László Marsall is one of the most distinctive figures in modern Hungarian poetry. Some might even describe him as eccentric, if not for the misleading connotations of that word. Compared to ordinary people, every genuine poet is, in some sense, somewhat eccentric – and among poets themselves, those considered eccentrics are often likened to figures like Sándor Weöres or László Marsall. In writings about him, he has been called, among other things, Proteus, Orpheus, and Sisyphus – each name provoking thought. The chief master of his youth, Sándor Weöres, compared himself to Proteus, the mythical being capable of changing shape and possessing unlimited knowledge of both past and future. Poets, by their very nature, are symbolically ‘prophetic’ beings, and may still be so today; on the other hand, as subjective poets, they often portray themselves or speak in many guises and forms. We know Orpheus, that legendary figure, as the archetype of poets who, with his marvellous song, enchanted nature and even the gods themselves. Sisyphus was a clever king who once captured Death. His punishment is to push a rock eternally up a mountain, only for it to roll back down each time. He is usually seen as a symbol of futile labour, but since Camus, he has also been regarded as an example of human greatness.

These things are common knowledge, yet they are worth recalling when we aim to describe the poetry of László Marsall. He is a poet who, aware of the disintegration of the Orphic idea of harmony, nonetheless strives to forge a complete world. This has been most clearly and perfectly realised in his love poetry. He, too, has buried a teenage son and a wife. Love, affection, and death are intertwined. He is a Protean poet, which we might also call experimental, with the understanding that the same poetic personality underpins every phase and volume of his work. The term applies to him for another reason as well: in his sense of time, past, present, and future are equally significant. True, he is not an omniscient figure, but a man seeking to know and understand. Marsall is not a cunning poet and has not incurred the wrath of the gods; the hardships he has faced came rather from the small hells of this earth. For him, too, Sisyphus is a symbol of the conscious human being who stands firm.

Alongside the heroes of ancient mythology, it is perhaps worth mentioning a Hungarian type as well: the ‘garabonciás’, the wandering wizard–student of folk belief. He is also called ‘student’, and his figure has both destructive and healing traits. People say that something of the child remains in a poet forever. László Marsall is an eternal child, an eternal student, who retained his playful disposition to the very end. The games of the adult, however, are not the same as those of the child: they are far more conscious and directed. In his confessional prose, Marsall recounts some of his childhood games and adventures. Once grown, his first great experience of play was sport. For seventeen years, he was a first-division, national-team volleyball player, and in those days, even at that level, the sport still counted as genuine play rather than a profession. Volleyball is also a team sport and thus multiplies the demands of discipline and attention. Since it is a human activity, it can offer a poet an opportunity to represent a view of the world. His prose poem Beszámoló a röplabda leütésének pillanatáról (lit. Report on the Moment of a Volleyball Spike), which consists of a single sentence, takes four or five minutes to read, and what emerges in this ‘moment’ is not the lightness of the game but the duty of standing one’s ground, and the agonising ecstasy of it:

“…gently, very gently, as if you were stroking the incomparable gold-leaf hair of your sleeping little boy, and yet, in a way that preserves the nation, you strike the ball, very gently indeed, slicing–stroking it down straight and unanswerably, behind the block, onto the cinders, so that there is no chest-swelling superiority, no joy, only an animal (or angelic?) sadness, rather the temptation of grief – that follows in your falling away, and it rains down on your brow and face as the cinder-grains from the slapped ball into your eyes; and perhaps you would be content if this were the last moment of the match and you did not have to repeat – yes, now you are a forlorn Sisyphus – and who knows how many times yet! – the same thing in the same way, and perhaps even more gently, jumping even higher.”

