Zsuzsa Demeter: László Lázár Lövétei
If the lines of force of Transylvanian Hungarian literature after 1989 were to be linked to generational beginnings, to a generational lineage, the generation of László Lázár Lövétei, born in 1972 in Lövéte, would have to be marked first. We are in Cluj-Napoca in the first half of the 1990s, and the members of this generation, Vince Fekete, Attila Sántha, Noémi László, János Dénes Orbán, make their debut in the Helikon magazine's insert called Serény Múmia (The Busy Mummy), founded by Vince Fekete. Whether there has been such a significant generational shift in Transylvania since then is a good question: however, we have enough literary history to say that the members of this generation did not publish an anthology, but they did use every other forum aimed at the literary public: manifesto, publishing house, journal to promote their programme of popular literature cult, as they had formulated in their “transmedia” manifesto.
„Két szék közt játszódó költészet" (“Poetry between two chairs”) (A névadás öröme (The Joy of Naming), 1997; Távolságtartás (Restraining), 2000)
The group start, the generation's application, also launched a series of independent volumes: in 1997 László Lázár Lövétei's first volume, A névadás öröme (The Joy of Naming) (as part of the Előretolt Helyőrség (Forward Guards) series), was published, and it was also thanks to the attention paid to the generation that such eminent critics as István Fried paid attention to Lövétei's debut. Lövétei's last, eighth volume of poetry was published in 2021 under the title Feketemunka (Illegal Work), as Györgyi Pécsi, who wrote the most comprehensive career profile, reminds us, Lövétei's volumes are worth reading backwards in time: the kind of “cathartic restlessness”[1] that accompanies this backwards reading shows “a poetry of uniform purity”, in the words of László Sturm, a series of “poems of suspected masterpiece”. It was László Sturm, by the way, who in 2009 drew a career portrait of Lövétei with threevolumes published: his statement that "This poetry is set between “his own text and texts of others, desire and reality, life and death, between »two chairs«, but increasingly fills the space under the bench”,[2] can be maintained and completed even after eight volumes: Lövétei was able to define and maintain the intermediacy of his poems in such a way that his distancing himself from them also means moving away.
What exactly this somewhat enigmatic phrase covers can be grasped by looking at the stories that unfold from each of Lövétei's volumes: From the volumes so far, it is clear that some of the more distinctive stories, themes and lyrical habitus can be discerned, the foreshadowing of which can be seen in the first two volumes (The Joy of Naming and the publication of Restraining in 2000). This statement is still valid, even if we emphasize the depoetized, anti-lyrical language of his first two volumes, when there is apparently nothing to suggest the classical poetic language of his later volumes: the Transylvanian literature of the early 1990s can be described as a gesture of dissociation from everything that characterised literature and the role of the writer/creator before 1989. However, the general strident opposition to traditional poetic discourse does not characterise Lövétei's early poetry. Boredom, blasirism, the mapping of “inhabitable space”, the waiting stance ('For it is nothing more / than a waiting stance: / though the spell of the agora fades / I leave it empty – my three coffees a day, my other / worries will fill it”, Állampolgári kötelesség felfüggesztve (Citizenship Commitments Suspended)) are combined with a poetic habit that captures reality through a piquant lens, not without cynicism and self-irony, and distances itself from it. The free verse of absence, of nothingness, of boredom, of passivity, of withdrawal, is counterpointed by the bound form of the first and last poems (Nem bohóc, de (No a Clown, but); Kitérő és kanyar vissza (Detour and turn back)): the inclusion of the ancient poetic tradition in a volume, its symbolic, opening and closing place, in the light of the knowledge of the previous volumes, also indicate Lövétei's departure from a poetic tradition to which his relationship is not yet obvious, since the stakes are the creation of his own world. (“I named Boreas a propeller / when my boat was full of water. / I could not find a suitable name for Zephyr. / And in the meantime I had to swim. // The Ventilator is definitely unpoetic./ Though that's something. Especially if I just focus on the cause. / My stuff is laid out to dry.” A névadás öröme (The Joy of Naming)) The delineation of the boundaries of his own world, the naming of the relationship with the poetic tradition, the delineation of his own state of being in general, results in a fragmented, short-sentence manner of