The poetry of Imre Oravecz is exceptional and unique in contemporary Hungarian literature. The voice that has been his from the very beginning is not comparable to anyone else’s, nor is it the continuation or culmination of any earlier lyrical tradition. At least within Hungarian poetry there is no one to whom Oravecz might be seen as harking back, no body of work from which he appears to have drawn. The only poet to whom the early lyric poetry of Oravecz can be related is Dezső Tandori, whose first volume, Töredék Hamletnek (lit. Fragment for Hamlet), was published in 1968, four years before Imre Oravecz’s debut, Héj (lit. Skin) [the translation of “héj” depends on one’s interpretation].
Héj is in no way a typical first volume, for there is no trace in it of the search for a personal voice, of hesitation, of uncertainty. It is a unified, indivisible collection which has not lost any of its force in the more than forty years that have passed since its publication (1972). In a certain sense this book is an enclosed deposit within Oravecz’s oeuvre, because the voice, the poetic discourse that characterises the texts of Héj proved impossible to continue. This kind of density could not be reproduced, there was no path leading outwards from the text. It is remarkable that Oravecz begins with a density carried to its utmost, out of which the later volumes of his oeuvre gradually emerge. Usually, the process is the other way round: poets typically reach such condensation and the use of short forms only at a later age. The poems of Héj already contain all the motifs that will reappear in his later works. Szajla is already there, the first traces of emigration are already there, and the whole is shot through with the intense presence of nature, while the tragic story of a love affair already shimmers through. Héj was present as a foreign body in Hungarian poetry at the beginning of the 1970s; the reception was marked by incomprehension and cool distance, with only a few exceptions. One such exception was, above all, Sándor Weöres, who presented Oravecz’s poems in the anthology Költők egymás közt (lit. Poets Among Themselves) published in 1969. Weöres wrote as follows of the early poems: “It is as if I were touching a rough, porous surface. Primarily a tactile experience, like Paul Celan, the poet of Sprachgitter (Speech-Grille)… I believe that, if this poetry is to open up in us, we must approach it by touch, with the fingers of the mind. We touch even the soft airiness of the line spacing, between the sparsely placed, rough motifs.” The world of Héj indeed calls Celan to mind, alongside the already mentioned Dezső Tandori, and perhaps also the late Pilinszky. With the poems of Héj, Oravecz opened up a space in Hungarian poetry that had been unknown until then. This impersonal, enigmatic, fragmented, stripped-down kind of poetic discourse exceeded the literary milieu into which it arrived. At the time when the lyrical tradition associated with the names of Attila József and László Nagy was in full bloom, the lyric of the Oravecz kind truly appeared on the scene as a foreign body. This foreignness would remain one of the chief attributes of this poetry in the decades that followed.
Seven years after Héj, with his volume Egy földterület növénytakarójának változása (lit. Changes in the Vegetation of a Landscape), Oravecz moved out of the closed, hermetic world of his debut, although certain elements of the poetic discourse of the first volume still crop up in this second book. The change, the widening of the poetic horizon, is clearly not unrelated to the fact that, in the very year Héj was published, 1972, Oravecz left Hungary and spent longer and shorter periods abroad, among other places in England and the United States. While the title poem alludes to the homeland, to Dregoly near Szajla (which later returns several times in Oravecz’s work), America already appears as a theme, as do the Hopi Indians, living within their own archaic society. This book is a work of transition, the real point of entry into Oravecz’s later writing. Szajla is present, the American metropolises are present, the North American landscape with its immeasurable expanses is present, and together with all this that traditional culture which will lead Oravecz’s poetry back to his native soil. It is in this volume that poems in English first appear – poems which will later also recur in his collections. One of the most striking features of this book is the strong presence of texts that might be termed hyper-realist. In his poems about the elevated train in Chicago, the autumn of the Midwest, the industrial districts of America, or a winter hike, we are confronted with almost emotionless, painstaking descriptions which seem not even to attempt to establish contact with the reader. These texts, which restrict themselves to bare description, keep all personal traits at bay. Yet in spite of this apparent coldness, these poems are, in fact, intensely personal. The presence of this seeming contradiction runs through Oravecz’s entire oeuvre. It is at once personal and impersonal, at once distant and very close. It is the reader’s task to find his or her own place, his or her own points of reference in these poems. If we decide to let the poems come close, they will function as something close to us; if, on the other hand, we keep our distance, they will remain objectified. This is one of the great ‘secrets’ of Oravecz’s poetry, one of its inimitable traits.
