Lóránt Kabdebó
Lőrinc Szabó
- a Poet of his Century
(1900-1957)

[...]

Looking back now, Lőrinc Szabó, who died over forty years ago, has at last been granted the honour due to him as one of the leading Hungarian poets of his century. He had been refused admittance to the pantheon because of a dichotomy in his life. His radically right-wing articles and political utterances from before and during the Second World War were not forgotten, and with good reason. Szabó, however, kept his poetry strictly separated from his political views and activism and clung to the right to ask questions and to be sceptical. It was due to this that he was allowed to be a journalist after 1945 (work, however, which he abandoned in favour of becoming the foremost literary translator of his time instead). In the Communist era, on the other hand, the same attitude, his poetic rigour and wariness of politics, his refusal to follow the "line" made it impossible for him to get his works published. He was only able to publish his translations, just like fellow poets such as Sándor Weöres, Ágnes Nemes Nagy, László Kálnoky, Zoltán Jékely, Sándor Rákos, et al.

His poetic achievement is that of a stubborn and consistent artist who questions the existence of a one and only Truth precisely by his incessant search for truth, and whose faith is shaky, too: his striving for God is kept under control by his adherence to the facts of everyday life. But it can just as well be interpreted as the oeuvre of an artist without hope who, having perceived the disintegration of the one and only Truth, tries to defend the truth of the One, fighting for the independence of the individual and kindling an odd epistemology just when he is most without faith, all the while never ceasing to praise the wonders and wealth of existence and Creation.

His brilliant sense of form (in which also lies the secret of his vast oeuvre as a translator) is, in fact, the very severity with which he is able to force plurality into composition. His oft-cited deliberate irregularities (such as enjambments, used to counterbalance the harmony of both the lines and the sentences, emphasizing and at the same time breaking both) are nothing but carefully placed breaches in a seemingly unchangeable order.

He is very much a man of a century when every attempt turned into its opposite and each word came to mean something else the very moment it was uttered, when action was in constant conflict with morality and when solitude, the last refuge of the individual, turned into defenselessness. "A sword searches through the cave of your solitude", says his 1931 poem "Politika". At the time, he was more than easy to misunderstand: his contemporaries, injured and thus made sensitive by an inhumane century, would not forgive him for daring to contemplate all the conflicting views as equal. Though keeping politics out of his poetry, he made much-quoted, very regrettable statements, which made him seem a supporter of far-right political movements. Before his death, he did something unique in world literature: in his confessions, entitled Vers és valóság (Poem and Reality) he tells how each and every poem of his came to be written. With this at hand, we can admire his poetic ingenuity all the more: it shows how the oeuvre towers above his non-poetic individuum, his life, his thinking, his blunders.

[...]

In the first decades of his poetry, Szabó is strongly influenced by German expressionism, his poetry is much like that of Kurt Pinthus' anthology published in 1920, Menschheitsdämmerung. Symphonie jüngster Dichtung (Dusk of Humanity. Symphony of the Youngest Poetry). In these years, from his first volume, Föld, Erdoý, Isten (Soil, Forest, God, 1922) to A Sátán műremekei he follows the arc of German poetry from the classicist modernity of Stefan George to the expressionists, adapting the latter's style to the needs of Hungarian poetry. He is eclectic not only in the choice of subject, but also in form. He writes in free as well as blank verse, in stanzas that might or might not be read as traditional poems, or imitating the chorus of ancient Greek drama. All these forms, how-ever, represent a single, incessant struggle: that between avantgardism and classicist regularity. His later poems, those in his dramatic volume Te és a világ (You and the World, 1932) and the much more lyrical Tücsökzene (Cricket Music, 1947), and some of the great poems afterwards, such as the philosophic contemplations of "A földvári mólón" (On The Jetty at Földvár), formulate the experience of the man of his century with great intensity and individuality, creating, as it were, a classicism all his own. Yet as early as the twenties, he could create, in his numerous poems, from subjects then fashionable all over Europe, something completely unique and personal.

There is a strange stylistic dialogue to be heard in the poems of the first decade, which can be seen as the eclecticism of a beginner-but something more as well. This seems to be the reason for his decision to rewrite and republish all his early works in 1943, at the height of his career, just before the world crashed around him. He needed the improved versions of these poems to serve as precedents for his mature poetry.

