József Utassy’s poems first appeared in a serious literary periodical in December 1965, that is, in his twenty-fifth year. Like many of his contemporaries, he was able to embark on his career only with some delay. One explanation for this lies in the fact that the 1960s may be regarded as one of the flourishing periods of Hungarian literature. The Bolshevik dictatorship was gradually easing, many members of the older generations were themselves in the position of starting anew, and in relation to the available forums the number of creative writers suddenly increased. It should also be borne in mind that in the decade following 1953 profound revolutions in outlook and poetics took place, most visibly in poetry. Oeuvres that have since become canonical were unfolding or undergoing renewal, and alongside these it was particularly difficult to find an independent voice and to make a noticeable start to one’s career. József Utassy showed sound judgement in selecting the path that best suited his own talent. From childhood onwards he was familiar with, and made his own, the texts and melodies of folk poetry. Among his contemporaries, he was connected in part to the visionary, symbolic, and mythic poetry that, drawing on folk tradition, was realised by Ferenc Juhász and László Nagy, and in part to Gyula Illyés, who began his career as a leading figure of the objectivity-oriented “new populism”, and from the 1950s onwards developed an increasingly polyphonic mode of thought and poetics. It is also essential to note that these oeuvres were strongly linked to the many-centuries-old tradition of Hungarian literature – to a sense of responsibility attentive to questions of national destiny. The picture would nevertheless remain incomplete if, in connection with Utassy, no mention were made of two other highly influential and innovative figures of the period: Sándor Weöres and János Pilinszky. It is by no means accidental that the younger fellow poet also paid tribute to them in verse, for his intellectual orientation was far from one-sided.
The reconciliation of visionariness and objectivity is evident from the very outset of Utassy’s work, becoming ever more conscious and complete over time. Viewed in its entirety, even the early poems already illuminated essential elements of the autonomous poetic world that would later unfold. Among his contemporaries, few can be said to have pursued a career trajectory of such organically unified coherence. Some critics regarded it as a sign of weakening that in his successive volumes the poet regularly included earlier poems as well. Yet this practice carried a different significance. At no point can Utassy be seen to have placed an earlier work within a new cycle without purpose. Indeed, certain major poems found their place in more than one cycle. The oeuvre also proved to be unified in terms of self-reflection. This is borne out by the careful construction of his collected volumes, and by the fact that even in the final years of his life he consistently concerned himself with organising his work into cycles independent of strict chronology. This is a kind of poetry in which, despite all change, unity remains the decisive principle. József Utassy wrote a single book throughout his entire life, much like Baudelaire – only he sang not so much of the flowers of decay as of the decay of flowers [based on the Hungarian translation of Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil].
In the 1960s and 1970s, many poets sought a possible synthesis between visionary and objectivist lyrical perspectives. This was almost a characteristic of the period – one of the defining ambitions of post–Nagy László lyric poetry – though its realisation varied from one poetic workshop to another. Utassy’s outlook was fundamentally rational. He did not regard the world as mysterious or unknowable, but as comprehensible and intelligible, a realm in which the path between phenomenon and essence, image and meaning, could indeed be traversed. Even when his poetic visions possess a strong mythic resonance – as in Magyarország! (lit. Hungary!) or Tengerlátó (lit. The Sea-Gazer) – they are not defined by their mythic character as such, but rather by a form of rational symbolism. In the 1960s, partly thanks to an essay by Sándor Csoóri, it became a conscious insight that folk poetry also possesses an ancient surreal dimension, no doubt because it is present in human imagination and in dreams as well. In József Utassy’s poetry, however, it is not the surreal but the realist–rational level that proves decisive. What appeared most surreal to him was nothing other than the drama-laden world of the twentieth century itself – a world whose tensions were condensed not only in the fate of humanity and of the Hungarian nation, but also in the poet’s own family history and individual life trajectory. It was this reality that he considered essential to name and to proclaim to the world.
In considering his poetry, three tragedies in his life’s fate must be mentioned, each of which also emerges thematically in his work. The child was only one and a half years old when his father set out on his final journey – to the front. From this grew the motif of orphanhood and, connected to it, those of war and death. The second was the extremely severe nervous illness that struck him in 1974, which for many years impeded his creative work and from which he was never able to free himself completely. The third was the death of his son at the age of twenty. War was not a direct experience for him; yet he did live through the Rákosi era, 1956, the reprisals that followed, and the world of the 1960s. He was continually confronted with the course of Hungarian and world history, with the shocking disparity between ideals and reality. This constellation gave rise, on 15 March 1968, to his first poem of major impact, one that almost became a folk song. Zúg Március (lit. March Roars), this work seeking to conjure Sándor Petőfi back to life, calls for help and appeals for justice:
Gather your bones, my friend, arise:
they steal from the basket of plenty’s prize,
they steal at the table where justice should stand,
in the name of nations! And you are still dead?!
