Béla Pomogáts: On the Poetry of Csaba Lászlóffy
Taking stock of history
It is a rarity in the history of literature to have two very talented writers (with almost incomparable oeuvres) within one family, and the work of the two Lászlóffys, Aladár and Csaba, is an example of this exceptional phenomenon. Aladár Lászlóffy's poetic work has been widely acclaimed, and the younger brother has also produced a significant and voluminous oeuvre, which is also one of those historical and moral parables that provide an account of the experiences and conflicts of the past and present of Transylvanian Hungarians. In his poetic, narrative and dramatic works, Csaba Lászlóffy, as Zoltán Bertha stated in his article Erkölcs és történelem (Morality and History), is “captivated by the conciseness of imagery, the effective creation of atmosphere and the truth of moral perseverance, standing and inflexibility, displayed through the fate, situation and struggle of the historical figures evoked.” Indeed, the poet from Cluj Napoca always took a stand in public life with a consistent sense of community responsibility, and this incessant moral compulsion to take a stand explains the intensity of his work, his ever-renewing creative zeal, his tireless fighting spirit.
An open mind and a strong sense of values
Csaba Lászlóffy was a versatile writer, with poems, short stories, essays and publicist writings to mark his rich interests. I would now like to focus on his work as a poet. The world of nature, the youthful feeling of love and (this goes without saying for a Transylvanian poet) historical investigations and insights saturated the poems, which followed one another in a dense succession, with a constant intellectual excitement and, what is more, with a readiness to argue. The poetic themes, open in all directions and with constant interest, were very varied: the small world at home, the Transylvanian landscape and the Transylvanian historical past strengthened the poet's loyalty to his community, and more than once aroused nostalgic feelings; the need to build human relationships was accompanied by a strong desire for love: the poet was thirsty for recognition. To quote from his early poem Üzenet (Message): “Appreciate me at least once / before I die. / Appreciate me as the happiness that has suddenly come upon you, / As the earth that yesterday was in thistles, / But today has learned to grow, / As the rain that, though hurried or delayed, / Will never wait forever.”
The young poet expressed an opinion based on enduring and certain values, referring to the authentic values of the European tradition. In his poem Königsberg 1795, he invoked the legacy of Immanuel Kant, a prominent representative of the rationalist tradition: “there is only one way to survive / you can smile, poisoners of all the poisons of all times / the wise old man for whom the real world never existed / and from whom nothing but his pains can be taken away / by the vulgar sins of the at last / sentimentalized like a child / ask you to respect for once / the limits of your vain selfish life / before my special peace with the world / I say peace to you, descendants / in proportion to our relative earthly existence, ETERNAL PEACE.” This order of honourable and wise life could only be achieved in his native land at the cost of struggles, in the pursuit of literary life, always taking care that the expression of one's views did not come up against the retaliation of the authorities, since the Romanian political power, which was constantly seeking to discipline the Hungarians in Transylvania, always asserted its interests very harshly, and violently if it felt the need.
Consequently, perhaps only the ever-vigilant intellect, prudence and a certain tactical sense offered the possibility of action. In his poem Kantáta (Cantata) Csaba Lászlóffy, wrestling with the uneasy experiences of editing, has asserted his belief in the protective role of common sense. An oppressed and intimidated national community was in particular need of a credible assessment of its current situation, and of an effective strategy for self-defence. The “tisztafej” (cleanhead) (as the people of Cluj-Napoca are well aware) referred to in the poem referred to the activities of the editorial staff member who had to check the proofs before going to press, to ensure that nothing remained in the text that might arouse the suspicions of the authorities. The multi-part poem concludes with the lines: “the rotary machine has started accurately / the strict order of words has been restored / but reason must be guarded against / even in the most blinding clarity / otherwise in the great confusion / the earth too could easily turn upside down / and to put things in order there will be little / a >clean head<.”
Bitter experiences
The optimistic tone of his poetic beginnings (which mostly broke through the disappointment of bitter experiences) became noticeably bitter from the late 1970s onwards, and the poems written in this period increasingly reflected the poet's historical anxieties in the wake of his experiences of the endangerment of the Hungarian community and culture in Transylvania. In these poems, historical lamentation and communal lamentation were intensified, and personal fate was subordinated to the increasingly prevalent anxiety. The poems El innen halál (Get out of here, Death), the more recent messages on fragments of the clay tablets, Hazulról hazámig (From Home to Home), Évszakok városai (Cities of the Seasons), Élettől életig (From Life to Life), Hétvég, századvég – világvég(e)? (Weekend, End of the Century - End of the World?), Forgatókönyv a karosszékben (Script in the Armchair), and poems written to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, gave an oratorio-like account of the poet's sinister conclusions and anxieties. The elegy of the sense of the situation was almost an irredeemable historical condition.
