József Tornai’s early poetry revolves chiefly around companionable wanderings through the woods and groves of the Danube region, first love, an ever-growing range of reading, and the experience of breaking away from family and the parental home in Dunaharaszti. All this – or the memory of it – permeates the entire oeuvre, no longer merely as scenery and story, but as the cosmic interrelatedness of human being and nature, the primordial elements, the sun, stars, water, free air, plants, animals, earth, and the eternal, life-giving wellspring of joy embodied by the human couple. The poet devoted poems and entire cycles to the youthfulness of an environment mythicised as paradise, to the setting of first love and the alliance formed with friends, and later experienced his separation from the homeland as a kind of expulsion, even though, well into old age, he did everything he could to keep those memories alive not only in nostalgia, but in the very reality of repeated summer camping trips. In this sense, he embodies the maxim of Béla Hamvas [Hungarian essayist and philosopher] that the purpose of poetry is the idyll. The modern human being’s “idyll” grows ever more problematic: as we move away from a carefree (though not necessarily happy) childhood, the idyll of a person living within history becomes increasingly artificial. The object of desire remains the idyll, yet in modern art it is more and more confined to memory.
For Tornai to become the many-sided, cultivated poet he would grow into, he had to break away from the home in Dunaharaszti. He needed spiritual nourishment, experiences, knowledge and human connections in the capital in order, once in possession of the knowledge available to him there, to shape his complex world-view. The folk poetry encountered in the rural world of origin and a way of life recalling ancient forms of co-existence with the forces of nature offered abundant material to a poet who lived his life with intensity. His intellectual horizons extended to an ontology also nourished by experiences of nature, to cosmology, history and anthropology, while simultaneously deepening his literary and aesthetic understanding. The sudden sight of a pheasant in flight or a fish shimmering above the mirror-like surface of the Danube would set in motion chains of emotions, thoughts and mythic associations in his poems. The flatland landscape appeared in his poetic world with such intimacy that one involuntarily thinks of a twentieth-century Sándor Petőfi [key 19th-century Hungarian national poet]. Instead of the pseudo-grandeur of the 1950s–60s [the period of state-socialist cultural policy in Hungary], he wrote enduringly beautiful poems about the sarcophagus of Saint Stephen [Hungary’s first king, canonised], about Béla Bartók [Hungarian composer, ethnomusicologist], and about A nemzet szelleme (lit. The Spirit of the Nation).
His mother, to whom he was closer than to his father, at first drew him towards the Roman Catholic faith, yet as he entered adolescence he subjected religious thinking to increasingly critical scrutiny. His religious poems do not bear witness to confessional belief; rather, they point to a pantheistic reverence for nature. As he came to know the world religions one by one, and – in possession of the thought of the Enlightenment and of modern scientific literature seen as a continuation of that tradition – he became a passionate, though not impatient, critic of faith that substitutes for thought. Even after his disillusionment with institutional religions, he continued to write poems addressed to God, recognising that God, as a subjective absence and necessity, invariably exists within the human soul.
In the years of his first great love, between 1945 and 1949, he still accepted the prohibition of the Sixth Commandment. Despite the urgings of the body, his love for Irén Tóth remained on a purely spiritual plane. Only after their separation did he discover the rapturous experiences of physical love, and from that point on, the majority of his love poems were conceived under its inspiration. Yet the memory of first love breaks through his poems again and again even into old age, filling parts of his oeuvre with a mysticism of love. Already during the period of his love for Irén Tóth he had become conscious that he rejected the male self-assertion associated with Lőrinc Szabó [Hungarian modernist poet], yet under the influence of later loves he continued to profess the central role of eroticism. He nevertheless denied that Platonic love could lead to human fulfilment. In a relatively late volume, Holdfogyatkozás (lit. Lunar Eclipse), the eroticism dominant in his love poetry – under the impact of his beloved’s death – fused with an awareness of mortality. The Eurydice-like female ideal, of beauty and desirability – made more complete in many poems by an intellectual alliance – gave way, in tragically inflected tones, to Persephone, queen of the underworld in Greek mythology. Death, too, preoccupied him as a philosophical problem, yet the praise of sensual rapture remained the most frequent motif of his love poetry. According to one of his poems, he experienced the enduring fulfilment of passionate love with nine women during his life, and the mythical number nine also alludes to the nine Muses – sources of inspiration. Symbolically speaking, it was Erato who exerted the strongest influence upon him.