speaking, and this is essentially the characteristic of his first two volumes. Within his generation, however, Lövétei's first two volumes also mark an independent poetic language and thematic that cannot be confused with anyone else's: the first two volumes of his poetry record and explore the boredom of everyday relationships, the “nothingness” and boredom as a state of being, dosed with subtle irony and self-reflection. Or, as László Szilasi writes in his short review in Látó (Visionary): "The text entitled Állampolgári kötelesség felfüggesztve (Citizenship Commitment Suspended) clearly marks the main trajectory of this poetry: instead of expressing environmental geography and states of mind, avoiding the temptations of the agora, it takes a position of expectation: “everything can be / the most human problem”. The lyrics of the poem in this volume are the product, the conclusion, of an underlying story. The text is incomprehensible without the construction of this story as a context. But the truth or falsity of the story created by the reader is unverifiable. The responsibility is emphatically the reader's, and the knowledge of this makes for slow reading throughout.”[3]
„Jobb lenne élni” (“I’d rather live”) (Két szék között (Between Two Chairs), 2005)
It is this seemingly aimless state of being that Lövétei kicks down the door in the poems of his third volume, the weightless playfulness is replaced by a poetic language that no longer allows the "simple recording" of things. The author, who is battling cancer, brings to the table perhaps his best volume to date with his poems published by Kalligram in 2005 under the title Két szék között (Between Two Chairs). The previous boredom, the feeling of nothingness, is replaced by a confrontation with death and non-existence, and although we are apparently reading a kind of hospital diary (there are similar attempts in contemporary Transylvanian Hungarian literature, Annamária Kinde's last volume, Húzódhatsz közelebb (You Can Draw Closer), in which, although it records the everyday events of the hospital, the weight of the awareness of death and the constant questions that overlay everyday life heightens Lázár Lövétei's minimalist poetic language. “The poet continues to discuss his personal well-being and his small idleness in verse” writes Györgyi Pécsi in her study quoted above, “He refers to his illness and excruciating pain, but from here the poem aims at the eternal fundamental questions of poetry and existence: if his existence is degraded, why wait for treasure, and what is worth anything if you are going to die anyway, and how does death change the essence? Hesitating contemplation becomes the poet's characteristic attitude, and the serious turn of view and thought changes the poem's manner and linguistic register, and in a surprising turn it makes a strong rejection of tradition, namely in the direction of the classic national traditions.”[4]
The most beautiful pieces of Lövétei's philosophical poetry can be read in Between Two Chairs, and while in the first two volumes there are only sporadic references to classical literature, in the third volume there are numerous allusions to Attila József, János Arany, Kosztolányi, Babits, Jenő Dsida, Ahmatova, Berzsenyi, Ady, György Petri and Pilinszky. This volume is an open reckoning and a bringing into play of the literary tradition, which is also adapted to the texts of the poets' predecessors in its genre: a series of psalms and elegies quote the classics of Hungarian literature in a way that “unmistakably assumes a stronger kinship with them: it also, to some extent, takes on their habitus and manners.”[5] However, Lövétei not only transposes, but also displaces, personalises the literary tradition: he speaks, reflects, writes on, but above all he indicates, in his nothingness, the poetic handholds along which he reinterprets the relationship of his poems in his first two volumes to the world. Last but not least, it is precisely by bringing the literary tradition into play that Lövétei is prevented from excessive pathos and self-pity. As a gesture of distance, quotation gives perspective to the uncertainty that is imposed on everyday life, putting doubt and despair into a different context.
Let us take part 2 of his poem Hol volt, hol nem (Once upon a time) as an example:
“Not the first case within a year:
»I'll sign my name, I thought, in the book,
to be remembered one way or another«
(and only very rarely more than that)...
Now it's over. I'm interested in everything,
except this: my masterpiece, the clean slate
(and it's a good thing I didn't think of anything,
because everything is still intact –
I've been training for the last round for a year,
and a new piece of data always kicks in)...
I’d rather live, and then – »Round and round...«
than rotting here under a paper sky –
then put me in the book,
if I matter at all..."