Aside from sport, mathematics also provided a space for play. Despite his interests, László Marsall did not see the 1950s as a suitable time to continue his philosophical studies. He enrolled in a mathematics–physics degree programme, and his passion for mathematics persisted throughout his career. After childhood attempts, he began to engage with poetry earnestly at the age of twenty, and consequently, with language as well. And language – especially poetic language – lends itself to play. The sequence of moments that make up a volleyball spike, the formulation and possible solution of a mathematical problem, and the creation of a poetic text all require that a person consider many and varied variables in thinking and acting. Attila József wrote that “lyric is logic, but not science”. Mathematics is both logic and science, yet it is unusual for someone to seek a natural connection between the two. One key innovation of László Marsall’s poetic universe is precisely his effort to establish an organic link between these two languages and logics. The vocabulary of everyday people and that of mathematics are two different worlds, but both were created and are used by humans. Philosophical, linguistic, and mathematical logic, too, differ from one another. According to theoretical mathematicians, only theirs is the true logic, and although it cannot be considered perfect either, it operates with a far smaller margin of error than the logic of language. It is, at any rate, a fact that in the twentieth century the science of logic increasingly became mathematical logic, and philosophy and theories of language were renewed as well. In other words, there is an academic background to László Marsall’s poetic experiment.

Strikingly late at thirty-seven – already mature – he published his first volume of poetry, selected from several hundred texts. He drew attention mainly through his experiments in structure and language. He questioned the reading of a poem line by line, stanza by stanza. Folyó a világ végén (lit. River at the End of the World) is a complete cycle of poems that can be read both horizontally and vertically. The very sequence of reading may be called into question. A vasárnap útjai és útvesztői (lit. Roads and Labyrinths of Sunday) hints at complexity even in its title. This work, consisting of nineteen textual segments, can only be printed on a sheet that can be spread out like a map; the individual parts are linked by arrows, allowing for several possible reading orders, and there are dead ends too, like side corridors in an unfamiliar castle. Yet the work follows a clear progression, while depicting the development of a relationship. In italics, the following statements are read: Ködben kővel a ködöt eltalálni [lit. To hit the fog with a stone in the fog] – legyen világosság [let there be light] – Mozi [lit. Cinema] – Étterem–Espresso [lit. Restaurant – Espresso] – To hit the fog with a stone in the fog – Nő vagy? [lit. Are you a woman?] – Férfi vagy? [lit. Are you a man?]. The final part stands alone, with no connecting arrow; it both repeats and concludes: “ködben kővel a ködöt eltalálni / a szó a szerszám a szó a kő / fölröpül / és Nap legyen világosság / most megszületik a ködből / a világteremtő.” (lit. “to hit the fog with a stone in the fog / the word is the tool, the word is the stone / it flies up / and let there be light / now born from the fog / the creator of the world.”) This piece is a remarkably vivid ars poetica, for every act of artistic creation can be characterised by this poetic image of the impossible, which nonetheless presents the task – the fairy-tale ordeal – as solvable.

An even more extreme example of loosened structure is Tükör a tükörben (lit. Mirror in the Mirror). This is a twelve-part cycle arranged in three columns, where fragments of lines and sentences, words and word-combinations seem to signal confusion and the impossibility of speaking validly. At the same time, the poem is clearly a love lyric – and it is perhaps precisely the experience of harmony that reveals itself here as unutterable in the traditional manner.

Mathematical signs have already appeared in this poem. Still, the insights of that discipline come to the fore most fully much later, in the volume Pókhálófüggvények (lit. Cobweb Functions, 1998), particularly in the cycle Anthroposz tézisei (lit. Theses of Anthropos). For mathematics is not merely a ‘game’ for the poet but a world with a language of its own, carrying metaphysical insights, a world that truly opens only to the few, yet whose fundamental questions of existence can undoubtedly be grasped through his multi-layered poetic meditation Meditációk a matematikáról (lit. Meditations on Mathematics): “Are you the property of human beings alone, or also of other imaginable–thinkable beings, who once were, are or are yet to be born? (…) You know nothing of yourself, of your existence, any more than a tap or the Ocean does. / The question remains: do you exist without us – in all possible and future worlds / that no human or bird has ever seen, that massive wall stretching from alphas to omegas? (…) My task: to herd You and the Monster of Imagination into the same pen. (…) Who elected mathematics as prime minister? (…) Any axiom system can be as beautiful / as the snow on Christmas Eve, snowflakes falling like coins of metal (…) Today I loathe the fact that you will not bend to my craft, / and that I will not bend to You: the equation is not symmetric. / Simple-minded humility will not help, and the orphanhood is humiliating. / But we shall meet again!” For László Marsall, then, poetry and mathematics are siblings, or at least half-siblings, yet their relationship can never be truly harmonious. Not because the goal he sets for himself exceeds his abilities, but because, in theoretical terms, it cannot be realised. In the final analyses, both fields grapple with the questions of finiteness (number, surveyability, constructability, and solvability) and infinity, both in ways thinkable by humans, yet using two different languages. From an epistemological point of view, both mathematics and poetry run up against the limits of what can be known, and neither the ostensibly objective logic of science nor the subjective logic of poetic imagination can cross those boundaries without restriction. The poetic oeuvre, nevertheless, has gained much from the processing of this peculiar parallelism.