The duality of myth and rationality emerges as a central tension in Tornai’s poetry. To map the correspondences and oppositions that constitute the dense network of this multifaceted oeuvre one would have to survey the vast territories of Hungarian and world literature alike – and even then, its essential nature would not be easily distilled. Philosophy, too, cannot be excluded from among his primary sources of inspiration. Tornai clings at once to meaningful, enlightened thought and to a poetic sensibility that intimates things mysterious and beyond reason. For him, Sándor Weöres [Hungarian poet and translator, deeply influenced by Eastern philosophies], who was always drawn to Hindu philosophies (Brahmanism, Buddhism) and to forms of knowledge reaching beyond rational comprehension, is as important as Attila József [major 20th-century Hungarian poet], whose world-view was in a continual process of change and maturation – and of whom we should not forget that Buddha, too, is present in a certain stratum of his lyric poetry. Tornai is likewise preoccupied with “ultimate questions”, even in those poems that appear more modest in subject – confined to a particular observation, landscape, being, or phenomenon – just as the aforementioned classics are, and as are Baudelaire and Rilke, whom he translated into Hungarian. (The series of names could be extended endlessly.) Having reached the limits of empirical and speculative knowledge, instinct and intuition have always been necessary allies. Where something cannot be grasped by conceptual means, imagination and art may come to our aid.
Pain and determination mingle in one of his early poems, A Hívó Hang (lit. The Calling Voice): “you leave behind your father and mother // in the grey house where you were born.” Despite the separation, the maternal and paternal elements became lifelong symbols in his poetry: in old age he gave his collected poems the title Csillaganyám, Csillagapám (lit. My Star-Mother, My Star-Father), placing the human scale within a cosmic perspective and elevating it into myth. In the archetypes corresponding to his parents’ characters, he encapsulated the human duality: the mother – religious, protective, offering refuge; the father – unrestrained in drink, the embodiment of wildness and untamed force. In time, he projected this symbolism onto the entire cosmos, mythicising it in accordance with the Chinese cosmological duality of Yin and Yang. He drew these concepts from the writings of orientalist, writer and translator Ervin Baktay, also born in Dunaharaszti, whom Tornai – an avid reader from childhood – studied with devotion.
As a diligent library-visitor, he immersed himself in literature and the related arts, in folk songs and folklore studies; and although he was not a good student in the formal sense, he matured into one of Hungary’s most learned poets through self-education. He sensed that, as a poet, he must continually expand that boundary zone where – to quote Attila József – human beings and the world can penetrate “to understanding and beyond” [Ars Poetica, translated by Michael Beevor]. To the point where intuition and inspiration take over from rationality and empirical knowledge. His national sensibility, wounded by the succession of foreign occupations during the war [Hungary under German and then Soviet military presence in the Second World War and its aftermath], led him to Hungarian and foreign masters alike; and his experience of poverty brought him closer to the ‘népi írók’ [“people’s writers” – a Hungarian literary movement focused on rural life and social justice], to the Hungarianness of Endre Ady, Attila József, Gyula Illyés, László Németh, János Kodolányi; to Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály [composers and ethnomusicologists]; to Miklós Izsó and Medgyessy [Hungarian sculptors]; to the painters of Nagybánya art colony [influential Hungarian painters’ community, today Baia Mare, Romania], and to many others, from László Mednyánszky to Adolf Fényes, from János Tornyai to József Koszta, and János Nagy Balogh, as well as to foreign masters. As a mature poet he also recognised kindred spirits among his contemporaries, for instance in the drawings of Lajos Szalay, the paintings of Béla Kondor, and the prints and paintings of Pál Veress – Szalay (like Picasso) drawing on the Greek classical age, Kondor on surrealism, and Pál Veress on the idols and totem poles of tribal cultures for his thoroughly modern art. His attraction both to those Hungarian classics who strengthened his sense of national identity and to world literature, together with his openness to ancient and modern philosophies outside Marxism, protected him from national self-absorption just as much as from Bolshevism, and sharply distinguished his patriotism from the nationalism he had once tasted – and rejected – in the Horthy era [interwar conservative-authoritarian regime in Hungary under Regent Miklós Horthy].