He had led a decade-long fight against messianistic traditions. Not in the thematic sense, but poetically. The poems of Te és a világ are built on the result of this struggle-there it is not the Marxist terminology, not the social injustice, not the gesture of a tribune of the people which states the tone, but the self control which sees and questions everything at the same time, within one single sentence. The poet needed to show the way that led to this stage in his mature poetry.

At the beginning, like Pound, he used personae to represent a paradoxical world in the conflict between a traditional and an objective rhetoric-to apply a later terminology, the Führer-principle seems to fight with the Dichter-principle. The historic vision put forward in the poem "Isten" (Lord, 1923), influenced by The Tragedy of Man, Imre Madách's nineteenth-century philosophical drama and Rimbaud's Le bateau ivre is in this series, as is the technocrat's image built up from motifs from Shakespeare and Renan, Caliban or the portrait of a dictator, in the poem "Vezér" (Leader). The desperate declamation of a tribune of the nation in "Hazám, keresztény Európa!" (My Country, Christian Europe!) or "Kellenek a Gonosz fegyverei" (Wicked Weapons are Needed) asks if the traditional views of the 19th century and the Christian words of two thousand years still hold true in the 20th. The question is whether you can still convey traditional meaning by uttering traditional words. He counters the rhetoric of tradition-with what? This is what he seems to be at a loss about in this decade. He is not yet aware that he will be one of the chosen few (alongside the mature Yeats, Eliot and Pound) in the rethinking of 20th century poetic rhetoric and in the creating of the poetic practice to convey it.

In this period he asks the questions springing from the conflict of the indi-vidual helplessly facing history. He denies love and calls it a luxury. Action springs from force ruled by a new leader possessing the "Complete Truth". The humanistic artist feared the rule of inhumanity, but the rebel hails it and admits that "wicked weapons are needed." All this written around 1926 or in 1928, when the idea of the poem "Vezér" was conceived, is more than an echo of a poet from a nation that lost the First World War, Stefan George's prophecy. The "captains of the world" as they are referred to in the poem, are figures of history now, after Lenin's coup d'état, Miklós Horthy's 1920 march into Budapest, Mussolini's Marcia su Roma, the coups by Pilsudsky in Poland, Mannerheim in Finland, Valdemaras in Lithuania, Petljura in the Ukraine, Kemal Atatürk in Turkey, the dictatorships of Carmona in Portugal and Primo de Rivera in Spain, the battle between Stalin and Trotsky are all phenomena to be studied.

Eliot writes very similar monologues (like "Triumphant March" and "Difficulties of a Statesman" in "Coriolan"), while Brecht contemplates the questions of messianism and power in The Good Woman of Sechuan.

The first thing to do is to form the committees:
"I am destiny, the single and only way. / The test comes next", says Szabó's Leader (in prose translation). "The fight! All I have / done so far was only preparation. [...] All ready. I am present / in seventy cities of the country, / am pointing towards the capital in fivehundred thousand / bayonets, in an hour from now / the sign goes off on my screen: / I'll cease to be and the current of my heart / will start the new order's machines."

Eliot's new leader has these ideas:
The consultative councils, the standing committees, select committees and sub-committees. One secretary will do for several committees.

[...]

One single line of Pound's: "Caliban casts out Ariel" (final version 1920), has come to be associated with various poetic events embodying the trends in poetry in the twentieth century.

This one line states very clearly the change that had occured in the history of cultural symbols. In Europe as well as in America, the figure of godlike Prospero had been overshadowed by the conflict between Ariel and Caliban, with more and more emphasis on Caliban even in amateur, college stagings of the play. Pound's infamous line had been preceded by Browning's "Caliban upon Setebos" written in 1860 but published only in 1864, and Renan's philosophic dramas (Caliban, suite de La Tempęte, 1878, L'Eau de Jouvence, suite de Caliban, 1880), while Caliban's voice is echoed in Joyce's Exiles (1918). There it is Rowen, Joyce's "self-portrait" who quotes Act III of The Tempest, "The isle is full of voices", where it is also an allusion to Ireland. As we reach the 20th century, Caliban's name comes to mean all those who are downtrodden and rebellious, even though as a figure he still bears all the disgusting characteristics bestowed upon it by Shakespeare.