It was Sándor Weöres who showed the young poet that a poetic text is hardly considered valid without rhythm and melody. Considering the origins of poetry and its several-thousand-year history, we know that, in folklore, texts were mostly singable, right up to the twentieth century. Myth and – at a theoretical level – ancient poetics, too, are closely linked to poetry, mathematics, and music. Music thus reveals a third system of signs, which has connections with both mathematical and poetic language, but whose essence cannot be captured by human speech, and which likewise leads us towards the infinite (Anthroposz két passzusa a mathesisről [lit. Two Passages of Anthropos on Mathesis]). In this way, three different sign-systems and their theoretical questions are brought into relation with one another in László Marsall’s poetic worldview.

For him, naturally, the most fruitful and far-reaching of these is poetic language. In employing it, and within the creative realm of imagination, music and mathematics repeatedly claim their place alongside poetry. László Marsall often spoke, as if of a symbolic figure, of the ‘angel’ who appears and then “one must sit down and write”. In such moments, a multitude of things, phenomena, and images flow through the creator, who must express this and therefore himself in the work. It is striking that Orpheus, Proteus, Sisyphus, and the ‘garabonciás’ are present both in his store of external knowledge and in his creative personality. To be a Protean nature, for example, one must not only be born but also be trained. Only then can an almost kaleidoscopic variety of poetry be created – not only in genres, verse types, and language use, but also in tone. In this way, László Marsall can be, at times, objectively impersonal, at other times passionately emotional, at times ironic, at times grotesque, and at times absurd. The song-like, the elegiac, the odic, the rhapsodic, and the narrative modes can all be found in his work, often within a single poem. Perhaps the character of this poetry, and, in connection with the ‘angel’, the mention of another concept not much in circulation, may seem surprising. The ‘angel’ also brings with it the atmosphere of the ‘duende’, which we know from the poetry of Federico García Lorca. In Spanish, understanding the ‘duende’ is dark sounds, a mysterious force, the spirit of the earth, and it is not so much with the angel as with the ‘duende’ that the poet must wrestle if he is to approach perfection. As Lorca formulated it: “The magic power of a poem consists in it always being filled with duende, in its baptising all who gaze at it with dark water, since with duende it is easier to love, to understand, and be certain of being loved, and being understood, and this struggle for expression and the communication of that expression in poetry sometimes acquires a fatal character.” (Translated by A.S. Kline)

Alongside the ‘dark sounds’ that allude to the magical, there is always another element constantly present in his poetry – expressed through the clown’s role, that of the jester ready to play. His poem Szavak fickós fortyogása (lit. The Lusty Bubbling of Words) indicates an ars poetica already in its title. A much later poem is just as revealingly titled: Melyben a szerző nem az életkorához illő viselkedésről szól (lit. Wherein the Author Speaks of Behaviour Not Suited to His Age): “Meg kéne már komolyodnom, / méltósággal bazsalyognom, / barátaim sejttetik, / ki mintha jár szélkelepen, / rozsdát reszel roncstelepen, / szójátékos kelekótyát / fintorogva elvetik. // Politizálnom is kéne / közép-kelet kis felében” (lit. “I really ought to settle down, / smile with due dignity, / my friends hint, and mutter, / this fellow who stalks the trade wind, / files rust at the breakers’ yard, / this pun-playing scatterbrain / earns their wrinkled scorn. // I ought to do some politics, too / in this little corner of Central–Eastern Europe.”) The answer to such criticism is, however, one of rejection: “mifenének komolyodnom, / ha jól esik gabalyodnom” (lit. “why on earth should I grow serious / if I enjoy getting myself entangled.”) There is black-and-white magic; the ‘garabonciás’ and the clown both reveal the right and wrong sides of existence, often at the same time. One can play with imagination, with language and with existence itself – to the death, indeed. Among Hungarian precursors of this striving, we may find works by Mihály Csokonai Vitéz, then Dezső Kosztolányi, Sándor Weöres, and Anna Kiss.

