Árpád Tőzsér has built, over almost sixty years, a poetic oeuvre that forms a living tableau of modern Hungarian lyric poetry. This exceptionally open and receptive body of work has been able to absorb highly diverse influences, renew itself repeatedly, and confront the poetic challenges of contemporary Hungarian literature, offering responses that are distinctive and capable of meaningful dialogue with his peers. As one of the most significant representatives of Hungarian literature in Slovakia [Hungarian-language literature produced by the Hungarian minority community in Slovakia], he remained consistently loyal to the traditions of his native region; yet, finding the shared Hungarian literary idiom sometimes too constraining, he continually drew inspiration from his encounters with world literature. As a translator, editor and university lecturer, he has closely and consciously followed the changing directions of poetic language, and has engaged with these developments creatively – and often deliberately provocatively.
It is not surprising that, like many of his contemporaries who came from similar social backgrounds, Árpád Tőzsér also began by following the patterns of the ‘népi’ (folk-inspired) lyrical tradition, writing poems that typically drew on the genres of village life and employed natural imagery, usually in forms that were not formally complex. In his case, however, alongside – or instead of – the idyllic representations of rural life, we already find texts that point to the problems of small communities, to poverty and loneliness, and at least in coded form to the signs of hopelessness in social development and to the falsehoods of communist political discourse. In Tőzsér’s poetry, peasant culture is never “silent”, yet for its problems to be heard and then articulated, some form of inner motivation was necessary – precisely something that stood apart from, or was even alien to, that culture itself.
His first volume, Mogorva csillag (lit. Sullen Star) appeared in 1963, followed closely by his second collection, Kettős űrben (lit. In Double Space), in 1967. What do we see in these books? On the surface, the imprint of an idyllic, seemingly unproblematic worldview: a sense of harmony between the poetic speaker and his surroundings, beauty, brightness, a feeling of being at home – a poetry of the landscape and the native region. We find scenes of peasant life, but in the eyes of the elderly women wearing headscarves and the toughened grandfathers there are traces of brokenness, and on their veined hands, the marks of hard labour.
The slightly later volume Időnként kihuny a város s kigyullad bennünk a falu (lit. Sometimes the City Goes Out and the Village Flares Up Within Us) still conveys nostalgia and positive emotional ties to the village, and the long poem Történet egy kripta lakóiról és a mítoszokról (lit. A Story of the Inhabitants of a Crypt and of Myths) is particularly vivid: here the “crypt” signifies blocks of housing estates, where, unlike in the village, people torn from their original environment live in loneliness and alienation, above all without shared experiences, in cramped and unhealthy surroundings. Yet by this stage, Tőzsér had already moved away from the ‘népi’ (folk-poetic) idiom.
Gradually, elements of learned culture, references to world literature and existential reflection became dominant in his verse, followed later by self-ironical essay-poems addressing broader thematic concerns – though these still touched on the experience of minority existence. By this time, he had left far behind the song-like forms of his early work.
Literary critic Zoltán Németh draws attention to the fact that the idea of the “native region” in Tőzsér’s poetry gradually transforms into the source of personal existential tragedy; indeed, Németh speaks of a kind of “native-region complex”. Literary historian Tibor Elek, in writing about the new edition of Genezis (lit. Genesis), offers an extended analysis of the reasons and necessity behind Tőzsér’s movement from what he calls “native-region totalitarianism” towards a re-evaluation of the native region, citing in detail the poet’s diaries and later essays, which are also crucial for understanding his self-interpretation.
According to these reflections, the poet was among the first to perceive the way communist ideology and the myth of the native region could echo one another, and therefore he sought to detach himself from the latter as well. This was not solely an ideological matter, but also – and fundamentally – a poetic one: the young poet who had moved to the city encountered the major figures of modern world literature, and, as he later wrote himself, came to recognise that one must move from the experience of the soil to the experience of existence. Since then, this recognition has provided the scope and possibility for his poetry.
