1. A Csóványos északi oldala (The Northern Slope of Csóványos)

Noon. No unnecessary movement.

I could be sand, I could be shell fragments.

This is the confrontation.

Like a drawing spread across an overhead projector,

I unfold over the water,

transparent, sharp.

And to see what I am.

Is more than unbearable.

The poetry of Ákos Győrffy is not poetry of opinion. Any kind of sharp confrontation, declarative thesis, or judgment is alien to him. He does not make a move – or if he does, then only in withdrawal, remaining within the circles of silence as he observes the world. He does not proclaim that God is dead (though neither does he say that He lives), yet the fundamental experience of the poems in his first volume is being abandoned, whose unspoken lament evokes simultaneously the worlds of László Krasznahorkai and Rainer Maria Rilke within us: something has happened to the seasons, to the forest, to our relationships; something has been ruined by elemental force, and we find ourselves maddeningly homeless at home in our well-furnished world, because by the time we furnished it, we had drifted terrifyingly far from it, from one another, from ourselves. Those beings warn us of this (although even this word “warn” already belongs to alienated existence) who have remained within the transparent, moving certainty of direct being: animals and plants. The touching seriousness with which they throw themselves into life is something we, the pedantic measurers of existence, can never attain. Five volumes later Győrffy would write:

Yesterday at dawn I took a walk in the forest.
In a clearing I noticed a roe deer.
It stood motionless while fog slowly drifted among the trees behind it.
Above us the moon was still faintly visible.
An animal with its naked, raw life beneath the stars.
I envied it.

Although the author never flaunts his opinions and does not wish to become a public oracle (like those writers whose ambition exceeds their talent), he constantly holds up a mirror before us. The poems in the volume move through ordinary landscapes – we see trees, rocks, ping-pong tables, railway stations, attic rooms – yet it repeatedly becomes clear that if we follow the poet’s gaze, tragic depths may open even within the most neutral spaces of our lives, within the simplest and most familiar territories of our senses. In these depths there is again nothing to measure. We are within the primordial fabric of the soul. If we attempt to disentangle these passages – which are at times almost musical – into what in them is ontological, moral, or aesthetic, the whole immediately disintegrates. Győrffy wishes to see like an animal. He wishes to write that way. If we read him well, for a moment we ourselves may become animals. The spiritual-psychic-physical weave takes us into itself. Here, for example, is the image of the soul’s ferry-country arising during a crossing of the Danube:

Let stillness bloom in me,
let it overflow, as fog fills
the ferry’s cabin. Driftwood dashes
on the mooring rope. I come to you.
Crossing does not start
or end; tears us in two.
Muscles tremble with each pulse
of these waves; a seagull
preens on the fog-light’s mast*.

We down here,
envious Ikari, with wax
frozen onto our shoulders. To rejoice like
the birds. And to fear like them too.

(*Translated by Clare Pollard)

It is a commonplace that every poet’s second volume is the decisive one, since the first book is usually merely the work document of searching for a path and trying out a voice. This is not true of Ákos Győrffy’s first volume. As Szabolcs Várady notes in the blurb, we already hear a fully matured voice here. As though the debut poet had already passed through everything. Naturally the images evolve as we proceed through the volumes, the anguish becomes more refined, yet wherever we draw from within the oeuvre, the same clear spring water flows. Every movement, every small occurrence seeks its support and meaning in the beyond; every human face emerges from the weight of its own invisibility. And somewhere, beyond even the beyond, lies the memory of the golden age:

The uninhabited territories are gone forever.
A satellite may be photographing the yard right now.
Stepping off the National Blue Trail somewhere, be there
some cliffs or a hovering buzzard, it takes only thirty seconds
before I hear the first airplane. Let there be
another half a minute of that silence from before.

Here, in the poem of enjambed “let there be”s, hope always gasps for air before speaking. It does not entirely suppress hope, but there is no need to, since it is obvious that the spiritual position of the hopeful person is ab ovo hopeless.

2. Akutagava noteszéből (From Akutagawa’s Notebook)

Stepping somewhat back from The Northern Side of Csóványos, retreating from absolute subjectivity, Győrffy’s second volume of poetry was born. It was inspired by an Akutagawa quotation found in one of Miklós Mészöly’s diary entries (which perhaps does not even originate from the tragically fated Japanese writer himself). This quotation forms the opening piece of the volume:

He was living in perpetual half-light. As though leaning on a delicate sword with a broken blade.

