Bosnia, Choices and Elections by János Kõbányai
János Kébányai has published a volume of reportage
on Sarajevo (reviewed in this issue by Csaba Gy. Kiss), and, more recently,
essays and reports on Bosnia-Herzegovina, whose troubled history was so
movingly and prophetically described by Nobel-prize winner Ivo Andric in
his novel Bridge Over the Drina. Köbányai tries to find traces
of the idyllic illustrations which figured in handsome publications from
the time of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and which accompany this article
here too. What he finds in their place, however, is
competing forms of nationalism all in a hurry to erase every trace
of what had gone before. They destroy not only monuments but even erase
memories from human consciousness and, ultimately kill any living soul
they find undesirable. Köbányai was one of the large international
team sent to Bosnia as observers at the municipal elections in September
1997 and he bitterly registers the immense effort, the huge bureaucracy
in the election machinery as opposed to chaos and
only the semblance of real results in the outcome.
He allows the people he meets to speak for themselves
thereby forcing us to comprehend what, for most of us, seems incomprehensible.
Attila József: Poems, translated by Zsuzsanna
Ozsváth and Frederick Turner and
"The Ars Poetica of Attila József "by
Frederick Turner
Following their translations of poems by Miklós Radnóti
(Foamy Sky, Princeton University Pess, 1992) Zsuzsanna Ozsvath and Frederick
Turner have tackled the greatest of Hungarian poets, Attila József
(1905-1937). In this issue and the forthcoming one, we publish some of
the poems that will soon appear in The Iron-blue Vault, a volume now in
preparation. József's brief life was a life of traumas and suffering.
He was the son of a soapmaker who left for the United States in 1908 to
make money there but never returned. His mother, a washer-woman, could
only provide miserable conditions for the family but in 1919 she, too,
died. Vulnerable and rebellious, József left university after a
conflict with one of his professors. Literary success or private happiness
never came and recognition for his poetry only in the last years -- by
then, however, after repeated breakdowns and a diagnosis of schizophrenia,
his stays in hospital and attempts at suicide became ever more frequent.
He ended his life by throwing himself under the wheels of a passing freight
train. The poems selected in this issue represent main facets of József's
poetry: the earlier, Expressionist period
No Shriek of Mine
Nem én kiáltok
No shriek of mine, it is the earth that thunders.
Beware, beware, Satan has gone insane;
cling to the clean dim floors of the translucent springs,
melt yourself to the plate glass,
hide behind the diamond's glittering,
beneath the stones, the beetle's twittering,
O sink yourself within the smell of fresh-baked bread,
poor wretched one, poor wretch.
Ooze with the fresh showers into the rills of earth--
in vain you bathe your own face in your self,
it can be cleansed only in that of others.
Be the tiny blade upon the grass:
greater than the spindle of the whole world's mass.
O you machines, birds, tree-branches, constellations!
Our barren mother cries out for a child.
My friend, you dear, you most beloved friend,
whether it comes in horror or in grandeur,
it is no shriek of mine, but the earth's thunder.
(1924)
social bitterness and anger
What Will Become of Him...
Mondd, mit érlel
What will become of him, whoever
has got no handle to his hoe,
upon whose whiskers crumbs don't quiver,
who dawdles, gloomy, thrawn, and slow;
who would from half a furlong's hoeing
keep one potato out of three,
whose hair falls out in patches, growing
bald unnoticed--who'd care to see?
What will become of him, whoever
has but five acres under crops,
whose draggled hen clucks at the stover,
whose thoughts nest in a mudhole's slops;
when no yoke clinks, no oxen bellow;
when mother serves the family soup
and steam from a liquid weak and yellow
drifts from the bottom of the scoop?
What will become of him, whoever
must live alone and work alone;
whose stew has neither salt nor savour,
the grocer gives no tick nor loan;
who has one broken chair for kindling,
cat sitting on the cracked stove's shelf;
who sets his keychain swinging, jingling,
who stares, stares; lies down by himself?
What will become of him, whoever
works to support his family;
the cabbage-heart they quarrel over,
the film the big girl gets to see;
always the laundry--dirt's slow strangling--
the wife's mouth tastes of vegetables,
and when the light's off, silent wrangling,
gropings, eavesdroppings, darkness, rules?
What will become of him, whoever
idles outside the factory,
a woman meanwhile hauls the lever,
a pale-skulled child sets the fusee;
when through the gates he gazes vainly,
vainly humps bags and market-creels--
he dozes, they rouse him inhumanely,
and always catch him when he steals?
What will become of him, whoever
weighs out potatoes, salt, and bread,
wraps them in newsprint's inky flavour,
and doesn't brush the scales he's read;
and in the gloom he dusts, complaining,
the rent is high, the tax is keen,
the price--but what's the use explaining
the extra charge for kerosene?
And what will come of him, whoever
knows he's a poet, sings his fears,
whose wife mops up the floor forever,
who chases copy-work for years;
whose name's a brand-name, if he has one,
just like a soap or cooking-fat,
whose life is given, if he has one,
all to the proletariat?
(1932)
the transcendental despair of the last poems
The Scream
Kiáltozás
Love me wildly, to distraction,
scare away my huge affliction,
in the cage of an abstraction,
I, an ape, jump up and down,
bare my teeth in malediction,
for I have no faith or fiction,
in the terror of His frown.
Mortal, do you hear my singing,
or mere nature's echoes ringing?
Hug me, don't just stare unseeing
as the sharpened knife comes down--
there's no guardian that's undying
who will hear my song and sighing:
in the terror of His frown.
