szerelem.” (lit. “It is clouding over in the sentences. / As afternoon comes down, / everything is there about my mood, / like an old, familiar beautiful landscape, / and, as on great trains and on mountains / that have gathered and stand forever, / there they sit silently: turned to stone – / family, friendship, love.”)

The poetic mode of expression thus remained elegiac; within this elegiac light are recalled the memories of childhood, as in A szülőház megmaradt kemencéje (lit. The Oven that Remained in My Birth-House); within this same light, poetry itself finds its meaning, as the poem A költő (lit. The Poet) suggests; and through this veil of elegiac rememberance, the sustaining experiences of youth are reborn, as in Ó, iskoláim, drága iskolák (lit. O, My Schools, Dear Schools):

“Az anyanyelv, a mindig támadott

kenyérmező folyton termést adott;

ha felgyújtják, ha beleszántanak,

eloltja égi könny, eső, patak

és testünk tölti mesgyeoldalát…

Ó, iskoláim, drága iskolák!

Megtanultunk itt életet, halált,

a hajnal gyertyafénye így talált.

Bod Péterek kísértete lesi,

a sok Bolyai, Páriz, Kőrösi

árnyajakával utánunk kiált:

Ó, iskoláim, drága iskolák!”

(lit. “The mother tongue, that ever-attacked
Breadfield has always yielded grain;
if they burn it, if they plough it under,
heavenly tears, rain, brook put out the flames,
and our bodies fill the banks and margins…
O, my schools, dear schools!

We learned here life and death alike,
the dawn kept us in its candlelight.
The ghosts of Bod Péters keep watch,
of so many Bolyais, Párizs, Kőrösis;
with their shadow mouths, they cry after us:
O, my schools, dear schools!”)

Evoking the old Transylvanian schools provides enduring spiritual strength, just as Transylvanian history itself does – the history of a communal ethic of survival. In these late poems, historical memories increasingly emerge: Divina Transsylvanica nostalgically recalls the memory of Transylvanian culture and spirituality; Tibeti kantáta (lit. Tibetan Cantata) appeals to the moral example of the perseverance of Sándor Kőrösi Csoma [19th-century Hungarian traveller and Tibetologist], and in the cycle Antik félálmok (lit. Antique Half-Dreams), the old Transylvanian homes of Hungarian culture (Torda [Turda], Enyed [Aiud], Gyergyó [Gheorgheni], Déva [Deva]) appear. Time and again, it is the moral lessons of the ‘exemplary men’ of Transylvanian history that resonate: in Negyven sor a hegyről (lit. Forty Lines from the Hill), which recalls the fate of the galley-slave preachers; in Az ima elment Rodostóba (lit. The Prayer Went to Rodosto), dedicated to the memory of the Rákóczi exile; in Testőríró (lit. The Guardsman-Writer), recalling the ‘guardsman-writers’ of the 18^th century; in Vízaknai Petőfi (lit. Petőfi of Vízakna), Wesselényi lovaglása (lit. Wesselényi’s Ride); or indeed in those poetic confessions that evoke the masters of contemporary literature and art: Emelet (lit. Storey), dedicated to Zsigmond Palocsay; „Egy vers egyedül jár az utcán” (lit. “A Poem Walks Alone in the Street”), in memory of Erik Majtényi; Szilágyi Domokos képe alá (lit. Under the Portrait of Domokos Szilágyi); Juhász Ferencnek (lit. To Ferenc Juhász); Üvegkönnycseppek balladája (lit. Ballad of Glass Tear-Drops), dedicated to the memory of János Székely; and Próza Mózes Attilához (lit. Prose to Attila Mózes). These poems created and confirmed that emotional milieu in which the poet, struggling with illness and the fear of death, could feel at home.

Forebodings of communal tragedy overshadow the poetic world of the last collections; in Velvets and Borgias, tragic experience dominates, or rather, the long-expressed desire for humaneness is counterpointed by dark experiences. Klára Széles highlighted how the ‘velvet’, which earlier suggested the caressing gentleness of erotic feeling, as it were, softens the historical intrigue and violence behind the name ‘Borgias’: “murderous ruthlessness becomes caressing gentleness”. The converse is also true: the name ‘Borgias’ destroys the gentleness and humaneness to which the word ‘velvet’ points. For the volume records above all the oppressive feelings of threat, and this historical anxiety emerges with particular force in one of Lászlóffy’s powerful late poems, which both articulates tragedy and seeks redemption: 2000 téli fohász (lit. Winter Prayer of the Year 2000), which, alluding to the Christian Passion tradition, pleads for mercy:

“Uram, ki hóval pótolod didergő testünk

Körül a sivatagot, csakhogy lelkünk

Jelképek díszleteiben ne szenvedjen hiányt,

Aki jászolnak tartottad meg itt is királyi

Jászlad, melyben példád követve kicsi

Attilák, Áronok, Csabák jönnek világra,

A harmadnapon való feltámadás esélye

Nélkül, csak az olajfák hegyére hajszolva,

Kínhalálra, vagy annak is csak a jelképére,

Kérünk, csillapítsd vadászebed, az időt,

Mely máris idáig kergette, hajszolta

Bennünk a csodaszarvast: az egymást bőszen

Váltó korok olyan idegen és ellenséges

Hangulatú tájaira, ahol már nem kell

Se Biblia, se fenyves, csak a számítógépek,

Foszforló ereiből a pénz jelképe:

A harminc vagy hárombillió ezüst,

Melynél még maga az örök Júdás is

Többet érne. Ezért kérünk, Uram,

Nézz utána, hová húzódtak ezek,

Miután kiűzéd őket a templomból?...”

(lit. “Lord, who replace with snow our shivering bodies
the desert around us, that our souls
may lack no symbolic scenery,
who have preserved for us here too your royal manger
as a manger, in which, following your example,
little Attilas, Árons, Csabás come into the world,
without the chance of resurrection on the third day,
driven only to the Mount of Olives,
to a death of torture, or even only to its symbol,
we beseech you, restrain your hunting-hound, Time,
which has already driven and chased
the wonder-deer within us to these
strange and hostile landscapes of epochs
that follow hard upon each other; to places where
there is no longer need for Bible or pine-forest,
only of computers,
and in their phosphorescent veins the symbol of money:
thirty or three billion pieces of silver,
for which even Judas Eternal himself
would be worth more. Therefore, we entreat you, Lord,
look to it where they have withdrawn
since you drove them from the temple?”)

The late poetry adopted an elegiac tone, and through this the poet rediscovered the old tradition of Hungarian elegies – familiar from the poems of János Arany, Mihály Babits, Dezső Kosztolányi, or indeed Jenő Dsida – in which bitter experience and recognition are expressed in melodious form and with classical prosody. In Aladár Lászlóffy’s final collections, fixed stanza, melodic intonation, pure rhyme – and at times even poetic word-play – replaced the earlier avant-garde mode of expression; the manner of speaking itself became poetic, in the classical sense. The return to formal tradition was revitalised by a metaphorical and lexical idiom oriented towards the freedom of association and, not infrequently, towards word-play – the two formal principles, classical verse-structure and modern image-making, powerfully complemented one another. It is worth drawing attention to the poet’s linguistic playfulness, which points to a very original linguistic inventiveness, not only in playful experiments such as the cycles Csasztuskák (lit. Chastushkas) and Nemzeti gyermekszoba (lit. National Nursery), or the poem Ars poetica, but also in the ‘gibberish’ poem based on word-play, the associative language-game Szóról szóra (lit. Word for Word): „diótörő, jégtörő, mátyás, szajkó, szakajtó, / ajtó, alszeg, felszeg, kőszeg, gernyeszeg, / egerszeg, szegecs, ripacs, forgács, / kalapács, gyár, gyáros, város, kolozsvár, / fellegvár, erős várunk, pajzs, pajzsika, páfrány, / sáfrány, sármány, sárga, sár --- sár -- / sár, sarolt, sarló, sárga, varga, varázsló, / parázsló, darázs, dara, derce, / beszterce, beszéd --------” (lit. “nutcracker, icebreaker, Matthias, jay, kneading-trough, / door, lower-peg, upper-peg, Kőszeg, Gernyeszeg, / Egerszeg, rivet, ham-actor, shaving, / hammer, factory, factory-owner, city, Kolozsvár, / citadel, our strong fortress, shield, shield-fern, fern, / saffron, siskin, yellow, mud – mud – / mud, Sarolt, sickle, yellow, cobbler, magician, / glowing, wasp, groats, grits, / Beszterce, speech --------” In the final analysis, we must say that, within the oeuvre of the Cluj Napoca poet, one of the richest, most many-layered and most original bodies of work in recent Transylvanian Hungarian literature has emerged – an oeuvre which undoubtedly ranks among the enduring values of Hungarian poetry as a whole.

[2017]