The second entry immediately places the image within the context of the here and now:

Leftovers of tripe stew on the kitchen table. The fat body on the couch groans loudly as it turns over. The television is on, it has been on since morning. The sound of migrating wild geese seeps through the cracks of the lowered blinds. Then the train as it thunders across the bridge above the poisoned river.

A train thundering above the poisoned river: this is the cross of unbearability. The drama opened in the first volume continues. The poet who lives in perpetual half-light holds a sword with a broken blade–that is, one unusable for killing. Within this sword lies the past, tradition. Though broken, it may still be leaned upon. Indeed, if one is a poet, one can lean only upon a broken sword. And if our points of reference are this mortal, then it is not far to the recognition made clear in fragment number 28 of the volume:

You feel it’s always somewhere else that something is happening.
That your very presence makes every location unreal.
That whatever exists becomes nothing precisely by being filtered through you.
That you are a camera into which no film has been loaded, merely spinning around, buzzing emptily.

Humanity filtered the landscape through itself and thereby annihilated it. Subjectively speaking, this perhaps means that whoever wishes truly to feel landscape and life must disregard themselves, step beyond or outside themselves, so that within this ecstasy the flow may begin anew – the evening transmigration of things – and the timeless, alienated self, in this self-annihilation, may stand before itself like a primeval forest. A recurring topos of Győrffy’s poetry is precisely this longing for self-annihilation: to raise the foreignness dwelling within one’s soul as one would cultivate a forest, so that by walking intimately through it one might finally find one’s way home. Of course, he is fully aware that there are no such “finallys,” for that would be death itself.

“As long as I can remember, I have struggled with the feeling that there is within me some impersonal being to whose life nothing pertains that concerns me – that is, the one living my personal life. Nothing applies to it; it pushes everything away immediately. Somehow I have to keep these two beings in balance. For my environment this is not an ideal state. Nor for me. Yet from another perspective it is, because everything I write is born from the constant tension between these two halves.” – said Győrffy in an interview upon the publication of the volume.

3. Nem mozdul (It Does Not Move)

The blurb of the volume suggests a kind of ars oblivionis: a forgetting-backward out of the bustle of the human, all-too-human world, toward that place where nothing moves. The same longing drives this volume as we have repeatedly witnessed since The Northern Side of Csóványos. Nor could it be otherwise, since everything “human” is alien to Győrffy, who remains consistent in his poetic purpose (or consistently inconsistent). Nothing “interests” him; rather, landscape and self mutually dissolve into one another. To the point where there is no longer any “one another.”

His third poetry volume testifies that the poetic path is deepening. On the cover appears a detail from a fifteenth-century painting. An angel hovers in the air, beneath it the title written in white. At the bottom of the image a hand stretches devoutly toward the celestial being. (It cannot reach it.) Opening the cover, we see the other half of the image, the counterpoint to the motionless, eternal messenger: a group of people. The world of movement, mortality, and change.

Motionlessness, existence untouched by time, is in European culture (as well as in others) a sign of higher being. In the background behind the angel are mountains; before them, a lake. On the shore stands a church. City and nature, church and tree, water and air, this side and the beyond are layered into one another. At the intersection of these layers stands the author, reflecting upon all this, sensing the landscape “with a more inward trembling” (to quote Rilke), and now sending forth his report. Is it accidental, or consciously ironic, that the portrait of Győrffy on the back flap can, by opening and closing the book, be fitted into the figure of the angel? This would be justified by the closing line and a half of the poem Az angyal arca (The Face of the Angel):

...only let me no longer
see your face, the angel’s shining face, myself.

The angelic landscape is justified even on the surface level. Most of the poems unfold from experiencing the landscape. Nature is the realm of movement, destruction, and renewal. The poet first sounds the experience in an objective tone:

I smoke a pipe on the terrace of the shelter.
The sound of the nearby spring, the thin stream
striking the rusted gutter fragment.
The sun, just above the valley, the mud
thawing in the middle of the cart track...

After this, we usually begin moving toward that which dwells where nothing moves. Where everything does not move. At this stage every description gains its meaning. Győrffy’s poetic direction has been transcendent since the first volume, we might say, were this concept not overburdened – if anything could still be called transcendent at all, if the transcendent could still be spoken. The shift, or rather glide, toward the deeper meaning of the images often occurs within two or three lines:

A boat chained to a willow tree.
To draw strength from something
that never existed...

