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Poetry

Hardly any artist has a body of work that can be approached from a single perspective. When it comes to authors of belles-lettres, it is often advisable to trace matters back as far as the beginnings of modern literary historiography, to the last third of the nineteenth century, when the school of positivism emerged. This sought to understand and interpret literary works by focusing on the circumstances of their genesis. Hippolyte Taine’s three key concepts – race, milieu and moment – became famous in this regard. Wilhelm Scherer later modified these ideas, stressing instead the significance of the inherited, the learned and the experienced. Clearly, all these approaches regard the author himself as central, as the point where these factors converge. In contrast, the school of ‘Geistesgeschichte’ [“the history of the spirit”, intellectual history] arose, emphasising the ‘Zeitgeist’ rather than the “external” factors. Seen from the vantage point of posterity, the two approaches ultimately complement each other: the positivist categories can easily accommodate the ‘Zeitgeist’, while without the painstaking results of philological positivism, that spirit of the age would remain inaccessible.

Why do I find it necessary to recall all this in connection with the oeuvre of Menyhért Tamás, poet, prose-writer and essayist? Quite simply because without the contemporary variants of both approaches, any discussion of his life’s work would remain incomplete. For his lyrical, epic and dramatic writings of different genres are all bound together by precisely those elements that can be accurately described and interpreted through the categories of Taine and Scherer.

What do I mean by this? Menyhért Tamás was born in 1940 in Hadikfalva [Dornești, Romania] in the Bukovina region, into a family that had fled from Transylvania after the notorious Siculicidium [1764 massacre of Székelys by the Habsburg army]. He was barely one year old when, in the summer of 1941, nearly twenty thousand people returned to Hungary, though they were granted only temporary homes in the southern region of Bácska [Vojvodina, Serbia]. In the summer of 1944, driven by the events of the Second World War, they were forced to flee again within the new borders defined by the Treaty of Trianon [the 1920 peace treaty dismembering historic Hungary]. Almost a year later they were finally able to settle. Many of the wagon caravans arrived in villages of Tolna county, Hungary, in the homes vacated by expelled Swabians [ethnic Germans]. They had to integrate into an environment that was alien and often distrustful.

Let us continue by recalling the most important facts about the personality and the society surrounding him. It goes without saying that the population of the Bukovina villages, in their farming, customs, culture and language, preserved ways far more archaic than those of the inhabitants of Hungary. This in itself compelled a radical change of lifestyle. They had lived in Tolna for only three years when the Bolshevik dictatorship began, with the radical transformation of a thousand-year-old peasant culture through the forced collectivisation of agriculture. Yet a path of advancement, though a rough one, awaited Menyhért Tamás. He completed grammar school, and later, upon moving to the capital, he was able to work first as a factory hand and subsequently as a journalist. He thus became a first-generation intellectual, as did so many of his contemporaries, though few had come from such distances and with so unique a world of experience as he. In the shaping of his vocation as a writer, the role of his formative experiences may be compared to those of one of his chosen masters, Gyula Illyés [poet, novelist and essayist, 1902–1983]: “you cannot escape” from the responsibility owed to your community. But he might also have been strengthened in this conviction by his readings in world literature: “One of these is a very beautiful sentence of Camus, according to which the writer never belongs among those who shape history, but among those who suffer it.” (Interview. István Bakonyi: Az ige őrzői [lit. Guardians of the Word], p. 165.) And would it be the devotee of positivism or of ‘Geistesgeschichte’ who would most happily quote the following confession: “...the infant, if struck by powerful impressions – if the stimuli of the outside world creep into his lap, such as crying, the memories of war, or even the shriek of locomotives – stores these deep within his instincts. And I must believe that literary memory, to a certain degree, carries forward the nerve endings of the ancestors.” (Conversation. Laura Faragó: Szülőföldem – zengő anyanyelvem [lit. My Homeland – My Resounding Mother Tongue], p. 84.)