By analogy with Hungarian folk poetry, the folklore of other peoples also became increasingly important to the inquisitive, self-educating young man. Towards the end of the Second World War, Russian soldiers were quartered in his home, and the adolescent poet-to-be could marvel at a foreign language and song. His aptitude for languages already revealed itself at this time. It was the Russian soldiers who made him realise that Bolshevik society was in no way more attractive than the Horthy regime – viewed with hostility by the poor – or than Nazism, which made itself known through its sheer depravity. This youthful revelation proved lifelong: in the poet’s own account it protected him, first as a student and later as a worker, from believing the false slogans of communist propaganda. Tornai’s poetry is notable, among other things, for the fact that – in contrast to more than a few outstanding figures of his generation – he was not blinded by communism even for a short time. This is evident not only in his overtly political poems: already in the early 1950s he boldly departed from the schematic canon [socialist-realist aesthetic doctrine imposed in state-socialist Hungary], becoming an admirer of Lajos Kassák [avant-garde Hungarian poet and artist], of Sándor Weöres, and, in the sister arts, of Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály and their foreign contemporaries; of the abstract paintings of Jenő Barcsay, of the unparalleled expressive modernity of Tivadar Csontváry Kosztka, and, among foreign painters, for example, of Paul Gauguin, Henri Rousseau and Pablo Picasso.
His political poems are for the most part historical retrospections, and they tend to address a more general critique of human nature than actual, day-to-day political issues. His commitment to democracy continued to operate, unchanged, under dictatorships of opposing signs – in the feudal-capitalist world he knew as a child, under Nazism and under Bolshevism. His social views were shaped by Endre Ady, Zsigmond Móricz, Attila József and Péter Veres, so that, although – like Sándor Csoóri [poet and essayist] – he was never a member of the people’s colleges [post-war educational institutions for students of rural/working-class background], his outlook is best compared to their so-called “Dózsa-like” radicalism [referring to György Dózsa’s 1514 peasant uprising]. This is also evident from his circle of friends: among them poets Ferenc Juhász, László Nagy, Ferenc Kiss, and the painter János Orosz.
Among the themes of his youth, special mention should also be made of his ‘God-poems’, written under the instinctive, elemental influence of his religious mother, and – also touched by the contrary influence of his “pagan” father – the struggle between faith and doubt as it matured within his developing inner life. The poetic vocation itself is likewise a recurring subject in his verse: the classics he encountered at school deepened his hunger for the word, his hunger for beauty and for “the people’s truth” [alluding to Ady’s conception of poetry as social witness]. Proponents of modernism maintain that in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries the primary subject of poetry is poetry itself: the poem is more a problem than a solution, and it is the song that gives birth to the singer (as Mihály Babits [Hungarian poet and critic] noted), rather than the other way round. In Tornai’s poetry we find numerous pieces that function as an ‘ars poetica’, and these bear witness to anguished, self-lacerating searches for a path and to an abiding sense of dissatisfaction.