The opening verse of the volume, the main verse, Magánzsoltár (Private Psalm), which has become a familiar theme in the Lövétei volumes, continues the topic already known from the first two volumes, and also sets the mood for the whole volume. We can listen to Lövétei's private moments and his agonies, which he observes with astonishing objectivity. “I never trusted anybody including myself. / Today I really have nothing to do. / Twenty-nine years have passed in which / Everything has come one after another by chance.”
It is a good question how to deal with the traditional approach of the poems that start with the line “I had to get used to cancer / as a leaf to a branch at the age of twenty”, which includes a series of great poetic predecessors. To what extent are the consciously assumed quotations primary in relation to his own text, what is the attitude that Lövétei adapts to or rejects? István Fried reads the texts as role-poems, in which a “life of one's own” emerges from the mixture and complicity of canonised tradition and one's own poetry, a life that can only be traced out in the poems or experienced and found in them (a recurring theme in Lövétei's later eclogues): Lövétei's life-situations, writes István Fried “took on literary existentialist overtones, becoming aware of the ironic reactions, dereterising quotation techniques, and the web-like nature of the individual thrown into the poetic centuries” and, having been confronted with the “desire to create order, to find one's bearings in a confused existence (...) with the desire to return to subjectivised textual worlds (Arany, Kosztolányi, Attila József, Babits, etc.) (...), the faltering Lövétei Lázár poems began to show an increased willingness to experiment alongside the spectacular gestures of reflecting on tradition.”[6]
The creation of a constricted space-time of his own, the creation of a new story, is the central core of Lövétei's third volume: the mixture of the evoked textual tradition and his own, objective poetic language results in a way of speaking that becomes a series of truly “masterpiece-like” poems precisely because of its elaborate but posture-free account.
„Árkádiában éltem én is" ("I also used to live in Arcadia")
Árkádia-féle (Arcadia-like) (selected poems, 2009); Zöld (Green) (poems, 2011); Alkalmi (Occasional) (poems, 2017); Miféle harag (What Kind of Anger) (poems, 2019)
It is no coincidence that after Between Two Chairs Lövétei comes out with a compilation, the Arkadia cycle. Besides the rusted material of his first three volumes, the Arkadia cycle, which is the last cycle of the volume, is the starting point of his volume of eclogues, Zöld (Green), and it is the latter volume that he revisits in the poems of Miféle harag (What Kind of Anger): the poems of the Green volume are complemented by the Sivatag (Desert) cycle, indicating the close connection between the poems and the volumes written in the 2010s. The poems from the Arcadia cycle are also used in his volume Alkalmi (Occasional): the poems “Két szék között” (“Between Two Chairs”), Poétai recept a “Két szék között”-höz (“Poetic Recipe for Between Two Chairs” and Mindenszentek után (After All Saints) are taken from the Arcadia cycle and transferred to Alkalmi (Occasional), reflecting on the theme of Lövétei's third volume in a self- and reinterpretative gesture, a palinody.
After the poems of Between Two Chairs, critics rightly took an expectant stance: after the sometimes resigned, sometimes litigious struggle with death and the sublime, after another chance, what kind of poetic language and what kind of themes could Lövétei's poetry expand along.