Because of the twists and turns of his life, Menyhért Tamás became a poet rather late; his first significant poems date from around the age of thirty, and his first collection appeared only in 1974. Its reception was mixed, perhaps precisely because he was so bound to the primal experiences of his life – something that some, evidently lacking the capacity for empathy, regarded as a fault. Yet this was precisely the greatest merit of Szövetségben a fákkal (lit. In Alliance with the Trees), and today we may recognise it as a defining achievement of his entire oeuvre. Just as Gyula Illyés once brought before public opinion the inhuman fate of the hundreds of thousands of servants on the Hungarian puszta [the Great Plain], so did Menyhért Tamás present a national group far smaller in numbers, whose ordeal could nevertheless become universally exemplary.

The first significant work to embody all this was Beszegzett ég alatt (lit. Under the Nailed-Down Sky). A cyclically structured work, it rightly felt the need to explain its historical background in a prose preface: the homelessness experienced in the autumn of 1944, at the age of four, which he later recorded as a chronicler. Menyhért Tamás called himself a lyric poet with epic inclinations, something later confirmed by his series of short novels. Yet this work could exert its effect only by preserving the elements of the chronicler, that is, of the epic. The first part, Temetetlen temetők (lit. Unburied Cemeteries), offers a chilling picture not merely of the plight of a smaller ethnic group, but of the entire nation’s wartime flight and wandering in the autumn of 1944, in which soldiers, forced labourers and civilians alike appear as near-victims of death. This continues in the second part, but here the memory of the Siculicidium emerges, together with the “Zombor fields” of Bácska. Later the ferry at Bezdán signals: “Already the new old homeland glimmers here!” The journey, whose destination is as yet unknown and which leads among the dead, also bears a newborn child, radiating a glimmer of hope.

The poem fuses together two linguistic strata. One is a type of lyric poetry of the 1960s, shaped in part by folk poetry, and at some level employing a visionary–symbolic mode of expression. Menyhért Tamás developed a more objectified, epic variant of this, one that also tells a story. Into this he wove both archaic folk-poetic texts and those that had sprung from folk traditions. What else could more authentically express the feelings of wanderers than folk song itself? At the birth of the baby girl, a woman sings a blessing; at the sight of the trees of the old homeland, the poet’s mother prays and pleads for a better fate. Finally, the monologue of the father leading the horse unites the two linguistic – and at the same time poetic – strata, for he speaks in the two-hundred-year-old tongue of the Székelys, not in a lyrical but in a narrative manner. His final words raise one of the fundamental thoughts of his son’s later oeuvre, concerning the destiny of the Hungarians:

“How much we have slaughtered, how much we were slaughtered!
A wonder that we still are! Scattered in a thousand directions, yet
we survived, and we shall survive still… Something
always gathers us together. Every severed head
makes the survivor the more stubborn, every hardship
a lesson in endurance, a trial of the soul: to stand firm
even to quartering – for our own, for the people’s…
Come, Gypsy, let us guard ourselves further!”

The difference between these two languages is akin, yet not identical, to the difference between literary language and dialect, and the question of how they may be fitted together. Here, two languages meet one another: a strongly lyrical form of modern literary language and a dialect that, isolated for two centuries, has survived into the present. Menyhért Tamás experienced this encounter first in daily life and later transposed it into his works. As he confessed: “...when I went home, I at once switched over. I changed my words! That was when I felt at home, when I truly arrived home – when I could change my words… That was how I could converse with them! For these words, if one examines them closely, are pre-language-reform words. And the language in which they speak – it is a visualising language. A pictorial language. One eminently suited to poetry. In their words they also conjure up what they name. This language manifests such power of pictorial evocation that I needed only to make use of it (and not abuse it), and at once it seemed as though I had created a distinct language. True, I tried to modernise it so that at every point of condensation the word would move in the direction of poetry. Thus when one begins to condense this language further, prose itself – of its own accord – becomes poetry.” (Laura Faragó, pp. 86–87.)

This language, then, links him inseparably to his parents, his extended family, and the community of resettlers. From the literary tradition, it connects him, self-evidently, to folk poetry, of which Transylvania is one of the most fertile homelands. According to Menyhért Tamás’s own testimony, “the richest path of poetry is folk poetry” (Laura Faragó, p. 86.). Knowing all this, it is only natural that his determining masters as elder contemporaries were Áron Tamási and András Sütő [both Transylvanian-born Hungarian writers and dramatists] not only in his conception of the writer’s role but also in his literary language.