Themes connected to folk culture remained characteristic of his work at ever higher levels, extending all the way to universal questions and to the lyrical crystallisation of a mode of thought ever more deeply permeated by philosophy. This, however, by no means resulted in a dry, impersonal or “cold” poetry. On the contrary: with the passing of his idealised – and increasingly unfulfilled – first love, and filled with the experiences of a newly liberated sensuality, passion flared ever more intensely in his poems, forming an unusual alloy with the intellectualism of his expanding philosophical world-view. In a twentieth–twenty-first-century poet such a mixture is a fortunate one. The fertile conjunction of instinct and intellect, their often sharply contoured dialogue, indeed the much-remarked dual nature of his poetry as a whole, is one of the gifts of modern poiesis – even when what stands at the centre of his inquiry is the very constellation of spontaneity and consciousness, lived immediacy and abstraction, plasticity and conceptuality, the national and the universally human, progression and archaic tradition. Tornai’s most perceptive critics – for instance Sándor Csoóri, Győző Határ [Hungarian-born English-language writer and poet], Zoltán Jánosi [literary historian], Béla Márkus [critic], Géza Vasy [literary scholar], and, among younger researchers, Lajos András Kiss (and several other names could be added) – consistently emphasise this bipolarity. His chosen contemporary master was Lőrinc Szabó, yet Tornai did not relate to his beloved model uncritically. He sought freer, more varied, at once more modern and more archaic forms. His poems bear more folkloric influence than those of Szabó Lőrinc. His view of history and his attitude towards women also differed markedly from that of the great master, who judged his poems with strict criticism yet was fundamentally sympathetic towards him. In matters of taste and judgement it was Endre Ady who stood closest to him.
As for Tornai’s progressivism, even in youth he was filled with anger by the unjust social order of the Horthy era, by its series of anti-human measures and its war policy that led the country into perilous adventure, just as much as by the sanctimonious ideology and primitive aesthetic principles of the Rákosi dictatorship [the Stalinist regime in Hungary, 1947–1956]. He acquired the foundations of his world-view in libraries, through the classical music broadcast on the radio, in museums, and from interlocutors who could be taken seriously (most of the latter emerging from the “Belvárosi kör” [informal Budapest-based intellectual circle centred in the inner city]). During the 1956 Revolution he edited a newspaper with Tamás Dersi and István Eörsi [Hungarian poet, playwright and dissident intellectual]; after its defeat, he narrowly escaped the prison sentences that were imposed on his companions.
At first he belonged to the veiled, and later to the openly declared, opposition of the Kádár era. In keeping with the division prevalent in Hungarian intellectual life, he gravitated towards the ‘népi’ camp [the ‘people’s’ intellectual tradition rooted in rural society and national questions]. During and after the Revolution, and right up to the regime change of 1989–90, the best of the ‘népi’ and ‘urbánus’ [‘urban / cosmopolitan’] intelligentsia still acted shoulder to shoulder for greater freedom, national independence, democracy, and freedom of speech. In the unresolved historical and social issues that Gyula Illyés [Hungarian poet and essayist; a central figure of the ‘népi’ movement] called “questions of fate”, our intellectuals proved capable of unity under the pressure of the one-party system. Tornai, open to all values and born “under the sign of Libra”, later expressed his conciliatory, harmonising disposition in public life as President of the Magyar Írószövetség (Hungarian Writers’ Union). The fate of Hungarians cut off beyond the Trianon borders [Treaty of Trianon, 1920 – dismantling of historical Hungary after World War I] was taken up chiefly by the ‘népi’ and national-minded circles; in this he followed Illyés, and after Illyés’s death he stood at the forefront of intellectual initiatives together with Sándor Csoóri.
Even after the change of political power, Tornai did not modify his critical stance, which he most often articulated on the ideological and worldview level. Here we may turn to the most important domain of his oeuvre besides poetry – his essays and journalistic writings. In these genres one finds clear, definitive critical statements about how humanity behaves throughout history up to the present day. Humanity, in his view, is a multitude composed of both good and evil, and across history the proportion between these two qualities essentially does not change. Since the mid-nineteenth century, human beings have been capable of astonishing progress in the natural sciences, technology, urbanisation, medicine and industrialisation (especially the arms industry), and in everything that pragmatically serves human needs – but also stimulates them, to the point of idiotic compulsions to consume. New generations, however, do not learn from the mistakes of the old. In a hundred different ways they develop what their predecessors achieved – and then destroy it. They behave like children who build a sandcastle only to smash it down again for no reason.