I agree with Tibor Elek in identifying two poems as central to this poetic shift: Szülőföldtől szülőföldig (lit. From Native Land to Native Land) and Fejezetek a kisebbségtörténelemből (lit. Chapters from the History of a Minority). The latter, due to its length and carefully constructed form, is a crucial precursor to Tőzsér’s later major essay-poems.
As this development unfolds, the traditional communal foundation of ‘népi’ (folk-inspired) poetics also begins to loosen in Árpád Tőzsér’s work, and a more intimate poetry emerges, one oriented towards personal fate and, in the past decade especially, towards the fear of death. This new poetic voice rests on an exceptionally rich and intricate network of references to world literature. The trajectory that his poetry followed from this point onward is impressive – one that, admittedly, the early volumes did not yet foreshadow. Yet one of the key values of Tőzsér’s poetry lies precisely in its capacity for renewal. As Zoltán Csehy [Hungarian poet, critic and scholar] puts it: Árpád Tőzsér’s poetry ”changes from volume to volume, becomes more intellectual and profound; within it we find a wide range of registers, from avant-garde gestures oscillating between the personal and impersonal, through postmodern role-poems, to philosophical statement-poems, all animated by inexhaustible energies.” Viewed from another angle, this means that within his own oeuvre Tőzsér learned to reconcile competing poetic approaches, to make distant poetic idioms speak either simultaneously or in immediate succession.
The dynamic of the oeuvre is further shown by the fact that Tőzsér regularly revises his earlier poems, and the new versions acquire fresh meanings within the renewed context of each volume. There are poems of which four distinct versions are known, and there is no particular reason to assume that the most recent one will be final. This is because Tőzsér’s poetry is not organised chronologically but rather through the closed, internally coherent worlds of individual volumes. The newer versions therefore do not erase the validity of the earlier ones; each retains its meaning and weight within its original context and cannot simply be replaced by later reinterpretations. The title of the 2010 selected volume, Sebastianus mondja (lit. Sebastianus Speaks), comes from precisely such a text that continuously migrates, transforms and is reborn in its new environments. The poem has become one of the emblematic works of the entire oeuvre, since even if we were to discuss only this single poem, we would nevertheless touch on the most important features of Tőzsér’s poetry: the philosophical attitude, the essayistic and lightly rhythmic mode of speech, the carefully measured structure of the long poem, and the humour that moves at times into the grotesque or satirical register. And there is yet another key aspect: the constant and visible presence of intertextuality. The poem refers to Rainer Maria Rilke’s Saint Sebastian, and through it to the visual artworks that served as Rilke’s sources of inspiration. Tőzsér’s successive versions of the poem also demonstrate how he is able to detach himself from his models, treating even a traditionally romantic theme with critical distance while nonetheless making it unmistakably his own. For although, in the Christian tradition, the soldier who converted from paganism, was pierced with arrows, miraculously healed through the compassion of women, and then tortured to death became a symbol of moral strength, steadfastness, martyrdom and their exalted beauty, in Tőzsér’s rendering we see the martyr who has survived the arrows not in his moment of transfiguration, but before his torment, sitting in prison, abandoned and without hope. Although the sense of identification with the theme and the confessional tone remain, the prison in Tőzsér’s poem signifies both the prison of existence and the prison of the poem itself. This double meaning guarantees the presence of self-irony, that is, a degree of distance. Moreover, in the fourth stanza the poem raises human existence and martyrdom to the same plane, so that the metaphysical connection between the earthly and the transcendent may be realised even before actual death takes place:
“And as the gaze breaks outward:
leaning from the window of the poem
you reach up into a celestial line,
and softly the earthly latch clicks free.”