This poetic personality is not Janus-faced; at most, we might call him a Janus whose face has multiplied many times over – and from each face a searching, inquiring figure looks back at us. “I remain, unchanged, unwilling to give up writing what I want, while obeying the one who dictates, who inspires, who writes in my stead. I am interested above all in the system of possibilities, that domain in which, from among the endless possibilities that may be imagined by a human being, one of them actually comes to pass. But the others might equally well have come to pass. I am as fascinated by the land of ‘what if?’ and ‘what would have been, if?’ as by the realm of ‘what will be?’, for the latter cannot be precisely discovered either; at most it can be prognosticated. And this is made all the more difficult here and now by the fact that, in the so-called domain of probabilities, in the system of possibilities, we are pushing at the ultimate boundaries.” (Interview with Zoltán Pósa, 2003.) In essence, the poet had already said the same thing back in 1980 in the blurb to Portáncfigurák [lit. Dust dance figures], and this clearly expresses the core of his self-identity.

The link between Protean shape-shifting and self-identity is powerfully shown in another confession: “I am a free man, and consequently my thinking cannot in any way be influenced by any political situation. I am a poet, and I was a pupil of Sándor Weöres, who said that the more personalities a man preserves in himself, and not some single unique individuality, the freer he is. Think of Shakespeare: how many roles he had to live through in a single play! I am a disciple of this outlook, and I believe I shall remain so. (…) I can hardly imagine that if all the devils of hell came up from beneath the earth and began poking me with red-hot irons, I would write any differently than if angels came down.” (Interview with László Györffy, 1993.)

Marsall-the-clown, or the Marshall of clowns, generally does not even wear masks; from different perspectives, under various lights, he reveals different variations of his own face. Sometimes he chooses a double; in the 1970s, he even gave the name Kluzsinszky to one of them, and in the context of the mathematical poems, he spoke of Anthropos; the piece A rendcsinálás Kokérdi Jenő-féle terve (lit. Jenő Kokérdi’s Plan for Putting Things in Order) sketches out a type of person. More often, there is a singular evocation of well-known authors: Rimbaud, ha kérdezné Rimbaud-t (lit. Rimbaud, If He Asked Rimbaud), Részlet Casanova apokrif naplójából (lit. Fragment from Casanova’s Apocryphal Diary), Írnok Csokonai álmában (lit. A Scribe in Csokonai’s Dream). To this group belong his ‘overwritings’, his intertextual play, the most original example of which is the rewriting of one of the foundational poems of modern world lyric. His Változat Apollinaire Égöv című költeményére (lit. Variation on Apollinaire’s ‘Zone’) dates from the turn of the millennium. Although it follows the French poem with considerable fidelity, its alterations succeed in tilting the world of that earlier fin de siècle into a depiction of life experiences belonging to a poet living half a century later. One symbolically rewritten poster text is particularly memorable: “Aki nincs velünk, ellenünk van” (lit. “Those who are not for us are against us”). Every dictatorship adopts this, and it was memorably adapted during the Kádár era [the period of the communist Hungarian People’s Republic].

The clown–playmaster also brings out the absurd. He devises, for example, A függélyes ország terve (lit. Plan for a Vertical Country): placing small countries on planes above one another makes them appear larger, and the resulting vision becomes a ‘Wonder of the World’. Then comes the idea of Város papírmadárból (lit. City from Paper Bird): it recalls a little girl’s paper bird, folded by a Japanese origami artist, and the question arises: what ghost-city plan might be hidden in the unfolded sheet of paper, who would live there and how. The key poem of the flight motif, written in the early 1990s, is Ha szárnyam volna avagy egy lehetőség dimenziói (lit. If I Had Wings, or the Dimensions of a Possibility): “csillag helyett egyenest az Országház tetejére telepednék / s még röptömben rágicsálnék kenyérrel keménytojásokat / – közel a Húsvét – s ott meditálnék új Státusról, Alkotmányról” (lit. “instead of a star I would perch on the roof of the Parliament / still nibbling bread and hard-boiled eggs in mid-flight / – Easter draws near – and there meditate on a new Status, Constitution.”)