Among Hungarian writers, his views in this respect are closest to those of László Németh [Hungarian writer, thinker; advocate of the social and moral role of pedagogy], who likewise emphasised the importance of education – while resonating also with certain foreign thinkers. The difference between the ideas of László Németh and Tornai lies mainly in the fact that, whereas Németh believed in the world-redeeming mission of the intelligentsia, Tornai doubted the success of any form of messianism, and considered only the “self-redeeming” striving of individuals – those who consciously train themselves towards the good, who think and who feel – acceptable and binding upon himself. István Bibó [Hungarian political thinker and jurist] also strongly influenced his thinking; yet Tornai differed from him insofar as he questioned whether the regulating force of law alone is sufficient for the peaceful organisation of human society. In general, therefore, Tornai cast doubt on modern variations of Rousseau’s view, according to which human beings are born good and, by eliminating some flaw, can outgrow their destructive, bloodthirsty nature. He acknowledged only the possibility of partial results, and rejected the notion of universal “redemption”.
His examinations of public and cultural affairs do not cling tightly to current events; rather, they attach themselves to the national “questions of fate” in the Illyésian sense and to the world history of humankind at large. Through a culture acquired in several languages, he has at his disposal a wealth of historical examples and philosophical and intellectual-historical lessons, which he interprets with tireless curiosity in relation to political, scientific and other developments in the world. It is precisely this interest in public matters, and his complete absence of indifference, that elevates him among those great intellectuals who view the world in universal perspectives yet without illusion. His disenchantment does not make him into a “cultural pessimist” or a “decadent” comparable to many thinkers of the previous fin de siècle; rather, it shapes him into a critical poet and public thinker who is nonetheless capable of recognising the good. He argues that the development of Western, “white” civilisation has become so contradictory that it can no longer truly be called development – only change, one that is ultimately doomed to collapse. With the extreme exploitation of natural forces, the subjugation and enforced destitution of the greater part of the world, and with a greed that even consumes itself, the nineteenth-century intuition has now been proven: that Europe and the American consumer society that arose from it are unfit to steer the destiny of humankind towards a better path. Many arguments support this view – nowadays, the unexpectedly surging wave of African, Balkan and Asian refugees pouring into Europe threatens the welfare societies, which are unable to eliminate destitution even among segments of their own populations. Hence, in one of his conversations with Zoltán Jánosi [literary historian and critic], he declares that “Europe is no longer enough”; valid judgements, as well as global economic, social and artistic programmes, are possible only if we think in terms of humanity as a whole. Even with this awareness, we must explore the societies beyond Europe – those that have become stuck at the level of feudalism, or that still preserve nomadic or even prehistoric conditions. Their elementary interests, and their cultures alike, must be incorporated into our thinking in the spirit of a “new universality”.
It is evident, however, that in underdeveloped countries and in certain communities customs still prevail – for example, the disenfranchisement of women, superstitious and aggressive forms of behaviour – because of which Europe’s essentially continuous civilisational development since the Renaissance (though repeatedly interrupted by horrific wars and dictatorships) is unlikely to endure for long. Europe – and similarly the two North American welfare states, in contrast to their southern neighbours, along with a few wealthy emirates and Israel in opposition to the Arab masses – establishes a kind of quarantine against the world’s poor, while the United States stirs up wars driven by the sale of its modern arsenal and by its geopolitical and resource-acquisition interests. It is not Albert Schweitzers but money men who decide the great questions of the world, setting aside classical civic values, above all the principles of equality and fraternity, without which even liberty becomes nothing more than empty words.