I say reflection is the only thing that's warming
our feet are as soft and slippery as autumn flies
To die before your death, what an embarrassing and stupid joke
fear not, lying flat, let not the master's superiority humble you
When life has anointed me with gentle violet colours
hide not in shadow from light and brightness
from whip-smart dog-hearted whimpering or
the whine of the furious tamer’s laughter fuse as one beyond the barrier
where no other heroic artifact in the earth is an ancient relic
only death assimilating with dark shadows
The personal and community experiences of the last and most oppressive period of brutal tyranny under the dictator Ceauşescu in Bucharest were given shape in the poems of the 1991 volume Ki fehérlik vigyázzállásban? (Who stands at Attention in White?) This book of poems was due to be published in 1987, but was delayed by censorship. The simple black paper binding of the book seemed to indicate that the black cover itself had a symbolic purpose: Csaba Lászlóffy's book of poems was in fact the “black book” of Transylvanian Hungarian lyric poetry. It was a sad and poignant poetic account of the almost unbearable public, human and spiritual atmosphere that weighed down the Hungarian intellectuals of Transylvania and Hungarians in Transylvania as a whole during the last years of the dictatorship. The bitter, almost hopeless mood, the gloomy imagery and even the structure of the poems expressed the severe and dark political atmosphere of repression.
At that time – in the mid-1980s – the poet from Cluj-Napoca was not allowed to mention oppression, which is why he recalled in his poems, in a manner similar to stage or prose work, the dark periods of history, such as the suppression of the 1848-49 war of independence or the Bach era. In these periods of emergency, and in the similar Romanian dictatorship, moral turpitude and common treachery were the signs of the almost unbearable pressure under which many souls and spines were crushed. And those who could hold their ground remained silent. The compulsion to remain silent also appears in the poems of the volume, as we read at the end of the poem A HÁZ, aki vagyunk (THE HOUSE We Are): “from such silence or to conceal everything / knowledge or madness, patience is born / this lie will come to a peak/ that is why history has never yet come to a dead end.”
This historical madness and horror was also evoked by the vocabulary of the poems: darkly glowing metaphors and similes in the tradition of Romantic lyricism. One of the poems in the volume, entitled Anyanyelv (Mother Tongue), which is also addressed to the poet's son, speaks of the 'tightrope walk of the wingless intellect'. Yes, the poem was indeed - in Transylvania, in Hungarian, in the darkest years of tyranny - such a dangerous 'tightrope walk', always in danger of falling. The severe experiences also left their mark on his poetic structures. Most of Csaba Lászlóffy's poems are truncated sonnets, fragments that seem incomplete and unfinished, or dramatic monologues struggling with burnout. It is a monologue of individual and communal drama, and at that time, in the mid-1980s, it was not yet possible to know what the outcome of this drama would be. Such dramatic monologues include Kiséret fiam zongorafutamaihoz (Accompanying My Son’s Piano Passages), Ötödik kvartett (Fifth Quartet in Commemoration of T. S. Eliot), Jelenések – Kaffka Margit (Revelations - Margit Kaffka), Jelenések - A pipafüstön áttűnő Vajda (Revelations - Vajda Through the Haze of Pipe Smoke), Virágtövön is téboly (Madness on a Flower Stem), or Parsifal, which was already an open protest against the poet's unbearable public experiences in the memory of Richard Wagner, wounded by and in opposition to his own age.
Historical changes
As a consequence of the historical changes that took place at the end of the 1980s, Csaba Lászlóffy was able to reveal his previously hidden poems to the public, but it cannot be said that he was able to live the encouraging and mobilising experiences of liberation in a lasting way. In the decades that followed, he had to continue to face difficult struggles, and these continued to give rise to dramatic, rhapsodic poetic works. The poems in his densely serialised volumes continue to move in an intellectual and emotional vein that combines personal and communal reckoning. These books of poetry are also distinguished: The inspirational role of the lessons of Transylvanian history and culture gave a tragic character to the poems, which often took stock of the poet's realizations in the form of dramatic monologues, such as A más világra tévedt képzelet (Imagination Lost in Another World), Jelenések – Katona József (Revelations – József Katona), A hely üzenete (Message of the Place), Sorskantáta (Fate cantata), Jelenések – Krúdyval a Margitszigeten (Revelations – on Margaret Island with Krúdy ), Tárgyak (Objects) (otherwise commemorating Ágnes Nemes Nagy), A tengeri kígyó mozaik kockái (The Mosaic Tesserea of the Sea Serpent) and Mozart-variációk (Mozart Variations) – mostly inspired by the greats of literature and art, these poems define the moral role and mission of the creative person.