Grotesque and absurd often go hand in hand with the hollowing out of the self and various forms of the “I”. In Marsall’s work, the mystery plays and radio plays, as well as a longer, absurd, crime-like short story, offer opportunities for this – and he also wrote a fairy-tale play (Sziporka és a sárkány [lit. Sziporka and the Dragon], 1980–1981). Presumably, it was precisely the possibilities of playing the clown role that drew him towards dramatic forms. In these plays, nothing is clear-cut: neither the characters nor the plot elements. Compared to the complexity of vision in his lyric works, the world in the plays may be called chaotic, and any attempt at creating order is a vain illusion. A mystery play demonstrates this in the most poetic fashion – somewhat paradoxically, since the mystery play is originally a genre of ideological and doctrinal clarity. Amíg a Föld forog (lit. As Long as the Earth Turns), subtitled “buffo mystery for voices” and dedicated “in memoriam Dylan Thomas” (published in volume form in 1980), already signals clowning in its ‘buffo’ character. The work presents the fragility of existence and the cyclical coming-to-be and passing-away of life in the image of a grotesque carnival whirl. Nothing is liberating in the carnival itself; at most, the idea of cyclicity can offer consolation: the almost non-existent plot begins with the birth of a baby whose mother is a midwife and father a gravedigger, and ends, after his death, with the birth of another baby. It is the title that stretches this out into an immeasurable timespan: it will be so As Long as the Earth Turns.

More elegiacally, and with far greater poetic focus, he stages the play of hope and disillusionment, the possible relationship between man and woman, in Hogyan találkozhatnánk, ha… (lit. How Could We Meet if…), an intensely lyrical work that may be called a play of imagination or dream. It revolves around the possibility that “Two human-sized roads and times sometimes meet.” The night train journey symbolises life’s journey; the dream represents dreaming itself, for seeking. The Citer-player is the more knowing ‘raisonneur’, somewhat in the manner of Lucifer, while the Man is a late descendant of Adam, seeking only the Eve of his life. Under the name and person of Arany, he appears to find the desired being, but she disappears, giving the name Tünde. The Citer-player scolds the Man:

“Te vagy hazug. Hogy toporoghass körben,

mentségek után kurkászol. Találsz egy hangot,

a hanghoz nevet, hozzá címet, a címhez csapdafélét,

hurok szorítja torkocskádat s vinnyogsz:

nincs éjszaka, nincs kéz, nincs vers, a semmi van.

Jogodat eljátszottad a nagy álmodozáshoz.

Nincs visszaút. Nyomoztál? Jó. Keresd tovább.”

(lit. “You are the liar. To keep on circling

you rummage for excuses. You find a sound,

a name for the sound, an address for the name,

a trap for the address, you loop

the string around your little throat and whine:

there’s no night, no hand, no verse, there’s only nothing.

You’ve thrown away your right to the great dream.

There’s no way back. You’ve investigated? Fine. Keep looking.”)

Instead of Tünde, only a woman’s voice speaks, and eventually, even this fades away. In Mihály Vörösmarty’s fairy play, on which Marsall’s text is based, Csongor finds his Tünde, and they may be happy in that “harsh, sorrowful, mournful” eternal night. The title of Marsall’s play is the first half of a line of verse, whose continuation is spoken by the women who appear: “Hogyan találkozhatnánk, ha… – …nem váltunk el egymástól soha” (lit. “How could we meet if… – …we had never parted from each other”). Yet even the joining of the torn halves of the line does not bring an encounter; solitude remains irreducible.

Some of Marsall’s dramatic works and a prose piece blend grotesque and absurd clowning with crime-like plots. Such is Tatus és szörnyei (lit. Tatus and His Monsters), and even more so the short story Fővárosi história – avagy az összes lehetséges történés egy szála (lit. Capital Tale – or One Strand of All Possible Events). The explanatory title of the Capital Tale expresses his artistic worldview: on the one hand, there are an incalculable number of possible events; on the other hand, a single event can have many possible tellings. Just as complex is Prof. Kalmár György estébe hajló viszontagságos délutánja (lit. Professor György Kalmár’s Troublesome Afternoon towards Evening). The professor teaches at the humanities faculty of Eötvös Loránd University, and his two best students drag him off to take part in a robbery. György Kalmár (1726–1782) was also an eighteenth-century, forgotten linguist and poet, and the professor is a scholar of that period. In the 1970s, Sándor Weöres drew attention to this strange, eccentric yet highly learned figure, one of the pioneers of quantitative Hungarian verse, whose person clearly fired Marsall’s imagination, for it lends itself well to ‘fooling around’.