The parents, as we could already sense from the poem evoking the wanderers’ path, influenced the child – and later the adult – not only through their use of language but also through their outlook and conduct. The figure of the mother was memorably captured in Versek édesanyám, Kiss Emerencia kapcsos könyvéből (lit. Poems from My Mother, Emerencia Kiss’s Clasped Book). This seven-part cycle was written entirely in the language spoken by the mother and traces a life marked by hardship, from a long engagement to widowhood. It would be a mistake to explain this work by reference to the influence of Sándor Weöres’s Psyché (1972), for Tamás Menyhért did not produce an imagined stylistic imitation but rather gave voice to his mother. The father judged everyone by how they carried out their work. A man of few words, “he knew how to keep long silences. He respected silence. As if he had known Áron Tamási’s saying: if you respect silence, it teaches you to think beautifully. My father could fall silent with an echoing weight; the mountains seemed to return his silence, and we felt the thoughts behind it.” (Laura Faragó, p. 86.) In the poems of Under the Nailed-Down Sky, too, we read the father’s inner monologue, with only the last line addressed encouragingly to his horse.

Another trait, traceable back to childhood and formative of worldview, must also be highlighted: the perception of nature, whose origins reach back not merely to Hadikfalva or the older Székely Land, but far earlier than the Hungarian conquest of the Carpathian basin. Humanity arose as part of nature and for tens of thousands of years did not distance itself from it. The experience and worldview of ancestors cultivating the land and keeping animals remained close to nature well into the twentieth century. This perspective was preserved and reinforced by folk culture, which is rational yet not alien to mythical elements. I believe it was not the city – already indispensable in antiquity – that estranged us from nature, but rather the boundless industrial civilization that transformed the settlement type into a mass habitat of millions and left its inhabitants isolated. Menyhért Tamás did not include in his selected volumes his poem Mielőtt még (lit. Before Yet) published in 1980, though here he most directly urges humanity to “return / to the slower / days / return / beneath the dominion / of the trees / let / again / let / the rivers / flow through / the heart // Not / this echo-screaming / not my screaming / it is not that Europe / not this Europe / I wished to catch up with.”

The nature-vision rooted in archaic times was already expressed in the title of Menyhért Tamás’s first volume, In Alliance with the Trees. The tree motif is a defining element of this oeuvre. We might speak of a motif cluster, since the tree itself encompasses several layers of meaning. Associated with it are root, branch, leaf, fruit, earth, sky, birds, shade, attachment to place, the cycle of nature, cyclical time, and on the other hand infinity, birth, ultimately life and death. Since the earliest myths, the tree has been an indispensable symbol – virtually an explanation of human existence. Menyhért Tamás does not wish to retreat into ancient myths or immerse himself in them, but regards them as part of human history, as fine roots touching our very nerve cells. This view appears most fully and beautifully in his novella A csodabárány (lit. The Miraculous Lamb, 2000). Set in the time of Stephen I of Hungary [reigned: 1000/1001–1038], the story transposes the ancient, pagan myth of the Miraculous Hind into the Christian symbol of the lamb. “Somehow I tried to write this duality,” the writer confesses, “to accept the miraculous lamb, but with the hind’s drumming hooves and its run. And this present, and this past, still live in us to this day. That is why I wrote the novella so it could just as well take place today.” (Laura Faragó, p. 88.) The other pole of this nature-centred worldview is a near-microrealist objectivity. The cycle Pilis-hegyi szószín-képek (lit. Pilis Hill Word-Colour-Pictures), created to accompany the photographs of Csaba Ráfael, appeared under the title Rousseau kezét fogom (lit. Holding Rousseau’s Hand, 2006), gently alluding to the apostle of oneness with nature. In contemplating the images, “a solitary walker” delights, not by night but always in daylight, and – except for a single waterfall – always among trees. This cycle of twelve sonnets is the poet’s most harmonious. Closeness to nature, playfulness, and cheerfulness could appear without counterpoint only in his children’s poems.