Following the principle of rationality, Tornai adopted a tolerant attitude towards the individual, yet an unrelenting, critical stance towards institutionalised religious and cultic forms of thought. At the same time, since his youth he had also paid attention to the fact that the moral customs that developed within religious communities do in fact embody certain values. Enlightened European thinking, in the Victorian era and thereafter, was inevitably compelled to recognise in the way of life of African or Tahitian “primitives” a sexual freedom at which hypocritical Europe “showed the red light”. After the “noble savage” of Defoe, Voltaire and Rousseau, it was Delacroix, Baudelaire, and later Gauguin, Picasso, Matisse and many other artists who revealed the spiritual values of so-called undeveloped societies, including their distinctive artistic abstractions. Aesthetic and poetic phenomena – that is, questions of form – thus became connected with cultural anthropology, psychology, and sexual morality, and this constitutes one of the explanations for the accelerating pace of modernisation in the twentieth century.
In parallel with this – though with many significant points of contact – there also emerged the constructive vision in the Kassákian sense, a way of thinking that does not deny the necessity of urbanisation that shapes the future, nor of a civilised way of life, social security, or, for instance, the elimination of infant mortality and various epidemics. “a sewer project” awaits us, says Tornai’s Polish contemporary, Zbigniew Herbert [poet and essayist], in Elegy of Fortinbras, and in doing so he seems almost to echo one of the guiding lights of the Enlightenment, Goethe. With Walt Whitman in the mid-nineteenth century there begins that radical artistic current which prophetically proclaims the importance of roads, railways, city-building and energy production. In Hungary, it found a follower in Kassák; in France, in Léger, and in others. Tornai matured into this intellectual current at an early age: the momentum of the constructive avant-garde is palpable in his poems. For him this was also a matter of individual temperament – Bergson’s notion of ‘élan vital’ might almost have been coined for him.
At the same time, he never neglected the folk and national traditions of his homeland. In many of his poems we can observe an exciting fusion of modern dissonances and the traditional consonances embedded in folklore. Here we arrive at what, in Tornai, is of central importance: his Bartókian quality.
The Bartók–Kodály current exerted a high-level poetic influence first on Attila József, although his “Kalevala-like” poems were probably independent initiatives. Of the folk-song-like poems of his middle period, Béla Bartók is reported (according to Ferenc Fejtő [Hungarian-French historian and essayist]) to have said that if he were a poet, he would write such poems. The term ‘Bartókian’ (coined by László Németh) came to full flowering at a remarkably high level, in the middle of the twentieth century, in the work of several members of the younger generation of the time – above all in the poetry of Ferenc Juhász and László Nagy – in spite of the dictates of socialist realism. In Tornai, too, the beginnings of this tendency could clearly have been discerned, yet he was almost written out of account by literary criticism. Those who failed to understand him did not recognise his powerful (though not Marxist) philosophical grounding, and accused his sometimes expressionistic, sometimes surrealistic, boldly metaphoric poetry of irrationalism. It was Sándor Csoóri – who spoke out with exceptional courage on literary and public matters, and who was a leading interpreter of the second wave of the new Bartókian spirit – who, in his artistically shaped essays, proclaimed the value of this ancient-yet-modern orientation.
Later scholarship was slow to perceive that there is no yawning abyss between Attila József and the poets of Juhász’s generation: the omnipotent Hungarian world-poet, Sándor Weöres – marginalised in the 1950s – is the most important connecting link, not only through his folk-song-inspired poems for children, but also through his incorporation of the values of exotic and archaic cultures into his verse. Nor should we forget Miklós Radnóti, who, in the mid-1930s, wrote a Black African song with profound empathy.
Tornai matured alongside the Bartókian impulses of the two “twin stars”, Ferenc Juhász and László Nagy, at the very moment when he added something fundamentally new of his own: in the 1970s he published his translation volume Boldog látomások (lit. Happy Visions), in which the songs of tribal (and nomadic) cultures from every corner of the globe are assembled. This undertaking caused a genuine sensation, comparable to Sándor Csoóri’s essays probing the “sensitive” questions of Hungarian peasant life, national culture, and collective rights. In the background, until his death, stood the protective and encouraging presence of Gyula Illyés, the first to articulate Hungarian “questions of fate”. It was he who, in Puszták népe (People of the Puszta), recognised the affinity between the people of the Hungarian plains and the starving of Black Africa and the pariahs of Asia. Later, he was also the one to draw attention to the elementary interests of the Hungarian minority left to its fate in the Romanian dictatorship.