Tomorrow, the seven-times cowards might
shatter over us the spiritual light.
Rise up, Petőfi! I shake your grave:
speak once again of the Freedom we crave!
In this poetry, the defining role of the symbol of freedom was not primarily called forth by adherence to the Petőfi emblem, but rather by the lived experience of the absence of freedom. This must have been particularly striking in the 1950s, which incessantly taught and proclaimed that, after a thousand years, the Hungarian people were finally living in freedom, and in the 1960s, which radically curtailed the commemoration of 15 March. Not only unnatural orphanhood, but this sharply accentuated social contradiction as well renders the individual dispossessed. József Utassy, both as a child and as a young man, was able to experience the mockery of the ideal of freedom at the level of both community and individual – separately as a citizen and as a poet. For it was possible to publish poems, but not just anything and not anywhere; it was possible to have one’s volume published, but not without compromise; and even critical reception was directed by official literary policy. The illness of society itself also played a role in the creator’s becoming ill, and he was forced to traverse hell not only as an artist, but as a human being. Direct experience diagnosed the sickness of Hungarian society, while the study of history testified to its generality. From here the poet arrived at the point of ultimately regarding humanity as a whole as diseased.
At the centre of the vision of the poem Tank stands the antagonism between the poet and power – and, at the same time, between the “court singer” and the independent poet. It is the latter whom power, the “tank”, seeks to annihilate by banishing him to the Moon. Ever since there have been poets, this antagonism has existed; the poem evokes antiquity, invoking as its ideal Sappho, who:
but she shone through pain that could crush the soul,
a pain causing a whole nation to fall,
if there was a prize, nothing is greater,
her songs through the shining lovers linger.
The motif of the tank reappears later in Iszonyú lesz (lit. It Will Be Terrible), a poem whose vision evokes the death of the Earth as a bitter testament:
Oh, not only me,
alas, not only me,
all shall once pass,
the light will turn black,
lakes and seas are going to die,
rivers will drown in sand,
on their banks mourning trees rustle:
behold the world, your world!
You thought it eternal, eternal.
During his university years, in the formative period of becoming a poet, József Utassy’s aesthetic and lyric-theoretical ideas took shape; these he later summarised in a few axiomatic statements. He held that the world of everyday life is “far more beautiful than literature”, and he also believed that “talent can be nothing other than an immense capacity for empathy charged with energy” (A kikelet fia [lit. The Son of Springtime]). The creation of a work, moreover, requires the maximum degree of concentration (Életünk, 1979/8). Lyric poetry is thus a transmission of energy and, at the same time, a system of images – in other words, order and systematic structure are also essential. For this reason, he considered it necessary to formulate his poems with finality, since – evidently with Attila József in mind – he knew that every point of a poem is Archimedean. He expressed this as follows: “I do not usually write down unnecessary things. I think very carefully about when to place that Sisyphean point at the end of the poem. And once I have placed that point there, the poem is no longer dependent on me.” (ibid.) According to the autobiographical confession: “I love those poets and writers who possess duende. For them I would put both my hands into the fire! Because I seem to see a red glow around their heads.” (Árgus, 1990/2.) Let us add: József Utassy’s poetry does indeed possess duende. (The concept of duende is known to us through Federico García Lorca. In Spanish thinking, this mysterious force – a dark sound, a proximity to death – is what animates the magical power of poetry.)
The first volume, Tüzem, lobogóm! (My Fire, My Blaze!), published in 1969, is permeated throughout by the motif cluster of fire, light, flame, and blazing. The symbol of March evokes not only revolutions, but also the revolutionary condition of youth itself. Youth, spring, wind, and love are constant motifs, and one might even say that this strand of the poems constitutes a series of variations on one of Hungary’s most beautiful folk songs – Tavaszi szél vizet áraszt (The Spring Wind Floods the Water). Thus, these poems may also be read as verses of elemental joy in life; indeed, it is precisely this perspective that appears more emphatic. The young poet simultaneously immerses himself in the beauty of coming of age and of taking possession of the world, in the constraints of social existence, and in the role of the poet who feels responsibility for his community. It is not the role itself that troubles him, but the world – which he regards as being in need of repair.