In Tamás Menyhért’s oeuvre the strata of experience came to embrace ever-widening circles. The cradle of his fate was his family and the small community departing from Hadikfalva. The quest for a homeland, the long years of homelessness, persecution and the terrors of war evoked the image of another Siculicidium. A minority is always different from the majority – different, and therefore alien. In broader European and historical contexts, it is not only the Csángós [a Hungarian-speaking Catholic minority in Romania], not only the Székelys who found themselves in minority situations, nor the other native dispossessed of the Treaty of Trianon [1920], but indeed the entire Hungarian nation appears as a minority, “strangers” in the eyes of many nations, by virtue of their Asian origins, their culture, and their language. The history of the Székely refugees fleeing from the murderous campaign of a former Austrian general reflects, like a drop of water the ocean, the whole history of the Hungarian nation. And when one thinks not only of continents but of humanity as a whole, it becomes clear that the subject is none other than human rights – or rather the deprivation of them. Although we know that this predicament is as old as humanity’s written history, even today no solution has been found. Since the Reformation it has been recognised that the Bible, as myth of origins, law, and history, mirrors the fate of Hungarians and, more recently, that of the Székelys of Bukovina. It is for this reason that members of the Székely community could say to the writer that through his works he had given them a second Bible.

Some decades ago, it almost became a fashion to draw a distinction between literature centred on the community and that centred on the individual, with the latter being considered more “modern.” Yet this distinction cannot be regarded as a criterion of value, if only because human beings always live within society. When Menyhért Tamás addresses the fate of his smaller community, he naturally seizes upon personalities through the resources of both lyric and epic modes. A case in point is the novel Esőrácsok (lit. Bars of Rain), which narrates the fears of wandering and existential uncertainty: the fears of individuals reinforce the fear of the community, just as the terror of the community shapes the individual. A brilliant psychological touch lies in the contrast between the atmosphere of the women’s and the men’s barracks during a night spent in a temporary lodging. Many other examples can be found in his works of the manifold practical and existential concerns that beset a human being who, for whatever reason, has drifted away from their community of origin and become solitary.

From a poetic standpoint Tamás Menyhért’s verse is also marked by great diversity. He favours multi-part works constructed in cycles, but equally the extremely compressed forms, fragments of verse, the “shards.” Perhaps the wittiest is Ihlet (lit. Inspiration): “Sorsodzik a hátam” [a punning neologism meaning “my back is being fate-stricken”]. The most thought-provoking: “Only here below: / by touching the earth / can you touch God!” – Érintések 1 (lit. Touches 1). The most cheerful: “A tree conceived, exults / the fresh root, its melody: / a walnut song.” – Hármas – Fogant fa (lit. Triad – A Tree Conceived). He works in a great variety of ways with poems of more average length as well. Anyám guzsalya (lit. My Mother’s Distaff) and Tegnap szépen, holnap szebben (lit. Yesterday Beautifully, Tomorrow More Beautifully) exemplify his folk-inspired verse. Poems with titles already carrying a “message” often consist of short lines that resemble modern incantations. Elsewhere the dominant form is the expansive yet still compact free verse (Fák árnyékára – lit. To the Shadow of Trees; Mondd – lit. Say; Minthogy – lit. Since). Not infrequently he builds mini-cycles out of fragments, which often take the form of greetings (Hatosok – lit. Sixes; Hét tusrajz – lit. Seven Ink Sketches; Görömbei András stációi – lit. The Stations of András Görömbei; L. E. mester – lit. Master L. E.). In the 1990s his poetry more generally assumed that mode of expression which fuses fragmentation with continuity, statement with suggestion, into wholly individual variations of poetic speech.

“As we compose our unpostpon-

able letters, with a wound-

ed breath, with the disqui-

eting haste of I let you know,

so too I ready myself each day

for this verse, with wound-

ed lines, aware that I write it un-

addressed – yet addressed all the same.”

The two early cycles of poems that signalled his arrival were soon followed by others. Zágoni levelek (lit. Letters from Zágon) consists of five imitations of the letters of Kelemen Mikes [Hungarian writer of the 18th century, long exiled in Turkey], though rendered in hexameters. Tövises talppal (lit. With Thorned Sole) is an oratorical work from the 1970s. Hang (lit. Voice), Anya (lit. Mother), Apa (lit. Father), and Fiú (lit. Son) trace the journey from migration to more recent times, to the period of co-organisation, when, as the poet put it, “one path alone remained to choose.” The poor man wonders: “What shall he do with his fate / improved, which is neither more nor less // than what had once been his due” says the Father; and also: “I have arrived, I know not where.” This does not signify ignorance of place, but rather a philosophical approach to the condition itself.