This poem coincided with the most significant transformation in Tőzsér’s poetic development, when, recognising the limitations of the ironic Central European grotesque associated with his character ‘Mittel úr’ (‘Mr Mittel’, a recurring satirical persona), he began shaping a poetic language more attuned to postmodern approaches. This shift played a major role in the reception of his work in Hungary. His 1996 poetry collection was named Book of the Year; shortly before that, in 1995, literary critic Györgyi Pécsi published her monograph on his oeuvre, and reviews and essays by prominent Hungarian critics began to appear with increasing frequency. It is striking that by this time the Mittel-poems had become something of a burden for the oeuvre: their mode of speech and viewpoint had adhered too strongly to Tőzsér’s poetic identity, to the point that many continued to associate his work with them even when his poetry had moved in a different direction – although it may also be said that the satirical and ironic tone linked to Mittel never entirely disappeared. Moreover, the specifically Central European sense of life expressed in these poems underwent a transformation after the political changes of 1989. The collapse of the old political borders was followed by the emergence of other kinds of boundaries, which required a different form of poetic address. Tőzsér’s sensitivity to his own artistic situation is demonstrated by the fact that he wrote the final Mittel-poems at this time, and in 1995 closed this period definitively with his selected volume Mittelszolipszizmus (lit. Mittel-solipsism). It is as if he himself sought to break free from the critical category that risked becoming a prison.
The experience of confinement, escape and attempted release is, in fact, a fundamental theme running through Tőzsér’s work. Critic József Tamás Reményi expresses this succinctly when he writes that Tőzsér’s “life for a long time was marked by the contradiction between flight and the appearance of arrival: escaping as a child from the post-war deportations of Hungarians in Slovakia, retreating into illness to avoid the burdens of adulthood, and then assuming a self-chosen exile from literary public life”. Early on, Tőzsér’s poetry also begins to incorporate cultural references and foreign-language textual elements that would later become even more significant and are distinctly associated with postmodern poetics. These foreign fragments are in Slovak, Czech and Polish, and their function is substantial: they signal the cultural environment in which the poems emerged, the particular conditions of the poet’s life, and the linguistic world of the minority community from which this poetry speaks. For readers in Hungary, these foreign lines may seem opaque, but for the poet and for a narrower circle of readers they hold recognisable meaning and thus articulate a shared sense of belonging.
Another key poem of the oeuvre, Adalékok a nyolcadik színhez (lit. Additions to the Eighth Scene), was also written in the 1980s. It later returned to prominence as a precursor to the dramatic poem Faustus Prágában (lit. Faustus in Prague) of 2005. The poem, extending over some two hundred lines, presents the same situation and uses the same dialogic form as the later dramatic work: it recounts the life of Albert Szenczi Molnár [1574–1634, Hungarian Calvinist scholar, psalm translator and lexicographer], who rose from poverty to become a respected figure among the leading intellectuals of his age, only to die in conditions of deprivation in Kolozsvár [a historic city in Transylvania, which for centuries was one of the cultural and intellectual centres of Hungary; today Cluj-Napoca, Romania]. Tőzsér sharply recognises the tragic paradox of this life: how could a scholar fluent in several languages, translator of Psalms, compiler of dictionaries and author of theological works, who had lived for a time in Germany and Prague (where he lodged with Johannes Kepler), return to his native region, jobless and fleeing debt only to live in destitution?
The poem’s title already indicates its broader literary orientation. Tőzsér approaches the Faust theme (we may also recall his 2012 collection of essays titled Faustus Pozsonyban [lit. Faustus in Bratislava]) not primarily via Goethe but through reading and rethinking Imre Madách’s Az ember tragédiája (The Tragedy of Man, 1861). Additions to the Eighth Scene functions as a supplement to the eighth, “dream” scene of The Tragedy of Man with an additional Hungarian scene, a new dream that may not be Kepler’s but rather that of Szenczi Molnár himself. The explicit presence of Madách’s work within the dramatic conflict is telling, since for Tőzsér – as we know from his essays – Madách (also from the Upper Hungarian region, today Slovakia) represents world literature in its fullest sense: a paradigm-setting, radically innovative author whose work is not to be imitated but followed.