The sympathetic and successful start to his career was followed by a steep ascent and a brilliant arrival. Although Csillagok árvája (lit. Orphan of the Stars) could only be published in 1977 after several years of delay, it was not merely a decisive event in his individual career. A few years later, András Görömbei offered an assessment whose validity has endured to this day: “One of the greatest poetic achievements in our literature of the past decade was Csillagok árvája. The compelling moral stance indispensable to great poetry was here allied with genuine poetic force; individual images and verse structures sustained enormous tension within artistic discipline. With an Ady-like vehemence and a visionary power of cosmic scope, he renewed the strand of Hungarian lyric poetry concerned with the community – a strand many had believed impossible to continue – by shaping it into plastic yet explosively powerful visions of existence.” (András Görömbei: “Ki viszi át…?” [Who Will Take Love] 241.)
In these poems, the spring-like tonality of the early work is not replaced by a fruitful summer, but by autumn – an autumn that brings not harvest but passing away. Őszvilág (lit. Autumn World) is at the same time the present’s “Judas time”, a notion that later became the title of the first collected volume. Even more emphatic than passing away, however, is Hitfogyatkozás (lit. The Waning of Faith):
Victory? For thirty silver they won!
Of a Judas time I sing my song,
and at the Son on the Cross I so gaze,
my berry-eyes’ light bursts out in a blaze.
Against this he sets the imperative of moral steadfastness that refuses all compromise – the obligation to sing. His ideal is the Promethean human being ‘Beneath the star-locked heavens’:
Here beneath these star-locked heavens,
only my cell would be wider, though,
spare me all the Caucasian torture:
Twentieth Century, you!
The singer-poet was confronted with situations of ever more dramatic tension. No longer did the poet declare that the world was his; rather, he said that he belonged to the world – to you – that he could not flee his fate, that he would be nailed to the cross of writing. Redeemed and redeeming, a sequence of poems came into being that offer answers which both unfold and resolve drama to the most fundamental questions of existence. The poet’s outlook is complex: he perceives not only the obverse and reverse of things – seeing, for instance, passing away within what is coming into being – but also their layered nature. This is evident in his conception of the human being as well. In his understanding, human existence is fundamentally triply layered, operating within a network of personal being, Hungarian being, and human being as such. Put schematically, Tengerlátó is primarily a poem of personal being, Magyarország! (lit. Hungary!) of Hungarian being, and Pohárköszöntő (lit. Toast) of human being; yet in each poem all three layers are present, latent within one another. At times their mutual dependence itself emerges as essential, as for example in Pohárköszöntő:
Only a single sentence you should shine:
A HUNGARIAN ONE TO THE HUMAN,
A HUMAN ONE TO THE HUNGARIAN!
The imagery of Őszvilág early on revealed the growing problems of personal existence; yet the next path taken by the poet of Tengerlátó led into “hell”. In the second half of the 1970s he was already writing his poems as one coming from hell, with the experience of the unworthy condition of a human being cast into the depths of existence. A critical, self-ironic representation of his own condition appeared early in his poetry, expressed also through individual verbal coinages such as “szeptemberedek” [approx. becoming one with September] and “varjúhodok” [approx. becoming similar to a crow]. Around this time, this ruthless honesty intensified: “From hell I come, / lit up by the fire of disease, / I have swallowed a hundredweight of medicine, / yet my torment does not ease.” The beginning of his suffering – the most dreadful first day, followed by his admission to hospital – was recounted many years later in Kálvária-ének (Calvary Song, 1995). This twenty-seven-part work, which might be described as a lyrical narrative poem, recounts with astonishing detail and objectifying precision not only the actions of a man in delirium, but his thoughts as well. It offers an authentic portrayal of the temporary disintegration of the personality and of delusional states, while at the same time recording with exactness the causes of the illness: telling a night watchman that his father died in the war, that he is therefore an orphan; that he is a poet, but that György Aczél – who is none other than “socialist realism” – does not allow his poems to be published. To the paramedics who are called out he declares: “No! / I am not ill! / It is not I who am ill here, / but the world! / I am only one of its / victims, / just one!” Kálvária-ének is a strange and unforgettable work, and however odd it may seem to note this in connection with the depiction of an illness, in its genre, outlook, and tone it is also an example of poetic renewal. It refutes the critical opinion that described this poetry as self-repeating and greying.