The most absurd piece, the true Hungarian absurd, is Kluzsinszky és Bohus bolyongása a lépcsőházban (lit. Kluzsinszky and Bohus Wandering in the Stairwell, 1975–1976). We are in a massive block of flats, in a labyrinthine system of corridors, at night, without any public lighting. The two title characters are looking for the Napos family’s flat [‘Napos’ in Hungarian means ‘Sunny’]. They supposedly started from there, but cannot find their way out of the building, so now they would rather return. Occasionally, they meet a resident, but they are none the wiser for it. Eventually, in the darkness, they lose each other, and Kluzsinszky – the author’s alter ego – is left alone. There are no Napos family and no Sun. The fragments of the story that are told never cohere, and dawn will never break in this building. Yet the two men are not longing for God, merely for a bit of light. Just as there is no clear explanation for the oblivion that has overtaken György Kalmár, so it is hard to understand why this radio-play masterpiece has not, despite the eventual recognition of his poetry, become part of our literary common knowledge.

We might legitimately ask whether it is the same angel who brings, as a variation of the clown-consciousness of inspiration, those clusters of poems in which the creative self appears as an essentially unified “I”, or whether this is another angel. Such reflection seems justified, for this group of poems is where the ‘duende’ manifests itself ineluctably, where there is talk of love, ageing, and death itself, in matters of life and death. These three words mark three central motifs. If an answer is permitted, it is, in all likelihood, still one angel and one addressee. Naturally, each motif has biographical roots; what enlarges them into poetry is the philosophy of existence.

All this, however, is rooted in a childhood experienced firsthand and later reflected in adulthood as poetry. As his biography reveals, László Marsall was an only child, and his upbringing was strongly influenced by manual workers and those living close to nature. His dreamy, contemplative nature, vivid imagination, and the seemingly sheltered happiness and freedom of his early years now seem, in retrospect, almost like an Eden from which he was expelled. Childhood, therefore, appears in his poetry more as a sense of lack, a life stage that cannot be revisited, something best left unspoken. Or, as the title of his first book suggests, the Vízjelek (lit. Watermarks) remain; they occasionally shimmer through the woven fabric of words that form the complex adult life.

The first notable spark of the ‘duende–angel’ led to the full development of the love motif, shaping his second volume of poems as a whole. Szerelem alfapont (lit. Love Alpha Point, 1977) clarified that for Marsall, love is the essential matter of existence, and that he had already produced remarkable, almost immortal works on this age-old and timeless theme. Alpha naturally signifies the start, the initial point of a line of love. However, the poet interprets this point more broadly, already encompassing potential contradictions and conflicts. The blurb to the volume – a prose poem, in my view, and now hard to access – precisely describes the existential situation embedded in the poems:

“I believe that ultimately, a human being aspires to reach the highest point of joy, where they possess complete faculties and potential, along with total security. This is the state where the energies of receiving and giving are in perfect harmony. In pursuing this desire, when a person encounters another, they inevitably meet someone of the opposite sex whom they feel is the embodiment of their own highest joy. If the other person also perceives us as such, we draw closer and closer, collide, ignite, and yearn for perfect, eternal unity. We mutually shed every surface layer and false veneer from our personalities. This process carries two risks: firstly, it can destroy the idyllic scene of the highest joy point, severing all ties that connect us and the other to anything beyond ourselves. Secondly, when left with each other solely, we may awaken the demons that invoke our suddenly lost paradise and guilt at this loss – demons that constantly brandish the severed ties before us and sow suspicion – even among those who are emotionally intertwined—asking, ‘are you truly holding the other’s genuine core in your palm?’”

