The New Hungarian Quarterly, 1986 (27. évfolyam, 104. szám)

BOOKS AND AUTHORS - Lengyel Balázs: Life Delighting in Life (Gyula Illyés, László Kálnoky, László Lator, Margit Szécsi)

BOOKS A N D A UTH O RS * 7 3 himself through poetry. Illyés was always one of those, now rare, spontaneous poets who were ever ready to write; he was among the Victor Hugos and Sándor Petőfis for whom the writing of poetry came like breathing. The fact that this was also the strongest, a compulsive mental act against suffocation, has not really been so clear until now. The rich flow of poems in Marching in the Fog provides the conclusive evidence for this. As such, it also shows how short-sighted and restrictive and how disrespectful of the poet’s achievement are those atttempts to view his huge output simply from its the­matic aspects and thus emphasize only those poems in which he is concerned with the causes of social justice, the peasantry (from which he came), the fate of the Hungarian nation and the permanently threatened ideals of humanity. All these were, in fact and in truth, his concerns, but what use could be any message if it were not express­ed in great poetry, if it were not supported by the integrity of a man who knew life as thoroughly as Illyés did, and who in thou­sands of lesser poems on a host of other subjects reached (and helped the reader reach) a totality of humanness? What would have happened if hehad only written those poems which literary historians keep citing? For­tunately enough, Illyés’s world was, even at the outset, in the most revolutionary period of his career in the twenties, richer than such poems reveal. As he reached higher and higher peaks in his career, his poetry grew steadily richer and varied, through the chef­­d’oeuvre of his mature years, Rend a romok­ban (Order among the ruins), 1937, to the masterpiece of his old age (Minden lehet— Everything is possible, 1973) in which he confronts the ultimate questions of existence with the harassing doubts of an un-meta­­physical metaphysics, with the tension of the human drama that awaits everyone. In Marching in the Fog, in the poems writ­ten in the last three or four years of his life, the great conflict in this drama is already over, the great philosophical tension is eased and the poet awaits the inevitable. Though there are no more major poetic ventures, Illyés still writes genuine poetry in which he registers the smaller or larger events of his inner and the outer world. “I am still alive, still feeling, and thinking, as of old, ra­diantly,” the poems suggest. And over and beyond the enjoyment they offer, this state of mind arouses our compassion and amaze­ment at the cathartic experience of a poet who sees his own fate in advance. Speaking of the poetic and human totality of Illyés’s work, the thematic aspect of the poems contained in the second part of this volume cannot be neglected. There are poems in it which have been taken out of the drawer for the first time, as well as fragments and manuscripts left behind. The portrait of the poet is now rounded out by them and the insight the fragments allow into the working of his talent is fascinating. We have seen in several cases (with Mihály Babits, Árpád Tóth, Attila József) that fragments left behind by great poets are like torsos retrieved from the ground. At times they are more dazzling, more revealing of an ideal of beauty, than statues that have come down to us intact. Illyés’s fragments are such torsos. But the great surprise of the volume, the single most important poem which makes his lifework complete, is still not one of these. It is a huge poem towering above all other great poems of his; a poem that had been more or less kept in the drawer, yet was still widely known, though mentioned only in secret; a poem written in 1950 and printed only once, in the November 2,1956, issue of Irodalmi Újság; a poem which became world­­famous at the time and has been translated into many languages. This is for the first time that One Sentence on Tyranny (Egy mondat a zsarnokságról) has appeared in a volume, and can finally take its due place among the classical works of national poetry, that plead for liberty and against tyranny. Illyés’s poetic oeuvre is only complete with this poem.

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