Social questions, at the same time, always carry aesthetic questions with them. Few recognised this as clearly as József Tornai and his intellectual companion Sándor Csoóri in the early 1960s, initially under the influence of the French avant-garde, and later with an ever broader view of other global tendencies as well. With this we have arrived at the constitutive traits and distinguishing features of the ‘Tornai poem’. In the 1980s, in an appreciative critical statement, Győző Határ [Hungarian-born writer and critic in exile] remarked that “something must be wrong” with Tornai, since a poet of such magnitude was receiving disproportionately little attention from critics and from the public. I very much agree with his ironic reflections on the backwardness of Hungarian literary life, but I would add one further point. The poetry-loving Hungarian readership – often precisely the well-intentioned among them – had, in a certain sense, had its “ear of reception” spoiled by the verse-music of the great figures of Nyugat [lit. West – leading modernist literary journal in early-20th-century Hungary] and by a formal art that had crystallised into perfection in nineteenth-century Europe, its origins reaching back to Greco-Roman and Renaissance–Mannerist traditions. In more fashionable terminology, by the 1930s the humanist ideal of beauty, the verse-music, and the “Western European” – and simultaneously favoured – poetic ideal of form had become “canonised” and classical. Above all this was shaped by the towering authority of Mihály Babits [poet and critic, central Nyugat figure], the immensely popular Dezső Kosztolányi [poet and prose writer, central Nyugat figure], the divinely musical and painterly Árpád Tóth, Gyula Juhász, and Ernő Szép. Attila József, receptive to everything, also absorbed this, enriching it with his revolutionary new conceptuality; and then virtually the entire so-called “third generation” – Miklós Radnóti, Sándor Weöres (when he was not writing avant-garde poetry), Zoltán Jékely, István Vas, László Kálnoky, and the rest.
Formal bravura, the lullingly beautiful music of verse, a rhythm, melody, and pattern of rhyme enjoyable even independently of semantic content – this is not really Tornai’s domain, and he also rarely employed Greco-Latinised forms. He preferred a Hungarian cadence, a “segmenting” rhythm adapted to the nature of the Hungarian language, even in his free verse. Some of his early poems (and occasionally even some of the mature ones) are not “pleasant” in the conventional sense – yet, through their metaphors, they create new kinds of beauty. I would even risk the claim that, together with his generation, he is marked by a more “barbaric” ideal of beauty than that of Nyugat-style lyricism. This is closely connected to his own motto: “I am modern and archaic.” In his own way he brought “new tremors” into Hungarian poetry, just as Juhász, Nagy and Imre Csanádi did around the mid-1950s, even if not with quite the same refined formal mastery as the former two. Of course, Tornai, both as a poet and as a translator, possesses an excellent knowledge of the rules of versification – yet he does not “run through them all on the keyboard” as Attila József and the great figures of Nyugat, with Weöres foremost among them, used to do. At times he is content with the clinging rhymes of folk song, or with rhythms that do not follow strict metrical schemes; and the beauty of verse, the ‘bel canto’, is measured neither in his poetry nor in Csoóri’s by the standards of László Nagy or Sándor Weöres. Their true model is Endre Ady in the sense that, for them, it is thought and passion that generate form, rather than the other way round (as in Arany, Babits or Weöres). The poetry of Tornai and of Csoóri, in its lesser melodiousness, is instead more disturbing, drawing consonance out of extreme dissonances and giving expression to the inner agitation of modern humanity, to the breakdown of harmony. In this respect both can be considered avant-garde poets, even though they are at the same time bound by a thousand threads to the classical traditions, from Bálint Balassi through Ady and Attila József, and beyond.
