Kathleen Shields - Thomas Kabdebo

One Sentence: Illyés and Eluard

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The poem upon which Illyés modelled his "Tyranny" is in all probability one of Eluard's most famous pieces, the poem entitled "Liberté". There is both circumstantial and textual evidence to support this claim. In addition, both "Tyranny" and "Liberté" are poems which took on a significant afterlife, being translated into many languages and being read as poems of resistance. The fact that Eluard's "Liberté" is the model for the Illyés poem also supports Domokos's dating of the composition of "Tyranny" at 1950, as we shall see further on.

Eluard's poem "Liberté" was originally composed as an address to his beloved Nusch, but was to develop into something much more than a love poem. According to his own account of the genesis of "Liberté", it was begun during the summer of 1941, during the height of the Nazi occupation of France. The ode to a woman became a hymn to liberty. In Eluard's own words:

Ainsi, la femme que j'aimais incarnait un désir plus grand qu'elle. Je la confondais avec mon aspiration la plus sublime. Et ce mot, liberté, n'était lui-même, dans tout mon poeme, que pour éterniser une trés simple volonté [...] celle de se libérer de l'occupant. (Thus the woman that I loved was the incarntion of a desire that was greater than herself. I merged her with my highest aspiration. And this word, liberty, was itself there throughout my poem simply to immortalize an extremely simple urge [..] namely to be rid of the occupier.)4

This account of the genesis of "Liberté" makes it likely to be the poem which László Gara had in mind when he mentioned the artistic model for "Tyranny".

We can add to this circumstantial evidence significant textual evidence to support the idea that Illyés had "Liberté" in mind when composing "Tyranny". The original title of "Liberté" was "Une seule pensée" ("A Single Thought") and this is the title under which it was first published in Fontaine in Algiers in 1942, after being smuggled out of occupied France. It was again published under this title in France libre in the same year and in the Revue du monde libre in 1943, both of these journals being based in London. (The title was changed to "Liberté" in 1944). The similarity between the title "Une seule pensée" and Illyés's title, "Egy mondat a zsarnokságról", is striking.

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Thomas Kabdebo

is the Hungarian-born Librarian of the University College of Maynooth, Ireland, and author of several works of fiction, published in Hungarian.

Kathleen Shields

teaches French literature at Maynooth College.