Tóth László, one of the most authoritative figures in Slovak Hungarian-language literature, has often – and sometimes for long stretches – been forgotten by his muse, or else called away from poetry by practical, rational pursuits: scholarship, editorial work, literary journalism. Yet he has always returned, again and again, to his characteristically intellectual–philosophical poems and to poetry itself – for this reason he is occasionally referred to as a “poet–philosopher” – but only when he could gain or find for his own experiences, his understanding of the world, and the poetically demanding articulation of his current existential situation an appropriate angle of vision and a language that moved beyond entrenched clichés.
For in his oeuvre poetry is the backbone that holds and sustains, the most essential expression of human being. Even though it is often, or mostly, present invisibly, the poem is at work in the background of all his other activities, articulated through the triad of “this is what I feel”, “this is what I see”, “this is what I think”. And as the creator himself notes, “…our very human essence would be lost if it were ever to fall silent – God forbid, to die away – within us…”
Tóth László regards poetry, the poem, as something that exists without sufficient or compulsory justification – simply: it is. There is no cause or purpose to its coming into being, to its existence. And yet, indirectly – or rather very directly – its role is indispensable in the process of becoming human: in the process by which we rise out of nature, and in that by which the human being recognises that he himself is also part of nature. Thus, without the emergence of sensitivity to the poem, the shaping and formation of consciousness and self-consciousness, of awareness of being created and of creating, and ultimately of becoming human, would be inconceivable. In his workshop poetry, the poem, comes into being – exists – so that we may find our way to it. Like the wind, it simply blows; but if it can become part of us, it can render our human existence – riddled with struggles of identity and uncertainty – more bearable and more valuable. “The novel, the short story, the poem become part of the world – or more precisely: of nature – in the same way as the bird, the blade of grass, the dusk-lit sky and the rock face reaching into the heavens, always unique and yet always – again and again – forming harmony within us; as a dog that dissolves our loneliness and bleak moods; as a human being,” Tóth László observes.
On this side of the bridge and beyond the bridge, often simultaneously, his oeuvre unfolded in two cultural milieus at once, although in its character it consistently moved in a single direction. His philosophical, yet frequently everyday-experience-driven poetry of ideas essentially winds around a single question, seeking ever-renewed answers to one fundamental issue: his human and poetic identity. In a larger-scale study, Béla Vilcsek aptly summarises and characterises the creator’s personality, the subject of his poetry, and the overall significance of his activity when he writes the following: “From every utterance and manifestation of Tóth László it is palpable that for him the rediscovery of the lost Eden, escape from oppressive everydayness, inner peace and security (that certain ‘found restlessness’) have always been embodied in the state that is ready for, and makes possible, the writing of poetry – that is, in poetry itself. This guides him in the first period of his career (‘on this side of the bridge’), when, in order to establish and gain recognition for a new kind of poetic outlook and mode of formation, he fights and endures his own struggles; and fundamentally this also guides him in his second period (‘beyond the bridge’), when, even in his forced exile, he does everything to ensure that the values of Slovak Hungarian literature and culture may become part of the all-Hungarian literary and cultural consciousness.”
If we look at the periods of his poetic oeuvre, we can trace a process of organic development marked by reflective features, headed by a long-maturing, extended “first” volume, which only reached its closure over the course of nearly a decade of creative activity.
In the second half of the 1960s (1967) he began publishing in various literary journals and periodicals, and relatively quickly and smoothly integrated into the literary milieu that characterised Slovak Hungarian-language literature at the time. Yet it was his appearance in the anthology Egyszemű éjszaka (One-Eyed Night), edited by Árpád Tőzsér in 1970 and devoted to emerging Slovak Hungarian poets, that truly laid the foundations of his impulse and his becoming a poet.
The following year his first independent volume appeared under the title A hangok utánzata (The Imitation of Sounds), followed in 1975 by Ithakából Ithakába (From Ithaca to Ithaca), and in 1977 by Átkelés (Crossing). These four major appearances, together with their cycles, in fact constitute the imaginary First Book that Tóth László regards as his first creative period – not only because of their unity of outlook, but also in terms of how he handled his poetic material at the time. In this period, in his years of debut, his poetic world is rather laconic, even though his characteristic poetic subjects and themes – the discovery of the world and of himself within it, and the inhabiting, appropriation and populating of the world thus known or presumed – might have encouraged, even suggested, the opposite.