This characteristic becomes ever more pronounced, and in the cycles névMÁSOK (lit. PROnouns) and HELYtelen (lit. disPLACEd) it becomes definitive. The lyric I confesses of itself: “I / who have not yet perished / not yet gone mad / with an eighth of courage / a sixteenth of heroism / sealed from head to foot / mingled with complicity / I live through this desert Time / with spared mercy / with cowardice as decoration / upon my breast / I surrender myself / before MYSELF.” This avowal is not self-abandonment; its meaning is the very opposite. Nor does disPLACED signify placelessness: it is, ultimately, a poem of recognising the state of being-at-home somewhere.

Even more comprehensive than these two cycles is Alkonyút (lit. Twilight Journey, 2010), which defines the entire volume. The poet presented himself with this work on his seventieth birthday: a cycle of seventy poems, each of nine lines. It is a reckoning with life, yet by no means a final one. The poet seeks not to close a chapter but to measure the road travelled and to continue onwards. This twilight journey leads mostly through autumn landscapes, and though the knowledge of winter is present, so too works the force of hope. Though the moments touched upon in the volume can hardly be called suffused with serenity, from the whole work a profound confidence in life radiates. For example: “The fairest of counsels: ‘do / not be ashamed to love’ do not be a- / shamed, I pass it on to the twi- / light’s glimmer” (14). The lyric subject of the cycle does not primarily summon up events, nor does he seek confrontation with them, but rather with the fate of life itself. He wishes to know himself yet more precisely. His aim: “that I might behold myself”. A witty structural frame is provided by the interplay between the first and the last poem. “As one who entered into twilight / service, my up- / ward step too lingers downward, awaiting / the Sun’s feigned death”. At the cycle’s close, awareness of death is thus dissolved: “once / more I brace my step, / and as at my beginning: / downward I step upward too!” The resolution has been realised: the one who takes stock has indeed beheld himself, and what he has seen has proved worthy of continuation. The imagined death, is dissolved in paradox serious even in its playfulness: it is “as near to you as / at the hour of your birth!” (19).

Prose

The life-material bequeathed by the nurturing community could, in an aesthetic sense, find its full expression in poetry; yet for its more complete preservation prose proved indispensable. After years of creative struggle, the very first attempt yielded a masterpiece: Vigyázó madár (lit. The Watchful Bird, 1981). According to the author’s own testimony, the novella was conceived as a “poetic-prose poem (at least that was my intent), a lyrical novel plunging down to the depths – and ascending to the heights – of living speech, in whose downward-drifting smoke unfolds the Calvary-like chronicle of my father’s life (with the family and the Bukovinian Székely community standing in the background).” (From the book’s blurb.)

The action spans but a few days. A telegram summons the son living in the capital: his father is gravely ill. Arrival, death, the funeral, memories of the the father, the family, the questioning of acquaintances from the village, and finally the journey back – these provide the framework of the present. Meanwhile, the son’s own memories and the father’s confessions are constantly recalled. Interwoven are the personally experienced memories and those evoked by others, most of which lead back to the father’s youth. Of the father the son, the family, and the villagers alike speak only with praise, and the novel makes clear that this is not merely because of his recent death. Both within the family and in the village community he had been a figure of exemplary stature. His wife evoked his personality most beautifully:

“When his work was done, after a strong warming the porch remained warm for a long time, and he would sit out there. Resting his back against the post, as if he had a special business with the heavenly and the earthly world, he would share himself with the stars, transform into earth, into tree, into bird, according to the mood he was in. He sat as though the watching of the fields had been left upon him, the watching of the crop, the roots, the rain, the clear sky…”

In the novella, the narrative of events and the parts of recollection remain distinct. The duality is clear linguistically as well: the contemporary speech of the narrator and the returning son coexists peacefully with the dialect still spoken by the parents. The title of the novel refers to the father’s favourite song about the crane, also called the “watchful bird,” for “it senses even the smallest danger” and always flies in flocks. The village community said that the Menyhért boy most resembled his father. And indeed, turning the pages of the author’s oeuvre, it becomes apparent that this is so: the attitude, way of life, and outlook that characterised the father are present even in those works where his figure is absent. At the novel’s close the parental counsel is quoted once again: “Carry with you in your heart a few strong trees, and you will see, they will serve you later.” Once more the trees: as a child the narrator had gone out to the grove to mourn or to rejoice – that is, to think. And it is there too that he goes from the funeral feast.