Reading Győrffy’s early poems, some immediately cried out: Krasznahorkai. The influence of Krasznahorkai is indeed undeniable. Yet this is by no means being an epigon. The sentence structures or dramatic direction of the images occasionally recall Krasznahorkai’s prose, but these sentences do not bind the reader hand and foot. This too is a tragic world, yet here it is not the voice of fate that speaks, but rather natural joy and the horrors of the soul dissolve and color one another.

Reading the poems in this volume, a kind of aerial perspective unfolds before us. Painters long failed to perceive aerial perspective. (There is still no trace of it in the circa-1490 painting reproduced on the cover.) Or perhaps they simply could not paint it –which amounts to the same thing. Since the discovery of aerial perspective, humanity sees landscape differently: as something forming the boundary surface of the visible world closing around us. Out of the gaze that grows weary and falters among the receding layers, another kind of vision arises. This vision dies away into an immeasurable distance that, in a mysterious manner, is both the purpose and foundation of the landscape’s lines of force.

We can reach this point of death – the center of Ákos Győrffy’s poetry – if we allow our inner gaze to glide through the landscapes traversed by the volume, then let it fade wherever it wishes. If we are involuntarily aimless in the right direction, we may sense something concealed by the atmospheric layers of cognition. For example, in the poem Mi lenne az (What Would It Be) we read:

...To shout meaningless words
from the cliff edge toward the mountains
on the opposite shore, words
that have meaning only in this place,
shouted from this place, two people
among the rainclouds, beneath the homelessness
arching above them,
with gestures that have lost their stakes,
we could do the opposite
too, but what on Earth would that be.

If we accept the assumption that fundamentally two kinds of poetic will are possible – the classical and the romantic – then we may conclude that Győrffy’s poetic will is fundamentally romantic. Poets before Romanticism felt at home in that Parmenidean state where existence and thought are identical. This remained true even though the Heraclitean principle opposing it – that war (strife) is the father of all things – had been present in European intellectual history from the beginning. For even the doctrine of eternal flux fit, in Heraclitus’ conception, into the same doctrine of the logos. This doctrine rests upon the always-presupposed unity between the order of things, their conceptions, and speaking about them. Ultimately all this is grounded in the inner tranquility and transparency of the self (to borrow Kant’s phrase, in the original unity of apperception).

In Romanticism this tranquil state of being collapses. The self bursts from its cage and is drawn toward dark infinity, finding – paradoxically – a new home in this ecstatic departure. He feels existence only when existence and thought no longer coincide. Thus the human being of longing is born. The soul projects itself onto its desires, and unattainability becomes its path. Life becomes nothing other than distancing oneself from the attained toward the unattainable. From existence toward thought. It is no coincidence that Oswald Spengler called this new human being Faustian. The essence of Faust’s pact with the devil is that the very moment the Faustian soul on its journey reaches its goal, it dies. Poems are born while moving away toward the unknowable, toward existence that cannot be grasped. Such as Hideghegy (Cold Mountain):

You long for places.
Stepping out beneath the sky,
the anxiety eases somewhat.

Watching the cloud dissolve
which only seconds ago concealed
the sun.

It seems you are nowhere.
A fly lands on the paper, larger than
any letter.

4. Havazás Amiens-ben (Snowfall in Amiens)

According to his own account, Győrffy considers this book his most obscure, most hermetic collection of poems. It is as if the poet is retreating even further from the lyrical self, moving toward increasingly impassive inner landscapes, while at the center of the collection a heart beats: the heart of the Saint Martin legend. The poems move away from this pulsating core, their traces cooling into something. On the protective cover is a painting from an old French calendar: a snowy village landscape.

In the title poem of the collection, the endless snowfall itself represents the earthly world. One must cross this swirling, all-encompassing whiteness to reach the deeper colors of life without freezing. The book opens with a preface-like, structurally separate poem: Védőbeszéd (Defense Speech). As such, it establishes the interpretative horizon within which the entire volume unfolds. This defense speech is the logos (speech, reason, law, rule of being) of a person who already sees the direction in which life must be lived, but has not yet lived in that way.

I have two or three other lives besides this one,
from which I now speak. The locations
and relationships of these two or three other lives
are much simpler and clearer than those of this – let’s call it for lack of a better term – my own life. (…)
That I am obliged to regard this life as reality, while the others as fantasies,
is only a sign of my own weakness.

Before the invisible judge of existence, the defendant defends himself as best he can: he sees the situation clearly, but then again, one cannot get ambrosia at McDonald’s.

