The New Hungarian Quarterly, 1975 (16. évfolyam, 59. szám)
BOOKS AND AUTHORS - Ferenczi László: A Prolific and a Taciturn Poet (Mihály Ladányi, György Petri
BOOKS AND AUTHORS 177 virtually every poet agreed on one basic issue: they wanted to create poetry, in other words, a separate realm, with its own special and unmistakable ortography and hydrography, atmosphere and values. Individual poems served as the building blocks in the realization of this ideal poetry and were subordinate to the whole of the volume, or to poetry as such, just as chapters of a novel are to the complete work. From Az_ út kezdete on, Ladányi has not written poetry, he has improvised poems. As far as function is concerned, his poems are in a co-ordinate relation with one another, similar to diary entries, a fact which naturally does not preclude some poems being more successful, others less so. Ladányi speaks untiringly and unceasingly of eternal hie et nunc’s, of the constantly changing “here and now”. “Every day I prepare for my fate,” the poet wrote in “Luna”, a poem from Dobsziló (Drum Solo, 1967), and his verse records daily resumptions, hopes and despairs, joys and failures, perceptions and observations. Notwithstanding that it sounds bad in aesthetics and criticism, I would call Ladányi’s poems human documents, adding that they are the notes of a moralist. Above all Ladányi’s poems document change in life style: the amazement, vacillation, search for a foothold and acclimatization of a young man who came to the capital city from the village. It is no accident that he compares the city to a huge woman and depicts it altogether with a feminine nature. And it is no accident either that glimpses of Budapest restaurants and espresso-bars flash throughout his work. That is not to say Ladányi is a poet of the city; he is not. Since the early 1960s he has frequently returned to live in the country. His experiences in the capital city, however, are one of the sources for his poetry. “ My poems are still reveries of the ditch bank, I write them during my roamings, in taverns, country stations, old press-houses,” he notes on the fly-leaf of Kitépett tollú szél (Plucked Wind), 1974. Many poems express concern for the revolution, demanding it, calling out to it or mourning for it, and he always identifies himself with those for whom this idealistic, and sometimes perhaps naively, envisaged revolution unfurled its colours. The setting and local colour of places where he writes and wanders come to life in his verse as a background for the people he meets. Ladányi’s poetry is anthropocentric and individual-centred, flashes of profiles, of workers, peasants and professionals, the educated and uneducated, poets, readers and boorish critics, friends and adversaries, old and young, and of women, scores of them. Portraits of lovers, the heroines of completed and hopeless love stories. In Hungary Ladányi’s generation was the first to encounter—already as adults—the sexual revolution. In twenty years of poetry, a sequence of conquests are related which puts Casanova to shame in a stubborn, unyielding search for ideal love that puts the Romantics to shame. Before the sexual revolution love, for the most part, was a sexual or sex-related moral problem. Now, with the gradual disappearance of sex taboos, heretofore unnoticed or hidden social, moral and psychological problems of love have come to light. Ladányi’s poems offer important glosses on the possibilities and need for love in the third quarter of the twentieth century. In practice a Ladányi poem becomes the maid servant of the examination of behavioural forms. The background is the memory of the Second World War and the threat of a Third World War, the recollection of the years of the personality cult, the problems of the construction of socialism and the achievements and failures of technological development. However, the examination is almost never abstract, impersonal or timeless, but is always linked with a date, concrete persons and concrete problems. Ladányi is one of the most popular Hungarian poets today. His latest volume,* Se csil * See poems from this volume in Edwin Morgan’s translation, on pp. 69-73 of this issue.— The Editor.