The title of the period-summing and at the same time period-closing volume (Átkelés) itself carries the notion of movement from one place towards another, of transition, temporariness, an intermediate quality, the moment of after something and before something – for one does not settle on a bridge. As a consequence of this, and of the formation of a conceptual and perceptual shift, a crisis becomes perceptible in verse form: an approximation of poetic language and form towards epic and drama (the creator himself calls the volume a “novel”), as an attempt to unify and organise into a vision his poetic and human experiences up to that point.
His next volume, Istentelen színjáték (Godless Comedy), published in 1983, is characterised in its background zone by the historical situation of the late twentieth century as a form of contemporaneity, by the disorienting hopelessness of dictatorship, and by an occasionally tragically perceived sense of life. The poems of Istentelen színjáték are works of searching for place and self. Their fundamental questions revolve around how identity can be maintained, and at the same time how one can overcome the constantly recurring anxiety and fear that personal self-identity may even be lost. In this situation, irony and self-irony became the dominant – perhaps the only viable – poetic devices of Tóth László’s poetry, as attempts to assess and endure the situation: caricaturing his age and himself.
Whereas the poems of the long, extended first poetic period, closed by Átkelés, were characterised by a “stripped-down hermeticism” of language, or by its answering counterpoint, an over-ornamented, over-rhetorised tone, synthesis was created in Istentelen színjáték by poems that followed a reflective mode of vision, whose object- and self-perception, worldview, were permeated by irony. Accordingly, and in order for the absurdity and grotesque character of things to appear even more evidently, the visual power of the poems in this volume is determined by an overhead perspective, by looking from the outside.
This is not the case with Ötödik emelet, avagy Egy éden bugyrai (Fifth Floor, or the Circles of an Eden), in which questions open up through the personality, corporeality and disposition of the lyrical self; here the dominant viewpoint is internal, and as ever deeper layers are touched, the scope of inquiry expands inward.
Just as Átkelés was defined not strictly by genre as a “novel”, so too Istentelen színjáték and Ötödik emelet… were conceived from the outset as the first two parts of a trilogy. Its closure, however, was long delayed – almost characteristically so. For in Tóth László’s poetic oeuvre, significant, mostly decade-long pauses and silences – periods of maturation – follow one another, until in a volume built consistently upon and out of the previous ones he sums up what occupies him as a poet. Thus the completion and fulfilment of the trilogy appeared only in 1994, in the volume Hármaskönyv (Triple Book). At the same time, the first block of this volume, the Adam poems, also signalled a new direction of orientation: a finely philosophical poetic voice that, through parables, questions the world of being and beings.
Another decade and a half passed before the appearance of a new volume, Kötélen, avagy Amint az ég… (On the Rope, or As the Sky…, 2008). At its centre are poems that register existential situations and states of in-betweenness, of ambivalent attachment and detachment. The earlier-dated pieces in this volume recall and continue the tone of Istentelen színjáték: they look outward and inward at once. Their inspiration is shaped partly by a grotesque–satirical–ironic mode of vision, partly by dilemmas arising within the personality, by lyrical moods and elegiac contemplations, by acts of self-reflection. The later poems of the volume, however, open onto a new horizon: language appears as an entity. It is no longer merely the object of use, no longer merely an instrument in the poet’s hand for the poem, but in certain – albeit limited – respects acquires subjectivity and autonomy: it assumes a phenomenal character, and reciprocally uses the poem in order to write and speak the poet.