Yet evidence of refutation could be observed even earlier. Alongside irony and self-irony, playfulness grew more pronounced, partly in conjunction with irony itself and with the grotesque. In 1988 the Hungária Kávéház (lit. Café Hungaria) cycle took shape as a volume. In these concise, epigrammatic pieces, linguistic play, humour, satire, and wit assume a prominent role. They mark the stages of the path leading out of hell, and then the worldview of the person who has emerged from it. The scene of contemporary life is the “café”, and although literary life stands at the centre, everything that happens in the country takes place here as well.
In another strand of this playfulness, childhood memories and the image of the native village come vividly to life. A gently melancholic cheerfulness, at times irony, at times pure joy in life permeates these recollections, as the distant past and the present are brought face to face. To this strand belongs yet another thematic sphere: that of the love poems. The collection of love poetry from the first major period was Áve, Éva! (lit. Ave, Eve!) (1981). The works gathered here are powerful, suffused with a restrained sexuality, and at the same time give expression to the personality’s notions of youth and immortality. By contrast, the love poetry of old age represents a major transformation; it might even be described as a poetry of marriage. Here the defining idea is that of a love-companionship experienced over an entire lifetime. The tragedy of their child’s death rendered the recognition of mutual dependence final and irrevocable. Perhaps the most exact reckoning of a shared life’s course is offered by Ketten (lit. Together):
I wanted to carry
the cross of poetry alone!
And now, ransacked, robbed:
under its burden together we groan,
and keep carrying the cross of crosses
to Golgotha on our own.
A third strand, a further cluster of motifs, leads back to nature – not only through the evocation of childhood, but also as a form of poetic play, for instance through the use of the haiku form, which Utassy himself employed with evident pleasure. Finally, a fourth strand, by no means negligible, is constituted by the poems for children, in which cheerfulness and playfulness are, as it were, “mandatory”. The circle may be widened still further, for alongside those mentioned, a radiating serenity repeatedly emerges in connection with other motifs as well – a serenity that shines through every tragedy and even through the awareness of inevitable death.
It soon became a matter of common opinion that József Utassy was also a poet of love and freedom. In the first volume, these two value-laden motifs still conveyed the more immediate impact of sight and lived experience; later, however, the poet spoke who was capable of rendering even the invisible perceptible, through such natural archetypes as the sea and the star. These motifs are characterised by a diversity of meanings, by polyphony, and are able to grasp not only the visible, but the invisible as well. The natural and the metaphysical levels frequently layer upon one another. The “orphan of the stars” receives the exhortation: “Let the sea beckon you to its shore and let it wash you / at the dawn of great purifying fires!” The orphaned human being holds a branch of burning bush in his hand, and in Tengerlátó “From a burning bush dusk flared more and more, / fire raged / on the farther shore.” In the burning bush God does not reveal himself, yet he becomes intimated to the Sea-Gazing Human Being, whom “God clothed, / clothed him in the Sun.”
From the period of the descent into hell onward, this elaborated network of motifs receded into the background for a time, and it is only in the 1980s that a clearly perceptible, transformed return becomes evident: from the volume Keserves (lit. Bitter Lament) onwards, the functions and roles previously borne by the star and the sea are taken over by the God motif. József Utassy, while still young, called God “our first and last metaphor”, and in a later poem, a poem itself. His image of God is characterised by a polyphony of faith, unbelief, the search for faith, denial, and blasphemy. These variants were born in states of crucifixion, of coming from hell, of walking a calvary, of crying out de profundis, or, at times, of hope. One of his late summations thus asks for ‘A Worthy Death’:
The faith of faiths belonged to me.
For justice I did tremble.
To itself light raised me,
now to demise I do belong.
The faith of faiths belonged to me.
My doubt: Thomas’s, just as strong.
József Utassy was a poeta natus, who within a short time became a conscious poet. He employed his talent with care and discipline: he devoted his entire life to poetry, and in turn offered his poetry to the Hungarian nation. He overcame illness, the resistance of the political environment, and endured – and survived – the belittlement, ideological rejection, and poetic dismissal imposed by postmodern attitudes. Today his oeuvre forms part of tradition that lives on, irrespective of the perpetually meagre frameworks of national curricula. When an objective anthology of the finest Hungarian poems of eight centuries is eventually compiled, his absence from it will be inconceivable – the silver chain of captivity has bound him immutably to the summits of the Hungarian Parnassus.
[2012]