If we wish to identify the more distinctive features of the Lövétei volumes in 2010, we must first of all mention the dominance of the Vergilian eclogues. If we read Lövétei's third volume as a kind of visits of Dante to Inferno (but some interpreters, such as Noémi László, believe that the poet, like Orpheus, walks through the underworld of poetry in the footsteps of his Eurydice, the great poem, and that the volume can therefore be read as a creation story), we can return to the land of Arcadia in these volumes. The motif already appears in Between Two Chairs, but in what context, of course, is a question. The continuity between the volumes is reinforced by the inclusion of the ancient textual tradition in the previously familiar context, which is based mostly on Hungarian classics. We read a series of masterfully crafted Vergilian eclogues, but the dialogue and role-playing of Pásztor és Laci bácsi/Lacikám (a költő?) (The Shepherd and Uncle Laci/My dear Laci (the poet?)) unfolds far from idyllic Arcadia: the events of the 21st century no longer allow either the poet or the Shepherd to make a gesture of withdrawal/restraining. What option does the poet have then? The answer lies somewhere in the genre chosen and the literary pretext invoked: “Lövétei” writes Györgyi Pécs, “recognizes and defines himself in a vast (sustaining, reinforcing) literary tradition, and like the Gothic church builders or the painters of the Middle Ages, he does not want to separate himself from it, but to adapt to the ideal model with playfulness and humility, and to create something similar, he moves only a bit, quarter of a degree, but this tiny separation makes him congenially unique.”[7]
This very unique and specific characteristic also stems from the contrast between the relatively closed, well-defined framework in terms of form and content and the way in which Lövétei's themes are presented. Eclogue poetry is a coded genre, hexameter seeming to have difficulty with everyday poetic language and reality. One might think, until one reads the sometimes ironic, down-to-earth dialogues of Green or What Kind of Anger, the question, then, with Lövétei's modern eclogues, is where the author departs from literary tradition: and it is precisely in this everyday poetic language, familiar from earlier Lövétei volumes, that this question is to be found. Lövétei's hexameters are deceptive: they suggest lightness and light-heartedness, counterbalanced by the irony of the speakers. However, Lövétei's Arcadia is far from idyllic: behind the apparent idyll, the poet is faced with anger, disillusionment or, as the cycle title of What Kind of Anger? suggests, isolation. In a certain sense, the poems of What Kind of Anger make Lövétei go to hell again, but this time he does not go to the underworld of poetry, but descends into the depths of the anti-poetry world. And as in Between Two Chairs, intertextual motifs, the lines of great predecessors (notably Arany, Vörösmarty, Horace and Virgil) will be the points of reference that offer a way out of this maze. That is, if there is a way out, since the Green, and then its complement, What Kind of Anger, is also a story of decline: not only of the world, but also of the decline of lyric poetry (Ötödik ecloga (Fifth Eclogue)).
The way out is a stoic, contemplative attitude, even if, at a book launch in Budapest, the author said of his eclogues on What Kind of Anger, “It's pretty much about my mood, but that's not new under the sun, because almost everyone in literature has had a mood. If there's anything important about this new book, it's the language you choose to use to stammer away your bad mood…”[8] Nevertheless, it is also clear from the dialogues that in the role-playing of pastoral poetry, the poet is left to his own devices, and hexameter is no longer a finger exercise (“It's no longer an eclogue, it's just a shabby, provincial satire…”; “And slowly hexameter becomes an ugly routine”). The volumes of the 2010s are an imprint of the poet's state of mind. They are lyrical diaries, experimenting with form, bringing tradition into dialogic play, sometimes with a self-indulgent play of language of a world that is not at all self-indulgent.
Feketemunka (Illegal work) (poems, 2021)
"because now I do know what to write about
Illegal work will be the title of the volume
will be about my illegal working days
I expect this to really put together the »LLL-reloaded«
so far the story is not only true but also real
it's a pity that I was sniffing all over the place
I am looking for the language for report-poems
what makes it »poetry«
I lie of course
I don't give a shit if it's poetry
I simply have to write it out of me
besides I've seen a crow on a spike (poem) nobody knows
what triggers the reader's »drooling«
I lie of course
because I really know what makes the text factory work
at least in theory
find the language and the point of view (...)
there are (would have been) plenty of stories
for me and my father
especially for my father
would deserve not only a poetry book
but those few years deserve a novel
while he was living in a Dacia 1100 as an illegal worker
on the Rose Hill in Budapest” [9]
The relatively longer quotation was published in 2018 in the pages of Helikon in Cluj-Napoca, and if anyone was wondering what kind of poetic language Lövétei switched to after the eclogues, Műhelynapló (Workshop Diary) could answer their questions, because it is hard to summarize more precisely than Lövétei what his poetry collection, which was actually published in 2021 under the title Feketemunka (Illegal Work), is about. Lövétei has also made use of the gesture of self-interpretation on other occasions, if we only think of the poem Poétai recept a „Két szék között"-höz (Poetic Recipe for Between Two Chairs).