We turn the page. We enter one of Győrffy Ákos’s imagined lives. Let us imagine that the following cycles are all such lives. The first is Távoli arc (Distant Face). The face upon which all the beauty and suffering of human existence is etched, seen from afar, behind mountains, deep in the forests. For the existent to reach being (of course, reaching being is impossible; only in the life of imagination can it happen), it must be able to read what the shells write in the mud, must question the girl in a dream, must perceive on the arms of a starfish detached from the rock the geometry of pain. One must live one’s life so transparently that one could inhabit a beech tree, as the woman in the poem Terepismertetés III. (Topographical Survey III):

While moving into it, once she leaned
against its trunk crying. I do not know exactly
why she cried, but the intensity of her tears
was such that she has lived in the beech ever since. (…)
The whole hillside was cleared, this
one tree left by the foresters.
Full of carved hearts.

The openness of existence lies in perceiving the world as André Gide’s Philoctetes does. The protagonist of the play says: “Since I have not spoken to humans, I have expressed myself more beautifully. (…) I have discovered more of the secrets of life than my teachers ever taught me. (…) I want to reach the ultimate transparency, so that if you see me act, you yourself feel the light.” This is the kind of striving present here.

To arrive at the point from which,

looking around, one can see for certain

that there is no way back.

This is what the Ruysbroek-fragment titled (nincs (none)) expresses. And immediately afterward, the poem ((szemmel tart (keeps watching)):

The lakeshore, the transformations

of an enormous face. Never seen

from the front, its gaze never

fully seen. What keeps

watching me is not looking

at me. Shadow-drawings of the sky

among the vineyards.

When one reaches the point of letting go of his boundaries, opening oneself to the indefinite, then within the space of existence’s original and unavoidable uncertainty it becomes apparent that – as Rilke says – someone (or rather something) is gently holding our fall. This does not provide moral or ontological absolution, but why would one need absolution when living poetically, that is, living intensely, beyond good and evil?

…The anxiety feeds on the realization

that there is nowhere to hide. If this is the case,

what else to do than hide. To select from the lies about one’s life

the least pathetic ones and then hide within them.

From what? As if someone dragged a filthy quilt

across bare treetops, in a snowstorm, I move forward.

The pieces of the cycle Reggeli gyakorlatok (Morning Exercises) – in the Greek sense of askesis – are ritual acts of contemplation (in both senses of the word), which signal to us that the transfer, the crossing to the other, “truer” Venice, is a daily labor. The rhythm of forming the concept – like the rhythm of all morning gardening, meditation, or forest walking – says: this is the tempo of the music of the spheres, of the deeper life of the Earth, of the thoughts of beings exploring existence. The transfer marks the realm to be envisioned, glimpsed in these poems, it points toward the direction in which the settings of Győrffy’s other lives must be sought:

…To lie beneath such a giant leaf in the sound of the babbling brook,
and whisper into the leaf veins. Let it start
in the pale green veins…

Thoughts of a poplar…

In the memories of a thrush, I try to find you…

…I turned around, saw no one
who could have been looking, except for an old
spruce…

Győrffy experiences the deepest layer of human existence, the otherworldly pain of this existence, by stepping into the life of nature, animals, and plants. This is the terrain from which no pale, theoretical, unlived truths seep forth, but rather an ancient experience of being that remains accessible even to human beings shaped by the most unsettling developments of civilization. From this landscape experience grows Győrffy’s metaphysics, nourished by vivid impressions.

5. Haza (Homeland)

Among Győrffy Ákos’s free verse, prose poems, and essays, the transition between forms has always been continuous, and it was almost only a matter of layout whether something was called one or the other. Homeland is the author’s first book that contains no texts that might even be suspected of being poems. The material of the book was compiled from essays and columns previously published in newspapers and journals. About the title – which, for example, proved so problematic in Germany that the German translation could not appear – Győrffy spoke at the time:

“This title does not indicate political affiliation or creed. My aim was to try to determine what home is, what homeland is. Of course, the geographical space in which the book was written is not a pure, abstract space. Yet somehow I wanted to reach the point from which there is no return, to some deep current where things can no longer be separated. The landscape in which I live always seemed to me to radiate a certain impersonality at its core, and beyond that, there is nothing. I wanted to reach this sense of homelessness to find homeland there.”

This homeland emerges from seas, orchards, forest paths, and valleys. On these landscapes, the poet confronts everything that his external and internal homeland offers him, everything that horrifies him about it, and everything that it calls him to do.

