Mátyás Domokos
"To Unwork Agony"
On the Poetry of Ágnes Nemes Nagy
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Ágnes Nemes Nagy has reason to refer to the poet's calling as a "craft". She ignores expressions that bind it to the traditional, though true, perception of a "sacred trance". Géza Ottlik, the most influential of the post-war novelists, describes a writer as "a skilled worker labouring in the existence trade". Nemes Nagy's usage reflects the modesty and self-respect of an expert in the field of existence—in her case, its outer skin, with its "disposable delight" ("The Garden of Eden"), "lively filth on the rock" ("Statues"). This idea is also supranational and is shared by foreign writers of Nemes Nagy's generation. Zbigniew Herbert, for instance, in a short story, "Dutch Apocryphals", describes the poet as "one who transforms the apparent into eternal", a "craftsman working with the material of daydreams". He contrasts him with those who probe a reality that is objective, measurable and expressible in formulae, such as scientists who approach the world in a different way because "art does not solve a single puzzle of nature." To this constantly voiced objection Zbigniew Herbert replies, through the persona of a painter, that "the task of art is not to solve puzzles but to make you aware of them... The means available to us have been primitive and unchanged for centuries. If I understand my task correctly, it is to bring man into harmony with the reality around him."
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The basic experience of Nemes Nagy's generation is conveyed by the poetic associations of an object or image on which her visionary sensuality focuses. A good example is the compulsively recurring memory of the nightmare of the Second World War. "A shirt is running on the meadow," she writes in "Storm", and by saying that it "escaped" from the clothesline "in an equatorial storm", (tr. Berlind), she elevates the poetic vision and an earthly sight into the cosmic arch of abstraction. A philosophy for this technique is given in a late poem, "The Proportions of the Street", "...the streetcar banks into the turn like a seasoned runner or like the earth at the curve of its elliptical orbit, where the simile is not simile, merely the other face of the same law". (tr. Berlind). The vision of the shirt that has escaped, scarred by the war, is imagined as "a wounded soldier's bodiless choreography". Then imagination multiplies the image: "They're off and racing. The linens. / Below the lightning's muzzle-blast / an army's worth of ultimate motions... / the very last linens of a mass grave / flare up for show". If it were not for the structure and handling of the metaphor, one might think this vision was created in the enflamed imagination of a 19th-century romantic poet. The vision of "Storm" is built up not of similes (no longer used after the first period of her poetry) but, as Reverdy desired, of the contact of two, more or less distant realities; they exist together by necessity and forever in her perception of existence determined by history, without any logic or justification for the sight. (This is similar to another member of her generation, János Pilinszky, in whose poetry the eternal metaphor for the state of the world is the concentration camp). After poems written, as she put it, "in the bottom of the fifties", "Storm", and poems such as "Between", "Statues" and "Hot Water Spring", signal her mature period. She herself considered this as the most important phase, in which her uniqueness manifested itself most successfully.
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is an essayist and literary critic, author of several collections of essays on contemporary Hungarian literature. He is one of the editors of the literary monthly Holmi.