After another ten years, Tóth László’s most recent volume appeared, A Wittgenstein szóvivője (Wittgenstein’s Spokesperson, 2018), a kind of stunted attempt at harmony. For the promised and awaited harmony – limited from the outset – cannot in fact be complete; indeed, it is unfinishable. This volume not only reflects on the poetic movements indicated in his earlier books, on the life-feelings and existential experiences pressing into them, but also constitutes a kind of returning continuation of the poetic world of Istentelen színjáték. Although in a different context and under altered circumstances, once again the voice of the human being who fears for his integrity because he senses it to be endangered, who is able to preserve his self-identity amid doubts, comes to dominate the poems. Thus on the face of Wittgenstein’s spokesperson – who may be identified with Tóth László’s alter ego, Adam, or with the poet seeking refuge in concealment – the smile grows ever more bitter, distorted, ironic.
That his poetry volumes have appeared from time to time with large gaps? He was most strongly motivated to write – and especially to write poetry – when, in the original sense of the word, he felt existentially implicated in coming to know something, in understanding it better.
And until the often decades-long assembling of a poetry volume, he had no shortage of tasks. Some he chose himself, but more often they were tasks in which the task – typically manifesting itself as the absence of something: an unpublished book or oeuvre, a not-yet-existing journal or anthology – chose him. And if the route of a possibility loomed before him, he regarded it as natural to follow it to the end and see where it led.
Thus Tóth László, the poet, at times worked as an editor and publicist, as the head of publishing houses in Slovakia and Hungary; at other times he appeared as the author of studies, of theatre-historical volumes, as a translator of literary works. He also wrote plays, children’s poems and a fairy-tale novel. Over the years he conducted extensive correspondence – practically as an organic part of editorial work and literary networking – which later came to substitute, to some extent, for an unwritten, missed diary.
As a literary translator he translated poetry and prose, fairy tales and plays alike, although his ambitions in this direction were never particularly strong. What interested him more was seeing how he could function in this field. Translation interested him, in an unconventional way, because it deepened his relationship to his own language and helped map the paths by which, through language, one opens towards oneself. He regards it as a form of self-expression manifesting as a double confession: partly concerning the given work and its creator, and partly the translator himself, who makes a confession about his own self.
Tóth László’s activity is highly multifaceted. Over the course of his career he has not only written books but, as the head of several publishing houses, also dealt with their publication; he has compiled anthologies and engaged in literary organisation. (Among other things, this also explains why not only individual poems but his volumes as well regularly represent strong compositions, and can be regarded as well-considered works of art.) But above all he is a poet. Even if accompanied by long periods of silence, he writes the poem – and sometimes the poem writes him. In this capacity his oeuvre, above all in terms of its quality, constitutes an outstanding achievement of Hungarian-language poetry beyond Hungary’s borders. And although “the literary rank and value of his poetry are acknowledged, in reality it is still something of a ‘foreign body’ in contemporary poetry,” as one of his evaluators, Györgyi Pécsi, notes. Elsewhere she adds that “the poetic model he represents… may be compared to Árpád Tőzsér’s later creative period – in Hungarian modern poetry it is not unknown, but it is certainly unintegrated.”
Tóth László’s multi-directional activity unfolded within the burdened duality of being both here and at home (Hungary and Slovakia), in the building and deepening of relations between Hungarian-language literature in Hungary and in Slovakia.
Under the circumstances of this border-situation existence – called forth only in part by geopolitical or ideological borders, and far more by the austere reality of life, unfathomable in its events and turns – his poetry and his work as a translator and publisher alike opened routes of passage between Hungarian and Slovak culture.
His poetry, too, is surrounded by the “border-situation” duality, by the lived experience of being split. Subjectively, it is an existence in a peculiar no-man’s-land of “neither here nor there”, set against the knowledge – literary consciousness – that despite its fragmentation, “both here and there” his poetry is part of the single universality, the indivisible unity of Hungarian literature.
In his poems, a recurring archetypal and elegiac figure (and most likely his alter ego) is Adam, who simultaneously embodies real and desired reality, a mediator of the “human and poetic existential situation”, who, as the title of one of his poems indicates, stands at the border (Adam a határon – Adam at the Border).
What else could one do when standing in the middle of the bridge but continue building the bridge? He looks this way and that, homewards in both directions, in order to find himself between them in the poem. For, as Tóth László notes: “All my life, with every movement, I have been searching for one thing – or rather, one person: Tóth László (tóthlászló).” This is the search of one who does not change within himself even against change.
[2020]