As a raft upon a river,
Slovak raftman, whosoever,
so the human race forever
dumb with pain, goes drifting down--
but I scream in vain endeavour:
love me: I'll be good, I shiver
in the terror of His frown.
(1936)
and include one of his most important poems, the 1933 "Ode",
a love poem and a celebration of the human body, which encompasses - in
Frederick Turner's words - "the universe of existent being".
The translations in this issue are accompanied by an essay by Frederick
Turner in which he discusses József's poetry as a coherent cosmological
vision. He divides this cosmology into five major elements: the universe
of existent being: the great void that lies beyond the edge of universe:
the forces of collective human creativity and love that push out the boundaries
of being into the future: the conscious self of the poet: the world-creating
activity of poetry.
Dangerous Territory by Jenö
Thassy
The excerpt from the closing chapters of this much-acclaimed memoir,
published in 1996 (and reviewed by Miklós Györffy in The
HQ 146), leads us to the endgame of the siege of Budapest until
the moment the Russians arrive. Jenö Thassy spent these days under
heavy shelling in the bombed-out city bringing food to cellar-bound starving
relatives and to surgeon friends in the garrison hospitals. His fellow
officers, dashing young aristocrats, saved lives by forging false identity
papers, secured hideouts and even attempted to organize armed resistance
between bouts of flirtatious gallantry. Fighting crept nearer day by day
and life in the besieged city became ever more surreal. As Soviet aircraft
were dropping their bombs, a seven-course meal, consisting entirely of
rice dishes, was being served in the basement of the Ritz Hotel on steaming
platters covered with silver lids. The famous confectioner Gerbaud opened
for an hour every day in order to sell off its stocks before it was looted
or destroyed by bomb. Thassy's film-like sequences are among the most evocative
testimonies of the last days of the ancien regime.
In Memoriam Sir Georg Solti (1912-1997)
In a long line of distinguished conductors of Hungarian birth, including
Fritz Reiner, George Szell, Antal Dorati, Eugene Ormandy, Ferenc Fricsay
and István Kertész, Sir Georg Solti rose the highest. On
his death on September 5, 1997, he was praised as the "last true colossus
of the podium" whose career had left a lasting mark on the main musical
centres of the world. An accomplished pianist but almost unknown as a conductor,
Solti was in his thirties when he took over the Bavarian State Opera in
1945 to become the music director at the Frankfurt Opera in 1952 for ten
years, and at Covent Garden for another ten, with appearances in Salzburg
and Glyndebourne. Anxious for more concert work, in 1971 he stroke up a
22-year partnership with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, which ranks as
comparable only to Karjan's association with the Berlin Philharmonic. Solti's
legacy from the Decca studios is a class of its own, with such legendary
recordings as the first ever complete Ring, or those of the Mahler and
Bruckner symphonies. Even during the Chicago years, Solti maintained his
links with England - the LPO made him principal conductor in 1975 and later
artistic director and conductor emeritus. In 1983 he conquered Bayreuth
and, seven years later, on the day of Karajan's death, he took over the
opening production of the Salzburg Festival with Un ballo in maschera.
In his Memoirs, completed shortly before his death (New York, Alfred A.
Knopf, 1997), Sir Georg Solti confesses that it was only in February 1997,
when he conducted Bartók's Cantata profana with the Berlin Philharmonic
and the Hungarian Radio Chorus, that he understood that his whole life
was contained within the story of the son turned into a stag. This realization
was followed a couple of weeks later by a sudden sense of reconciliation.
"As I stood on a hill overlooking Lake Balaton, I felt for the first
time a sense of belonging. I realized that Hungary was becoming part of
Europe again - the boundaries had disappeared. The stag had returned home,
his antlers had been able to pass through the door, because during his
absence the doorway had become taller and wider." - is how the Memoirs
close.
János Breuer has scrupulously researched
all the details of the formative years in Budapest, some of which even
Sir Georg would not have remembered. He is mentioned in The Annals of the
Music Academy as an outstanding student of piano and composition, who was
often exempt from the tuition fees and allowed to skip courses and was
awarded top marks. His teachers included Leó
Weiner, professor of the chamber music class. Solti and other Hungarian
musicians of world fame testified in a memorial volume that his was the
most important musical influence in their lives. Composition and piano
was taught by Ernst von Dohnányi, the
internationally celebrated pianist, conductor and composer. Solti decided
to become a conductor after a concert conducted by Erich Kleiber in 1926.
As there was no separate department for conducting at the Liszt Academy
at that time, he volunteered to work as a coach at
the Royal Opera House. He was 18 when he started this unpaid job, which
familiarized him with the vast repertory of the House, and 26 when he first
stepped on the rostrum with Le nozze di Figaro,
on the eve of the Nazis' occupation of Vienna on 12 March 1938. By then
the second anti-Jewish law was being drafted, declaring that no public
office could be held by persons of Jewish religion. In a few weeks Solti
left for Switzerland severing his links with Hungary.
László Györi tells
the postwar story from the Hungarian angle. Sir George Solti's first
attempt at a "homecoming" took place in 1945 but his offer
to rejoin the Royal Opera House was rejected. After this insult, a break
of more than three decades followed, and it was only in the eighties that
Solti's concert appearances became more regular. The change of regime brought
a sea of change, with many philanthropic gestures towards the Liszt Academy
of Music and young musicians. In 1992, a new relationship was forged with
the Budapest Festival Orchestra, which Solti
esteemed and supported, with many plans for future collaboration.
|