I look back, beyond the wheat fields, not so far, there is the bluish-green stripe of the willows, and behind it, the river. And beyond the river, the more bearable fear of death, which I now feel as homeland without any pathos. In this way, looking back from here, I begin to understand what the word homeland might mean. Homeland – comes to my mind already at the pub, after a truly life-saving Becherovka and a few sips of beer – is the more bearable fear of death among familiar and accustomed scenery.

Heidegger would have appreciated this collection: the experience of life’s terrifying homelessness forms its basic texture. To find homeland – if depicted in a linear progression – three existential tasks must be accomplished. Each is a meditation. The first is to recognize this homelessness and stand in it with a heavy heart. The second is to allow wonder to arise spontaneously in this world-deep exile. The third is, without forgetting the homelessness, to yield to the pull of wonder and return. Return to the place from which we set out. But how different this place now is from what it was before! This will be the home no longer found by us, but one that found us. Homeland, whose micro- and macro-landscapes, beech forests and watersides, joys and fears, reveal in a continuous flux all from what only a tiny part can be captured in words.

Dried, empty snail shells, fern fronds reaching my waist, thick moss on the edge of the well. I watch a beetle trying to crawl under a pebble. My grandmother’s slow steps in the vegetable garden. I feel distinctly that I am a stranger here, and yet the whole scene is painfully, heart-warmingly familiar.

6. A hegyi füzet (The Mountain Notebook)

The ancient Greeks called the peak of a mountain akmé. By extension, the word also signified the peak of a human life (assuming one lived a good eighty years). At forty, one was said to be in their akmé. The Mountain Notebook appeared precisely at Győrffy Ákos’s akmé. Perhaps this is why the book references Dante. Around this time, something happened to the poet, who was halfway along the path of life, that provided an excellent occasion for his next book to take on a legendary origin. He found an uninhabited forest cabin on the outskirts of Kismaros, not far from his family home. In the room, in the drawer of a crumbling writing desk, was an empty notebook. He decided that from now on, he would come to this meditative retreat to fill this notebook. And so it happened.

“I am starting to write in this notebook, left here by an unknown owner, with a light blue cover, to try to figure out what I am looking for here.”

For a poet whose “method” is already observation, distancing, and retreat, the opportunity now arose to withdraw from the world to this house of abandonment. “Language is the house of being,” said Heidegger. The small forest cabin now became a house of being-in-language. Pilgrimage to the cabin and writing there, our “confessions,” is something akin to prayer. I would not call it confession, because Győrffy does not moralize. Or if he does, it is not on the level where the concept of confession would even make sense.

“I wonder, if my grandfather, whom I never knew, suddenly stepped out from behind the trees and sat beside me on the log, would he understand at all if I told him what this morning means to me? Would he understand if I said despair, if I said helplessness, if I said torment, if I said the souls of women and children, if I said lies, if I said cowardice, if I said that in me there is now nothing left of what, for him, was naturally and unnoticedly present. (…) While I know – and this knowledge is the dark center of this paralyzed melancholy – that no one, that never again will anyone step out from behind the trees, as no one ever did before, to gently lay a hand on my shoulder, with steady attention, to embrace me, and that only then in the depth of silence, suffused with compassion, could the possibility of healing, of forgetting, even arise.”

Far back in historical time, when writing became widespread, it seemed for a while that the art of memory had been discovered. Yet Plato, the first thinker to write systematically, already warned that the opposite was true: writing is a potion of forgetfulness. Yet – even the Greeks, masters of memory, knew this – forgetting can be pharmakon, that is, a medicine. Resonating with the insoluble tragedy of human existence, what else could a writer trust but the beneficent forgetting that allows the impossible to continue? In this way, one’s own future emerges from the hand of the author.

7. A távolodásban (In the Distancing)

This green – thus camouflaged – hybrid booklet appeared in 2021, and it contains a peculiar section: Szövegek T.J. hagyatékából (Texts from T.J.’s Legacy). Even in the preceding volume, the 2016 The Mountain Notebook, we could read some of the monologues of T.J., a psychiatric patient, recorded by Győrffy on a dictaphone at the homeless shelter where T.J. lived. His method was the following: he would place a newspaper article or a photograph in front of T.J., who then began a brilliant, improvisational monologue. The texts reveal that T.J. was both mad and a genius. Speaking of Mendelssohn, he said:

“Four hundred forty-three thousand works remain to us,
or rather, to me and my mother.
The rest have somewhat less.”