This basic stance – at once distant and yet intensely personal – may also lie in the background of the way in which, through the archaic worldview of the Hopi Indians, Oravecz finally finds his way home to Szajla. In the last cycle of Egy földterület növénytakarójának változása (lit. Changes in the Vegetation of a Landscape), Hopi poems already appear, but the fully unfolded Hopi universe is only realised in the poet’s third volume, A hopik könyve (lit. The Book of the Hopis). Of this coming-home Oravecz writes as follows in the foreword to the volume: “[…] with the help of a pre-historic culture I came – or rather returned – to the place I had always longed for: to the peasant culture of my own people, now dissolved but forever stored in my consciousness, my nerves, my movements, or, if you will, to my own pre-history. And thus, I came to realise that my new poems speak directly of the Hopi, but indirectly of the community of which my ancestors were members, and to which I belonged until the end of my childhood.” Beyond the fact that A hopik könyve (lit. The Book of the Hopis) also works with original Hopi expressions, it is by no means some kind of exotic excursion into the by-now almost vanished society of a distant region, but rather the poet’s own myth-making. The poems of the volume make visible and experienceable the process whereby Oravecz creates the mythical world of an Indian society that never existed in quite this form. The creation of the world, the begetting of children, the prising out of nature’s secrets, the description of seemingly insignificant moments in everyday life – these together constitute this strange yet familiar world which leads the reader back into a space where above and below have not yet separated, where the divine presence can be felt in every corner of the earthly world, where humanity lives its life in the light of that divine presence. A hopik könyve (lit. The Book of the Hopis) holds up a peculiar mirror to the reader. It confronts them with the destruction that modern culture has wrought in their own soul, while at the same time pointing to the possibility of living a life worthy of a human being. With this world that can almost be called idyllic, an age of gold, Oravecz ‘dreams’ himself back into his own childhood, into the long-vanished peasant community of his native soil. A hopik könyve (lit. The Book of the Hopis) is an exceptional venture in Hungarian poetry, one of the strongest achievements of the oeuvre.
Similarly, the next volume, 1972. szeptember (lit. September 1972), published in 1988, is also a unique and remarkable work. Up to that point, Hungarian literature had produced no text of comparable power on love, sexuality, and the dramatic unraveling of a relationship. In this book – in the light of his earlier work, in quite a surprising manner – Oravecz leads his reader into the depths of his own soul, omitting no detail, leaving nothing in shadow. 1972. szeptember (lit. September 1972) tells the story of the fulfilment of a love and its inglorious passing, in which the narrator descends into the innermost circles of his own hell and begins to speak of what he finds and sees there. He begins to speak of that which is hardest to speak about: fear, anxiety, errors, sins, human frailty – the entire arsenal of human imperfection. This confession possesses immense poetic power, while in fact doing nothing more than freezing life-situations familiar to us all into moments that seem endless. The prose poems of the book describe a general human condition, namely a loss of footing, when nothing is what it seems, when trust and confidence in life are shaken, when it appears that there will never be a way out of this darkness. Seen from this angle, 1972. szeptember (lit. September 1972) can also be called the ‘shadow’ of A hopik könyve (lit. The Book of the Hopis): the stable, sheltering world evoked there disintegrates here into its atoms and is scattered into nothingness.
The first collection of the short prose pieces, the brief, sometimes essay-like texts of Oravecz, appeared in 1995 under the title Kedves John (lit. Dear John). The addressee of these writings, this John, is an actual person. It is to him that Oravecz writes these letters, in which he reports everything that happened to him, or rather to them, at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, for by this time he was living with his son, whom he himself was raising. America is again a determining factor in these letters – America, and the repeated returns from America to Hungary, where the writer of the letters cannot find his place. The short prose pieces of Oravecz likewise have a distinctly marked language. He builds with terse, clear sentences; there is nowhere any trace of a striving after effect, verbal play, or stylistic bravura. It is this pure, simple prose style that makes these writings of Oravecz such refreshing and enjoyable reading, writings that are continued in his book Egy hegy megy (lit. A Hill Walks), published a good ten years later. Perhaps the most memorable moment of Kedves John (lit. Dear John) is the text in which Oravecz refuses the József Attila Prize awarded to him in 1989. Hungarian literary history records few gestures of this kind, especially on the part of an author who, in the first two decades of his career, was not showered with prizes.