The love poems in the volume primarily capture the happiness of this ‘golden joy point’. Above all, Zene a dobhártya mögött (lit. Music Behind the Eardrum) and Amatores te salutant have become indispensable anthology pieces. Still, one should also highlight Vízizene (lit. Water Music), Tükör a tükörben (lit. Mirror in the Mirror), Szakadatlan szeretkezőben (lit. In an Unbroken Act of Loving), Ódondad kérelem (lit. Time-worn Petition). In the first, the word “gyönyörűm” [roughly: “my gorgeous one”] and its variants are repeated across thirty-eight lines without monotony; instead, we sense a gradually intensifying variety, and a somewhat baroque altar of love is erected. The second, with its seemingly coy Latin title, describes a sexual act – daring indeed in the 1970s – in which the inspiration of lovemaking and that of poetic representation find perfect harmony:

“és újra a megnyíló szád, és szemhéjad alól

halálon túli tükörbe meredő szem,

és látom magunkat arcod felől melled mögül,

comb-rengésedet ágyék-vetődésünket, és méhed

utolsó jajgatását ágyékom vörös egyszeme látja:

kifeszülő combod megmeredő tested remegése,

tarkómtól talpadig torlódva robbanásom,

vörös-fehéren szétszikrázó semmiben óó

tebennemedben zuhanva zuhanva zuhanva…”

(lit. “and once more your opening mouth, and your eyes gazing
from under your lids into a mirror beyond death,
and I see us in your face, behind your breast,
your trembling thighs, the flinging of our loins, and the last
crying of your womb as my loins’ red single eye
sees it: your legs stretched, your rigid body’s shudder,
the piling up of my explosion from nape to sole,
red and white scattering into the nothingness, oh,
falling, falling, falling in your Me-and-You Universe…”)

One of the great injustices of existence is a meaningless early death. The poet’s elder son, at sixteen, drowned during a storm on Lake Balaton. The ‘duende–angel’ commanded and assisted: the tragedy had to be worked through. In the volume Egy világ mintája (lit. Pattern of a World, 1987) the cycle A hirtelen elárulás óráján (lit. At the Hour of Sudden Betrayal) includes, alongside the title-poem, such texts as Torkomban forog (lit. It Turns in My Throat), Ülni az ablak előtt (lit. Sitting in Front of the Window), Szemtől szemben (lit. Face to Face), Egy csontszilánk (lit. A Splinter of Bone), És Ő eltűnt elveszett éjjel (lit. And He Vanished, Lost at Night), Kitépi magát a kezemből (lit. He Tears Himself from My Hand). The event cannot be explained, only described and acknowledged, along with the fact that chance brings chaos into life:

“Mi lesz velünk, ha egyszer ránk derül:

az élő halott és a halott élő,

és fájsz nekem, mint én fájok neked,

s nem felenként, mindig üt az óra,

és minden való: a volt a van és a leszen,

s az ember is csak örök metafora”

(lit. “What will become of us, if once it is revealed:
the living is dead and the dead alive,
and you hurt me as I hurt you,
and the hour never strikes by halves,
and everything is true: the was, the is, and the shall be,
and even man is only an eternal metaphor.”)
(Egy csontszilánk [lit. A Splinter of Bone])

After this unforgettable family tragedy, the angel spoke more gently: in 1988, the cycle and volume Negyvenegy öregek (lit. Forty-One Old People, with drawings by János Orosz) was published. This is his most cohesive book, both in terms of genre and form. Written after he had passed fifty, this gallery of portraits includes poets (József Berda, Sándor Weöres, Zoltán Zelk), mathematicians (Lipót Fejér, Rózsa Péter), well-known and unknown figures, as well as imaginary ones – perhaps the most beautiful is that of his grandfather. Its mode of depiction is one of understanding yet restrained, objective affection. The introductory essay to the volume concludes thus: “In old and tribal cultures, the Council of Elders was honoured; rank and dignity surrounded its members. To defeat time, today’s old people, instead of royal dignity, are left with obsession. They are devoted to their profession, forever drilling, whittling, mending, creating, and looking after grandchildren. They are the exceptions. Most are ill, tired, and orphaned. For them, old age is a cruel homeland. The question remains: where should they find a homeland?”