(…)

“The ornaments on the wall are chromosomes, because this is nothing less
than the admission of art into the body.
This is a bodily corridor, and within this corridor
diamond gravity prevails.
Here are hidden those arteries
that return us to the heights.”

In the Distancing is part of the Időmérték (“Time Measure”) poetry series published by Magvető. The poems within are condensed versions of the author’s previously published essays and columns – compressed, rewritten, tightened textual variants. It is interesting to see how the passage of time renders certain texts no longer fitting, reshaping an old work. Győrffy was interested in discovering the enduring core of a text, the part that could continue to live once transformed into poetry.

Time nurtures the text; it shapes its personality. The way a poet relates to his own earlier works is a matter of disposition. Some constantly rewrite them. Győrffy is not a reviser by nature, yet here he allowed himself this experiment. Moreover, he transformed prose into poetry. Exposed to the world, the texts seem to shrink inward against the cold, revealing their poetic faces.

8. A csend körei (The Circles of Silence)

The Circles of Silence is a collected volume of columns published in the weekly Mandiner. These are intellectual diary notes, reflections, and self-reflections. Due to their function, these writings need not be as dense or viscous as the heavier essays intended for non-political weeklies, yet their spirit springs from the same profound depth. This is the same Győrffy. The clearest sign of this is that after the initial lighter, introductory passages – an accommodation for the average reader, though no one has ever seen such a reader – the material usually deepens, and the attentive reader arrives where they must: at the heart of gravity.

For a true writer, it is not particularly burdensome to provide weekly contributions to a publication. His gaze inevitably turns inward, toward deeper layers, no matter what happens in everyday life. Everything that life brings has depth – or, if you prefer, height. And once Győrffy reaches that altitude, he takes the reader along with him.

“The prince pondered whether it was a blessing or a curse to have been born at the boundary of two worlds, precisely at the moment when the new inevitably devours the old. Not that the old was particularly good. There was no talk of Arcadia. Even if it wasn’t good, it was suitable for dreaming. The prince feared the peace of dreams, the afternoon silence of the olive groves, the silence of the must’s source in the cool cellars, the dozing silence at the tavern tables, the cicada’s rasp dissolving into the waves of the sea – in short, something that belongs far more to the realm of poetry than to so-called real life.”

Győrffy writes about Lampedusa, Imre Kertész, Jung, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Miklós Mészöly, Géza Csáth, Sicilian travels, and the melancholy of coastal landscapes; yet everything mentioned here points in one direction. It is about that particular silence, whose circles are the events of our lives. It is within this silence that Győrffy Ákos truly lives – whatever that “truly” might mean.

9. Watteau felhői (Watteau’s Clouds)

A person – at best – learns their first words from their parents. Their first sentences, a writer learns from other writers. Every writer lives among books, is born into a given literary tradition, and, if fortunate – regardless of whether one can be said to be fortunate in death – their works are passed on to subsequent generations of writers. How a writer engages with this literary tradition – whether as a humble servant, in rejection, or somewhere between these extremes – does not really matter. What matters is that they relate to it in some way. A writer does not exist in a vacuum, and even the deepest solitude or silence of writing has reference points.

Books are living organisms or spirits, phantoms, fairies; they wander freely through time and space, burrowing into the depths of phenomena and events. Often I do not remember a specific book at all, yet I know that it works invisibly and almost imperceptibly within me, performing its mysterious labor. Perhaps tradition – and ultimately culture – is nothing other than this hidden functioning within humans: the blessed, secret workings of books, images, and music in the soul.

The works of contemporary writers and poets, as well as those of immortals, now take the spotlight. This volume is a collection of Győrffy’s reviews and critiques. Just as in the case of The Circles of Silence it was pointless to debate whether the writings should be called columns or essays, here too it is irrelevant to decide whether the author’s literary reflections are primarily reviews or criticisms. This is also undecidable because, when discussing contemporary books, Győrffy frequently digresses essayistically into his personal relationship with the poet or writer, he presents inner landscapes, recounts stories from his own life, and weaves the interpretive web into which we can do only one thing: instead of engaging in pedantic genre theory, we fall into it with feeling.

What interests Győrffy, even under the pretext of discussing books that matter to him, is what has always mattered: to what extent their authors help achieve inner silence. Are they siblings? Because if a book finds a person, something can happen with its author –something Győrffy wrote about even in The Mountain Notebook:

“to gently lay a hand on my shoulder, with steady attention, to embrace me…”

Thus, a distant soul is received as a sibling, mother, or father by the writer when he is not writing, but reading.