Since then, we have also come to know what the under-stylised poetic language is, the search for which is only recorded in the Műhelynapló (Workshop Diary) (“Only the word / That Knut Hamsun's kind of “real word”, “most illegal word”, “cruelly illegal word should be"is missing” / Because you already know / What your problem is”, Illegal Worker). Lyrical reportage, sociography, guest-worker literature, poverty literature, role poem or situation lyric? With his documentary life stories of the Székely guest workers of the early 1990s, Lövétei opens wide the gates of genre, and even if fiction lies deep in the depoetised language and documentary story, which is reinforced, for example, by a reference to Petri in his poem Az utolsó munkás (The Last Worker) (“It was an ordinary day / Are you paying for something?ˮ), the reader may well ask the question: where do the boundaries of literary art begin? (This question is also asked by István Fried in his review in Helikon.)[10] According to the literary historian who has always followed the poet's career: “The poetic language of the individual poems, the contrast between the friend and the interlocutor, the quotation from “our priest” that emerges from memory, and the mottos and intertexts, the rarely excellent juxtaposition of different spheres of existence at the cost of the rhythm of thought, The “rhetoric”, which can be put in quotation marks, creates the moments in which it moves out of the monotony and monophony of (poetic) discourse and opens up the possibility of a multiplicity that is distorted to the extreme, often driven by false images.”[11]
The poems of Illegal Work are worth reading in one sitting: only in this way can the linguistic layers of the dialogues, poet and guest worker, that have become familiar in Lövétei's earlier volumes be revealed. The poems can only function together, as part of a volume, and only in this way can the language of the illegal workers' vulnerability be understood.
The reader/critic is responsible for the story created, writes Szilasi in his review. And what kind of story can be read in Lövétei's poetry? The genre, thematic and formal diversity of the individual volumes essentially covers the variations of approaches to the same theme: the subject poet's attempts to create self and language, his story of creation. Distanced, but still elusive.
Or in the words of László Lázár Lövétei:
“Getting up at five in the morning,
and setting out of the house.
Standing in front of your nonstop counter and
drinking coffee.
Watching the dawn outside,
and let the party start.
Having a little fun just to
Regret it the same day.
Making good and bad decisions,
on how to proceed.
Walking through the trees, seeing the land,
and rejoice in silence.
Writing a little eclogue,
or not give a shit:
sitting on the grass and then elegantly
retire.”
(Ecloga type)
[1] Györgyi Pécsi: Mint gótikus templomépítők (As Gothic Church Builders) (László Lázár Lövétei: Árkádia-féle (Arkadia-like)).Hitel, 2010, Vol. 23, No. 7, pp. 119-123.
[2] László Strum: Az unatkozás dicsérete. Portré Lövétei Lázár Lászlóról. (The Praise of Boredom. Portrait of László Lázár Lövétei). In Andrea Ekler - Kinga Erős (ed.): Pályatükrök. Húsz portré fiatal alkotókról. (Career paths. 20 Portraits on Young Artists) János Arany Foundation of the Hungarian Writers' Association – Kortárs Kiadó, Budapest, 2009, pp. 97-103, 103.
[3] László Szilasi: László Lázár Lövétei: A névadás öröme (The Joy of Naming). Látó, 2002, Vol. 13, No. 4, pp. 113.
[4] Györgyi Pécsi: i. m., 120.
[5] Ibid.
[6] István Fried: Lövétei Lázár László két kötete (Two volumes of Lázár László Lövétei). Forrás, 2012, No. 5, pp. 34-45.
[7] Pécsi: i. m., 123.
[8] Eszter Kovács: Bemutatták Lövétei új kötetét (Lövétei's new book was presented), www.eirodalom.ro/aktualis/item/ 4243-bemutatták-lövétei-új-kötetétét.html
[9] László Lázár Lövétei: Műhelynapló (Workshop Diary). Helikon, 2018, Vol. 29, No. 22, pp. 16.
[10] István Fried: „Baráber-líra” (?) (Baraber's Lyric) (?). Helikon, vol. 32, No. 24, pp. 19.
[11] Ibid.
[2022]