As a young man, Menyhért Tamás once showed a short story to Áron Tamási, who, instead of offering criticism, invited him for a walk. “We went up the hillside, stopped beneath a tree, he looked at it and said: one can write about anything – even a novel, not only a short story… even about a tree! About the fact that it is standing here… You only need to write who it was that sat beneath the tree. You can even write a novel about a leaf falling down…” (Laura Faragó, p. 87). This advice proved fruitful both in reinforcing the tree motif and in shaping an epic outlook, and perhaps even in guiding Tamás to discover the genre of the lyrical novella as the most fitting form to express both his age and his own experience. Poetry always condenses; and if the novella preserves the rich imagery so characteristic of the Hungarian language and literature, then by evoking multiple layers of meaning it can capture its subject with greater complexity and depth. In the cycle of novellas that followed one another, the author employed a wide variety of formal solutions.

The already mentioned Bars of Rain (1984) is set during a single night in 1941, at the border station of Kosna, under torrential rain. Each of its seven chapters consists of a single sentence ending with an ellipsis. The scenes are: first the women’s barracks, then the men’s; a railway carriage with the teacher, her clerical husband, and another teacher; the traffic office with railway workers, a doctor, and a dean; again, the women’s barracks with the half-orphaned teenage girl Balbina; once more the men’s; and finally, the departing train. Each chapter presents itself as an interior monologue, yet the voices of the characters almost flow into one another. These monologues evoke the image of a flock huddling together in fear amidst the storm and the deluge, while the “bars” of the title also suggest the image of a prison – not in the sense of police custody, but as a metaphor for the confinement of human destiny. In the work, a counterpart of the Tamás family appears in the figures of Lajos Sebestyén, his wife Aunt Emer, and their barely one-year-old child, Márton. This family will play an even more important role in the following novellas, though we shall meet other familiar figures as well.

The plot of Mérleges idő (lit. Time on the Scales, 1985) begins in the summer of 1945, when a group of resettlers finally manage to establish themselves in Tolna county. The village of Kisdobrány is clearly a thinly veiled Kisdorog. Unlike the previous work, this novella is highly eventful, built largely on dialogues while also making use of distinct interior monologues. It covers the first two years in which the newcomers, occupying the homes of freshly deported Swabians, must attempt to make a life for themselves, all the while facing the open hostility of those who had remained, and haunted by the fear of the displaced returning.

The novel Előcsend (lit. Preliminary Silence, 1986) is set during the darkest years of the Rákosi dictatorship [Mátyás Rákosi was the communist leader of Hungary between 1949 and 1956], most likely in 1952, in Kisdobrány, with the Sebestyén family at its centre. Like its predecessors, the novel is strongly plot-driven and rich in dialogue, but here interior monologue comes more prominently to the fore, expressing how in those years silence was imperative: even a few incautious words could brand one as a rebel and lead to arrest. The short novel depicts a caged world in its bleak reality; the story remains apparently unfinished, for nothing points to the possibility of change. As Gyula Illyés wrote in his famous poem: “Where tyranny exists, / that tyranny exists” (A Sentence on Tyranny, translated by George Szirtes).

Finally, Balbina (1987) also belongs thematically to the history of the small Hadikfalva community. Balbina herself – alongside the figure of the mother – is the writer’s most enchanting female character, here taking centre stage. She was already a figure worth noting in Bars of Rain. The short novel traces her life between the autumn of 1955 and the spring of 1957. Balbina is a divided soul, who has left half her spirit in Bukovina, together with her childhood. Her husband works as a miner in nearby Komló, but she refuses to leave the village. A member of the local council, she reads extensively and takes part in the amateur theatre group. She contracts tuberculosis. Meanwhile, her husband keeps a mistress, seeks divorce, and departs for the West after the Revolution of 1956. At around thirty, Balbina recovers, takes a lover, and even conceives, but the young agronomist refuses responsibility. Balbina dismisses him, deciding to give birth and raise the child alone. From a later novel, Forradások (lit. Scars, 1989), we learn that Balbina – once celebrated as both the wit and the beauty of Kisdobrány – left with her child, eventually moved to town, and lived with her grown-up son. In Menyhért Tamás’s epic world, alongside the father and mother figures, Balbina’s character returns with unyielding consistency. None of these life stories are success narratives, and yet each is meaningful and worthy of esteem. The structure of Balbina departs from earlier models: the woman herself recounts this chapter of her life, recalling dialogues from various past situations as well as from the present moment of the story. Remarkably, even earlier events are frequently rendered as brisk, dramatic exchanges in her recollection.