As has become clearly visible in retrospect, every volume by Oravecz after Héj (Skin) was pointing all along towards a single point, a single large story. That large story is none other than his book Halászóember (lit. The Fishing Man), published in 1998, which can undoubtedly be regarded as the crowning achievement of the oeuvre. The work on this book took ten years, and with it Oravecz quite unambiguously found his way home. In the grand ‘panopticon’ of Halászóember (lit. The Fishing Man), a sunken world is revealed – the world of Hungarian peasant culture, which Oravecz had himself still experienced as a child. This work is at once a monumental volume of poetry, a sociological document, a lyrical act of remembrance, and an unpathetic reckoning. Taken as a whole, however, the volume stands closer to the form of the novel (as its subtitle also indicates: Töredékek egy faluregényhez [lit. Fragments for a Village Novel]), although some of its individual pieces are memorable in their own right. The detailed description of the countryside around the village, the strips of land, the woods, the fields, then the long-dead men and women, relatives and acquaintances, the scenes and figures of childhood – all of these swirl through Halászóember (lit. The Fishing Man). Critics repeatedly compared Halászóember (lit. The Fishing Man) only to Gyula Illyés’s Puszták népe (People of the Puszta), and indeed, apart from Illyés’s book, only Oravecz’s work has managed to raise so grand a memorial to a vanished culture.
The volume that followed Halászóember (lit. The Fishing Man), A megfelelő nap (lit. The Right Day), consisting mainly of short poems, again represents a new shade in Oravecz’s oeuvre. These poems stand closest, in both form and content, to traditional Japanese and Chinese verse forms. The problem of facing death, of loneliness, bitterness, and death-tinged thoughts is sharply foregrounded in the book. There is no longer any trace of the hermetic, bare, meaning-less world we saw in Héj. Here an ageing man speaks of how he lives his everyday life, what he trusts in, what he hopes for, what he fears. And, of course, the all-pervading presence of nature on the pages of the book: the observation of birds, the contemplation of mountains, the noting of changes in the weather. It is no coincidence that at the time when the poems of A megfelelő nap (lit. The Right Day) were being written, Oravecz translated the poems of the Japanese Buddhist monk Ryōkan (civil name Yamamoto Eizō), which were published under the title Ablakban feledett Hold (lit. Moon Left in the Window) in 1999. The poems of A megfelelő nap (lit. The Right Day) are permeated by this Buddhist outlook, which at the same time remains deeply Christian. The dispassionate enumeration of the events of life, the disillusioned confrontation with death, the immersion in the sublime images of nature – all these characterise Ryōkan just as much as they do Imre Oravecz.
We can regard Oravecz’s most recent collection of poems, Távozó fa (Departing Tree), published in 2015, as a kind of continuation of A megfelelő nap (lit. The Right Day). In this volume we again encounter themes similar to those above, supplemented by the moving poems written in the meantime to his second son, which form perhaps the most memorable cycle in the book. The collection Távozó fa (Departing Tree) prominently includes poems in English; their inclusion in the volume is entirely understandable in Oravecz’s case. Since he has repeatedly lived for longer periods in the United States and communicates only in English with his elder son, the incorporation of a foreign language into his poetry can in no way be seen as an empty pose or a sensationalist gesture. English is so much a part of Oravecz’s life that it inevitably leaves its mark on his poetry as well. In my reading, A megfelelő nap (lit. The Right Day) and Távozó fa (Departing Tree) belong together, they complement one another – memorable summations of the late lyric of Oravecz.
Finally, I must speak separately of the novels, of the two volumes so far published of the trilogy still in progress: Ondrok gödre (lit. Ondrok’s Hole), which appeared in 2007, and Kaliforniai fürj (lit. California Quail), published in 2012. Oravecz had long cherished the idea of writing a novel. In a certain respect Halászóember (lit. The Fishing Man) may be regarded as preparatory work for the novels. The plot of these two published books is formed by the emigration of the Árvai family and the story of their life in America. Oravecz prepared for writing the books with thorough background research and on-the-spot ‘fieldwork’ down to the last detail. Hungarian literature had long been in debt for a large-scale emigration novel, despite the fact that the phenomenon left very deep marks on the society of the first half of the twentieth century. Ondrok gödre (lit. Ondrok’s Hole) and Kaliforniai fürj (lit. California Quail) are works of exceptional linguistic power. They are at once family sagas and emigration novels, and the background material woven into the plot is so meticulous that they may even sustain a scholarly reading. With these two novels, Oravecz has attained a distinguished place in contemporary Hungarian prose and can now claim a significant oeuvre not only as a poet, but as a writer as well.
In conclusion, we may say with an easy conscience that Imre Oravecz is one of the outstanding figures of twentieth-century Hungarian literature, whose oeuvre shows no real ups and downs, but rather a steadily rising tendency – something characteristic only of the very greatest.
[2016]