It is not accidental, therefore, that no recent Hungarian literary work reflects Madách’s influence more strongly than Faustus in Prague, nor that few works treat Szenczi Molnár’s intercultural role – manifested in friendships, translations and especially in his dictionary-making – with such clarity and emphasis. In Tőzsér’s reading, Szenczi Molnár is not only a historical figure but a bearer of cultural mediation across European intellectual networks, whose fate illuminates the vulnerable dignity of minority existence and the tragic paradoxes of cultural transmission.
The work Faustus in Prague – like Goethe’s Faust and Imre Madách’s The Tragedy of Man – is a dramatic poem. In this work too, Tőzsér is first and foremost a poet: he uses dramatic framing primarily to enable parallel speaking positions and the easy confrontation of differing viewpoints. The figures he draws from historical and cultural memory are not distinguished by characterisation but by their language and by the value-preferences embedded in their patterns of thought. Ultimately, therefore, the poem does not work with characters, but with languages, value-systems and argumentative frameworks.
At the same time, these early modern characters (contemporaries of Shakespeare), who speak in an archaic Hungarian inflected with Latin constructions, use biblical metaphorics with the natural ease characteristic of their period. Furthermore, Tőzsér subtly weaves into their dialogues the linguistic registers of Madách, who lived two and a half centuries after Szenczi Molnár, as well as certain nineteenth-century philosophical concerns and even features of distinctly contemporary poetic imagery. The result is a text that is not straightforward to read, intellectually dense, yet lively and varied, exciting precisely because of the interplay and superimposition of its linguistic layers.
We have already seen that the ideas associated with the figure of Mittel, along with its mode of speaking and formal strategies, attracted considerable critical attention. Yet they were ultimately insufficient to secure the breakthrough of the sixty-year-old poet’s reception within the Hungarian literary canon – insufficient, that is, for his work to be read and recognised widely in Hungary. Among the contributing factors were the prosaic, anecdotal, at times essayistic style of the poems, the substantial length of many of the more significant texts, the philosophical dimension that ran counter to dominant expectations within the Hungarian lyric tradition, a certain insensitivity to the complexities of minority experience among Hungarian critics, and the limited accessibility of publications produced outside Hungary’s borders.
It is from this perspective that the Kappus-poems of the mid-1990s are especially instructive. In these texts, Tőzsér in a sense defends his own grotesque and ironical mode of writing, turning inward and reflecting on his poetic stance. Yet even at that time, Tőzsér’s work was not in fact as distant from the mainstream currents of contemporary Hungarian poetry as the Kappus-poems themselves suggest.
The volumes Leviticus (1997) and Finnegan halála (lit. The Death of Finnegan, 2001) altered this ambivalent situation to some degree. While it had long been characteristic of Árpád Tőzsér to experiment with different poetic registers and styles, and to avoid settling into familiar forms, it is nonetheless unusual for a poet to begin developing a markedly new poetic idiom after the publication of ten volumes. Yet this is precisely what occurred in Leviticus, and The Death of Finnegan reinforced and clarified this new direction in an even more distilled form. The poetry that had previously voiced the multi-layered relationship to the native region – while remaining fundamentally particular in orientation – set aside these earlier central questions, shifting instead to more universal philosophical concerns of existence.
The close interrelation of the two books is indicated most clearly by the fact that, with minor revisions, the second volume reprints two of the most significant poems from the earlier one: Euphorbosz monológja (lit. The Monologue of Euphorbos) and the title poem Leviticus.