The five short novels were later published together in Cserefának füstje (lit. The Smoke of the Turkey Oak, 1991). Loosely connected to this cycle are two further works. Holtág (lit. Backwater, 1983) is strongly autobiographical in its experiential background. Miklós Márton from Kisdobrány finds himself in repeated crises: his marriage collapses, he has moved from factory work into journalism at a company newspaper yet fails to find his place. He drinks, takes a lover, and they plan divorce. In the end, guidance comes from an old farmer who had left Bukovina as early as 1910: “Where there is water, and life in the water, where there are trees, and life in the trees, where there are birds, and song in the birds, man is never alone.” The other work, Scars (1989), offers the late-life reckoning of a former chairman of a socialist co-operative Kisdobrány. Already living in the capital, he had left bitter memories behind in his village.

Three further novels by the author extend, though more obliquely, the main thematic concerns. Szent Anna-tó regéje (lit. The Legend of Lake Saint Anne, 1989) reworks a sixteenth-century Transylvanian ballad into a realistic tale that may also be read as a historical novel for young readers. Magyar regény (lit. Hungarian Novel, 1997) unfolds during a suffocating train journey, in which fellow travellers – exiled beyond the Trianon borders – converse about the fate of the Hungarian nation. Their situation is almost Kafkaesque; the conversation approaches the absurd, not through the events themselves but through the existential condition they reveal. For now, The Miraculous Lamb (2000) closes the sequence, seeking resolution and finding it, in a legendary and fairy-tale setting, in the reconciliation of Eastern and Western cultures for the Hungarian people.

Drama

Unjustly little attention has so far been paid to Menyhért Tamás’s dramatic works, which are largely historical in theme. Tanúságtevők (lit. Witness Bearers, 2013; earlier titled Bűnfenyítők és befogottak [lit. Tormentors and Captives], 2002) turns to the punitive trial that followed the Siculicidium, the massacre of Székelys who resisted conscription. The play explores, on the one hand, the defendants’ steadfastness, and, on the other, the inner conflict of the court clerk – Hungarian by tongue though German in name – who must wrestle with his conscience.

Two monodramas centre on writers of kindred spirit: Mikes and Tamási (2005). The first stages the reckoning of the aged, solitary secretary already familiar from the Letters from Zágon. The second gives voice to Áron Tamási, interrogated repeatedly for his role in the 1956 Revolution.

Among the so-called “sound-dramas,” three were published together in A kőgörgető (lit. The Stone-Roller, 2002). Their subject matter moves beyond Székely history, yet the worldview remains unmistakably the author’s own. Each unfolds as an extended interior monologue in a moment of extremity, the present tense pierced by sudden flashes of memory.

In Az űzetett király (lit. The Pursued King), the fugitive Béla IV (reigned: 1235–1270) seeks refuge from the Tatars. Fuss, akár a szarvas, fuss! (lit. Run, Run Like a Hind!) reimagines poet Sándor Petőfi’s final moments as he flees the battlefield at Segesvár. And The Stone-Roller itself revisits the myth of Sisyphus: though the boulder slips from his grasp just before the summit, what hardens in him is not despair but the command to endure. His defiance echoes Camus: “You may drive me back, force me to begin again, yet, if need be, I shall repeat the ascent a thousand times. None of my reversals lack, nor can they lack, a thread of trust. With each defeat I am more… An existence forever climbing and descending, a life to be carried uphill.”

As is the fate of the Bukovina exiles, of the Székelys, of the Hungarians, and of humanity.

[2014]

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Menyhért Tamás

Selection of works