It is a long tradition of our poetry, and I am thinking of poets such as Mihály Vörösmarty, János Arany and Mihály Babits, to record moral principles and moral strategies by recalling their literary heritage. Csaba Lászlóffy's poems also present the personalities and works of his predecessors as moral or artistic examples, especially in the poems that evoke the legacy of contemporary Transylvanian literary figures such as József Méliusz, Jenő Kiss, János Székely, Andor Bajor, Domokos Szilágyi, Gizella Hervay and others. These are not merely portraits of friends, but rather “ars poetica”: they show the intellectual horizon of the poet from Cluj-Napoca. At other times, he evoked the moral example of the classics of Hungarian poetry or the Transylvanian tradition, such as Dániel Berzsenyi in Halotthamvasztás, Sándor Farkas Bölöni in the poem Az 1836-os virradatra várva (Waiting for the Dawn of 1836), and the great prince in the sonnet sequence A Bethlen Gábor földmozgás kiterjedése (The Spread of Gábor Bethlen's Earthmoving) (written in 1979), the latter's “master sonnet” juxtaposing the great historical past with the disappointing present with a suffocating sense of the past: “Your posterity is a vulnerable loneliness: / great dreams, plans, / our sacrifices are getting late; / the idiom of carrion tracts / is hard to navigate without you.”
Csaba Lászlóffy's poetry became more and more saturnine, even tragic, as time passed: pondering the fate of the Hungarian community and the mother tongue in Transylvania, he came to more and more sinister conclusions and visions. In his poem Erdélyi ősz (Autumn in Transylvania), he gave a picture of his well-being in the lyrical tradition of his predecessors, and later on this was expressed in poetic rhapsodies. Like many others, the poem Elégia térdig aszfaltban (Elegy knee-deep in asphalt) (written in 1996) showed a dramatic structure, while later poems recorded the struggles of the soul, often in a fragmented construction (with a kind of “pseudo-grammar”). Such a poetic structure always expresses the turmoil of the poet's personality, the drama he is experiencing inwardly.
In Csaba Lászlóffy's poetry, the fear of death, the funeral farewell, was repeatedly expressed, for example in his poems entitled Sírfelirat az élőknek (Epitaph for the Living) and Tejútra hágunk (Embarking on the Milky Way), the latter also voiced the distressing feeling of the destruction of language: “Culture is a strange flower of charm: / sometimes it closes by itself. / After the destruction of image and language, the brain / without face and sound does not know who you are; / grass covers the memory. / Whether or not you're on a milk run - the shock: / Were you? Were you? You cannot miss / ancient misery, modern madness.” The aphoristic poem A Trianoni kihívás (The Trianon Challenge) marked the most distressing experience in the endangerment of the mother tongue, as Trianon, as a symbolic call-word, meant not only the mutilation of the national territory, but also the endangerment of national existence. We read the following: “Words / are crumbling / in library rarities, and you, like a slave, would bend down / seven times / to save what still protects / (the language), knowing full well that there is no other therapy / left for you - / to dig out the collapsed / within the unbroken walls / from under the / rubble of the past!”
The composition and the poetics of the poems followed the rhapsodic surge of emotions, expressing the anxieties of the troubled soul with the interrupted sentences, with the use of images drawn only at the level of signs. As fellow Budapest poet István Ágh observed of him, “His monologues transcend the usual discipline of utterance, creating discipline and structure in another dimension, in another freedom. The way he sets language on the monotony of private speech, following the logical sequences, he climbs, runs, jumps over the barriers of riddles until he solves the riddles. Like a river, as the rapids of the whole world flow - full of spiritual and natural rapture. At the heart of his programme is a reflection on human existence in the history of culture. Its linguistic power is expressed in the balance of story and state, emotion and reason, in some powerful interplay beyond language. It is always striving for completeness, in which the most sublime, the so-called poetic subject, can be accommodated, even the newspaper article, alien but still relevant passages from any field of human activity, direct and indirect experience.”
A versatile talent
The versatility indicated here is also characteristic of Csaba Lászlóffy's talent in other literary genres, as a narrator and playwright he also had a very versatile and successful activity, which I will not go into now, as I have undertaken to present his poetry in his individual voice. In conclusion, I will only point out that Csaba Lászlóffy's poetry (like that of his contemporaries: Domokos Szilágyi, Gizella Hervay, Zsigmond Palocsay, Gézi Vásárhelyi and above all his brother, Aladár Lászlóffy, who was two years older than him), the poetry of Csaba Lászlóffy gives voice to the Hungarian experiences, struggles, hopes and disappointments of Transylvania in the second half of the twentieth century: historical hopes and historical disappointments. Like those listed above, his poetry was a community message, and as such will remain valid in the future. Perhaps I could conclude by recalling a lecture given by Sándor Kányádi at a meeting of the Austrian Pen Club in Vienna in 1967. “Hungarian poetry in Romania is not without a future: it is inexhaustible in both readers and poets. Its power lies in the fact that, in the words of Hamlet, >holding up a mirror to nature<, it tries and is able to >show the shape and imprint of the body of time itself of the century from its own sphere, taking special care not to overwhelm the modesty of nature<. And although his experimental spirit has not waned in half a century, from the surrealistic free verse to the regular sonnet, from the long poem to the micro-poem, he tries out every form of art (with or without success), fights his own generational battles [...], assumes the role of cultural connector in the spirit of his predecessors, fights for the purity of humanity, for the freedom of the individual and of humanity”. Csaba Lászlóffy's poetry was born in the wake of this “struggle for freedom”, representing and serving the personal and community demands of humanity.