In the past decade and a half, Tőzsér’s poetry has presented him as a poet addressing classical metaphysical questions, though with the significant qualification that his poetic language is highly self-reflective and therefore consciously prepared to confront the charge of being “outdated”. At first, Tőzsér seemed to adopt an almost defiant, wounded stance against prevailing literary trends, as if he deliberately sought to write in an outdated mode. Yet his allusions and subtitle-like indications make it clear that he was perfectly aware of which poetic registers were most dialogically active at the time, and why. What he attempted was not so much to oppose contemporary trends as to accomplish something distinct: to transmit and preserve the self-identical, traditional questions of poetry within a poetic language that he conceived as postmodern, while retaining the thematic concerns of modernism and preserving the ideal of beauty. In other words, to continue speaking of life, death, lyricism and love in formally structured, rhymed poems.
The poetry of the 2000s likewise demonstrates that philosophical inspiration is part of his creative field, but the volumes also bring to the surface more complex issues, including questions of power and violence. It is difficult to dispute Tőzsér’s own assertion that philosophy – or at least a certain philosophical tradition – has always used a poetic mode of language. Yet from this it does not necessarily follow that poetry can, without further mediation, serve as an adequate medium for philosophical discourse, or that it can make visible the full depth of philosophical problems. This is especially thought-provoking given the demands placed on the reader: the books draw on multiple layers of classical Roman literature, and require considerable familiarity with the cultural-historical references. The densely woven networks of literary, historical and cultural figures and concepts offer, however, rich possibilities for the poetic speaking voice – the “I” – to enact roles and to move among them, an opportunity that Tőzsér consistently takes up.
For at least fifteen years, Árpád Tőzsér has been experimenting with different forms of the ‘death poem’. In his most recent volume, each cycle is organised around a distinct poetic form, shaped by differing contexts of language, cultural erudition, identity, metaphysical meaning-making, history and tradition. Yet in his work, any attempt to attribute meaning to death confronts the inevitable paradox that arises from the fact that death lies beyond existence: how can one speak of something that is already outside the limits of the language of life? Another paradox emerges in these poems: while the volume asserts that death is the only subject truly worthy of lyric poetry, it must simultaneously recognise that the impossibility of speaking about death ultimately implies the death of poetry itself. And although individual attitudes towards death may vary greatly, in essence all deaths are alike, which again draws Tőzsér’s poetic thinking toward emptiness, toward meaninglessness – returning us, in a sense, to the point we reached when we bade farewell to the figure of Mittel some twenty years earlier. The poet stands face to face with death and with nothingness, confronted by the threat of falling silent. In the earlier cycle, Ármin Mittel – unable to endure the absurdity of the world – was placed in a mental institution.
Perhaps it is in response to this impasse that Tőzsér’s recent poems adopt a looser, more conversational tone, approaching death by tasting it, circling around it, speaking of it without the insistence on dramatic solemnity. The first part of the volume Fél nóta (lit. Halfwit Song) is occupied by the cycle A gyöngykapu kitárva… (lit. The Pearly Gate Is Open…), a twenty-one-part sequence written in dialogue with a Bach cantata, presenting a speaker who accepts and comes to peace with death. The second cycle, Visszanézés a csillagokból (lit. Looking Back from the Stars), shows a poetic figure already beyond the problem of death, playful and ironic, joking with language and form, and freely voicing dissatisfaction, aversion or commentary on anything at all. It is as if everything has already become indifferent.
The final poem of the cycle brings this gesture to a head by shifting from the philosophical to the material in a playful corrective: “In this grave a fresh corpse blues, / for reasons no one can deduce, / a sign that death is no joke, / no matter what Leibniz wrote.” (Sírvers, [lit. Epitaph]). It is as though the decay of the body overrides all philosophical reasoning, and the insistence that “death is no joke” ultimately declares poetry itself inadequate when confronted with death – particularly since, in this volume, there is in fact more humour than solemnity. Moreover, this duality characterises the later poems as a whole: the death-poems and the lines that treat old age with irony and consider death as a kind of interlude, repeatedly alternate with one another. This gesture is what makes Tőzsér’s recent poetry so compelling: he philosophises and writes poetry, but he also shares with us the knowledge that neither philosophy nor poetry resolves the most profound human problem – death.
[2016]