Győző Határ is most persuasive when he suggests that Tornai shapes his poems in a grand, block-like manner, with little reliance on the tools of minute polishing and meticulous refinement. Thought and emotion render the greater part of his poems – and of his entire poetics – monumental. One of his principal strengths – as with Sándor Csoóri – lies in a metaphor built on minimal similarity, one that addresses even our “sixth sense” and gestures towards universal correspondences. His poems “flow and contract” irregularly, according to inner law, or come to a standstill in their repeated lines, until a moment of revelation-like insight lifts them upward. What gives measure to his “reined-in free verse” (to use Miklós Hernádi’s expression) is an unbounded discipline and freedom of thought, precisely by virtue of this productive contradiction. I have once described him as constitutionally romantic, and by this I meant not a stylistic category but an emotional nature, a temperament. Without this, there can scarcely be paradoxical thinking, richness of feeling, enthusiasm, tragic collapse, or a catharsis of elemental power – and scarcely, too, youth itself. Today the word “romantic” is almost as irritatingly discredited as “Hungarian character” or “moral strength”. This is not the fault of the romantic soul, of Hungarianness, or of morality – least of all of over-disciplined classicism – but of a few foolish, ideologically motivated grave-robbers of thought, and of sheer vacuity.
We have thus arrived once more at a crucial concept: Tornai’s principal adversary is ontological nothingness – the “nothing” of being, nihil and nihilism. When he encounters it in poetry (for instance, in the work of Dezső Kosztolányi), he bows before the nothing that the master presents with such intelligent and beautiful words; in others he may recognise a ‘horror vacui’ or a yearning for nirvana. But when he confronts it in public thinking, in mass culture, or in pseudo-sciences, he knows no mercy: he dismantles the false prophecy “piece by piece”. Paraphrasing Goethe in his critique of irrationalism, nothingness is what the blind spot in our eye perceives – that is, does not perceive. The poet is the mirror of the world and cannot rely on flaws in the silvering of that mirror. Tornai, too, has a mission; and whenever he encounters manifestations of ontological nihil, he rises up in protest against them.
A few words, finally, about his ‘God-poems’. Outside the realm of art, Tornai accepts no personification of any central, cosmos-transcending power or creator, in monist, dualist or polytheist (-pantheist) form. And yet he created a rich body of God-poetry. It is impossible even to imagine art, poetry and human existence without God, or indeed without religions and mythologies. We are constantly confronted with the religious concepts, embodied figures, symbols and narratives – if one prefers, the “stories” – as well as the objects and edifices of several thousand years of art and cultural history. In everyday speech we involuntarily invoke the Lord, Jesus or the Virgin Mary, and in moments of anger we call upon the Devil, the sacrament. Even if these do not exist, they do not signify nothing; they express something – ourselves, and our belonging to a community that transcends time.
With Lőrinc Szabó we may say: what a pity that there is no God. By saying this, we have already created Him – just as another poet of Reason and unbelief, Ágnes Nemes Nagy, fashioned her own God, and addressed her reproach to the “non-existent” for having created so flawed a world, and the human being cast into it.
The finitude of human existence, and the enigma of a world revolving around itself, always preoccupied Tornai; they shaped his poetry as fundamental elements of his philosophical thinking. Among the world religions, he found the teaching of Buddhism most congenial, yet even this offered him no final point of orientation. He often formulates possible answers in the form of questions. The refrain of one of his most significant poems, the more than two-hundred-line Emberfejű Idő (lit. Man-Headed Time), that “we are still alive”, despite the selected atrocities of history and our own weakness, would lose none of its meaning if it were followed everywhere by a question mark. Here is his 2004 confession, from the afterword to the first volume of the four-volume edition of his poetic life’s work – itself “a question of questions”:
“Poetry is dead in the dimensions of European–American civilisation. Will it be reborn? I do not know. It may be that humankind is unable to overcome the obstacles to being that it itself has created. Hungarian verse is still alive, as the language is, and if we have a culture, it will not vanish with the now beginning twenty-first century.”
For his part, he has done, and continues to do, what lies in his power. He adds immeasurably to the insights of his predecessors, and remains in constant dialogue with them and with contemporary thinkers – above all with himself. And this is what makes him a great and original figure, an “autonomous human being”, a “free thinker”, in his own words.
[2015]