A more detailed, monographic presentation of László Marsall’s poetry would need to highlight additional motifs, such as God, faith, angels, ethics, eroticism, silence, lack, nothingness, transformation, dreams, mirrors, earth, water, wind, flight, and birds. It would be possible to analyse how and why he evokes, among the classics of world literature, the oeuvres of Catullus, Hölderlin, Rimbaud, Rilke, Apollinaire, Dylan Thomas; how the then-contemporary French lyric or T. S. Eliot influenced his youth. How he recalls and pastiches the works of Mihály Csokonai and numerous other classical authors. Why János Bolyai, Bergson, Wittgenstein, Gödel, Heisenberg, set theory, and the philosophy of language are important to him. What his poems of remembrance, lament, and tribute express. Into how many shapes, roles, and personalities he stepped, at the angel’s prompting, over the course of his oeuvre, and accordingly, in how many ways he spoke.

There is one more trait of this lyric that must be clearly mentioned. We have already discussed his conscious distancing from politics. The origins of this clearly lie in the domestic situation after 1945. After 1990, however, a change occurred: Marsall began to incorporate ‘public’ questions into his poetry. With fierce passion, he rejected those who skimmed off the gains of change and welcomed what was essential:

“Nem hittem volt, hogy még »az én időmben«

– gyerekkoromban így mondták az öregek –

elzakatolnak a tratata-gitárosék, MÍG-esek, Katyusáék

a »Folyón át a FÁK közé«.”

(lit. “I never believed that ‘in my own time’
– as old folk said when I was a child –
the tatata–guitar crowd, the MIGs, the Katyushas
would rattle away ‘Across the River, into the CIS’.”)
(Meghökkenés és torpanás [lit. Startle and Recoil])

He wrote perhaps his only but significant poem on Hungarian identity, Magyarnak lenni (lit. To Be Hungarian), which is a turn-of-the-millennium variant of the castigating yet protective, hopeful vision of Endre Ady and Gyula Illyés:

“Magyarnak lenni: kúszni hátra!

berontani a zsákutcába,

és ki-kitörni mégis: »hátha!«

vagy kikötünk a másvilágban,

vagy besorolunk egy Más világba.”

(lit. “To be Hungarian: crawling backwards,
charging into the cul-de-sac,
and still breaking out: “what if!”
we either make landfall in the other world
or enlist in some Other world.”)

László Marsall began writing poetry as an adult in 1953. This marked the start of a period where, on the surface, schematism still prevailed, while beneath, partly hidden in desk drawers, four distinctive poetic tendencies emerged. One is associated with Gyula Illyés, the second with Sándor Weöres, the third with János Pilinszky and Ágnes Nemes Nagy, and the fourth with Ferenc Juhász and László Nagy. Marsall’s primary mentor was Weöres; later, like many young poets of the time, he found the 1958 anthology of modern French lyric and the surrealists particularly influential. Around that time, Rilke, T. S. Eliot, García Lorca, and then Benn, and Celan became more widely known in Hungary. This was soon followed by the influence of Beat poetry and the neo-avant-garde. Poets emerging in the decade and a half after 1953 could access all of these. Many related to Gyula Illyés mainly as an initial influence, primarily in outlook; those with a vaguely ‘popular’ or ‘national’ tendency regarded Ferenc Juhász and others as their masters, while some followed the Újhold circle. Weöres, too, mentored many, but in terms of outlook, it was Marsall who came closest to him.

From any of these directions, one could move towards new experiments and the neo-avant-garde, but in the 1960s, due to cultural policy, no true workshops for this could be established in Hungary – only in Újvidék (Novi Sad), around Új Symposion, and in Paris, around Magyar Műhely (Hungarian Workshop). By the 1970s, it was nonetheless clear that the most sensational figure of the period, Dezső Tandori, was no lone pioneer. Among the poets born in the 1930s, alongside the Voivodina-based Ottó Tolnai and the Magyar Műhely group in Paris, there emerged oeuvres that did not abandon the renewed contemporary tradition to step into the postmodern camp, but instead sought to synthesise the available possibilities – perhaps most boldly in László Marsall’s work, and also in that of Ottó Orbán, László Bertók, Márton Kalász, Árpád Tőzsér, and Domokos Szilágyi. László Marsall is thus a conservative-minded innovator who, standing on the border between late modernism and postmodernism, awaits the messages. Knowing several geometries, he senses that, in poetry, the parallels of movements and schools can meet and intersect – and that what results need not be a collision but a poem. It may be that he did not find the ‘great narrative’, but he recorded many smaller ones, and these ‘fragments’ have been shaped by the oeuvre into a Whole.

[2012]

László Marsall

Selection of works