The same phenomenon appears in Hungarian poetry in the works of two poets, formerly master and student, responding to each other in monologues. Mihály Babits translates The Tempest in 1916 as an anti-war protest, placing peace-making and moderating Prospero in the centre of his interpretation. This interpretation, preferring Ariel and Prospero, induces a kind of humanistic, pathetic aura around the play, supported by Babits's unquestionable authority. Lőrinc Szabó's "Kalibán" (1923) is a generational rebellion against his master, bearing the marks of both the personal and the political character of a talented poet.

Master and pupil here mutually misunderstand one another. Recognizing the shifting and reshuffling of cultural values around him, Babits is busy trying to fix an interpretation he thinks traditional, while Szabó puts the emphasis on the inevitability of change. The point for Babits is that classicist-minded modernism, so much like his own, is not resistant to political influence. This was well illustrated by Stefan George's war poems, showing how such modernism can accommodate a preference for antihumanistic, messianistic values.

Sun Vu Kung is a user of technology, an uncontrollable figure who wants to have everything life can offer and who is envious about everybody else's possessions-he is the prototypical rebel striving for power without reserve. On the other hand, there is Buddha, his complete opposite: peace, love and order, everything that defines the position of human beings within a system, thus defending everyone's rights within these limits. As the story goes, Buddha ultimately "casts out" Sun Vu Kung, just as in Pound.

He is the hero of Fény, fény, fény as well, defined by the rapidity of technological development and whose failure foreshadows the pain of a finite existence. Sun Vu Kung shares the internal struggle of Yeats's Irish airman (which Szabó translated into Hungarian): "A lonely impulse of delight / Drove to tumults in the clouds"; he is disappointed to find the "waste" at the end of the world, in his internal "tumult". His purposed activity is more than mere destruction-it is akin to the Apollo in Rilke's conclusion in "Archaic Apollo" (which Szabó also translated): "you must change your life." Buddha is also beyond a humanist image of goodness: the ruthless deliberation with which he finally puts the mountain on top of Sun Vu Kung "out of mercy", is the ever-existent limitation imposed by the guardians of social order.

The poem implies that there is no pure human formula: historic figures, just as ordinary people, are a combination of extreme characteristics. At the peak of his career, Szabó performs a special tightrope act: he tries to make up a harmonic whole out of his radically different poetic selves, his everyday self and the man of his age. He is well aware that history and human nature will upset this balance and impel it towards one of the extremes: for this reason the struggle will never cease, the victor will always humiliate the vanquished, which, in turn, breeds further rebellion and desire. This is an accurate description of the Europe of the 1930s and of his own personal life as well. Still he tries to incorporate the ideal moment of balance in his poetry, as a summary of all the diverging forces.

[...]

"Semmiért egészen" (Everything for Nothing) is probably the best-known of his poems. At the end of his life he himself said "I think this is my best known poem". It was written in a café, and was first published in a daily paper on 24 May 1931. Even though it is admired by all those who enjoy poetry, it has been much debated due to its seemingly male chauvinist statements.

Szabó was married for 36 years, from the age of 21 until his death. At the same time, he was in love for 25 years with his wife's friend, until her suicide. Apart from these ties, his poetry and his confessions make reference to several other affairs. He himself recalls how he wrote this particular poem in Vers és valóság, saying, "It was provoked by ten years of marriage and fourteen or fifteen years of love experience. And also the position I was in regarding Erzsike [his love]. I have thought for decades that this poem was meant for Nagyklára [his wife] alone, but now I am beginning to realize in a way it has a message for Erzsike, too. It seems I wanted fidelity from both of them. The whole question of fidelity-infidelity-love must have been but a pile of foggy ideas and I knew I wanted too much by demanding such complete selfless devotion."

Years later he put that another way in an interview. "Yes, I am selfish. As far as I know, other men are not. Neither are women. Therefore what I want is something absolutely special. I want joy and complete reliability. Consolation, a helpful companion. Especially in the case of long-term contracts, such as marriage. The wife, unless she is a very special, ingenious, independent and creative personality, should be but a part of her husband's life. This ought to be her pleasure, her ambition, her happiness. This only will grant domestic peace. Equality in rights and rank is mostly nothing but theory, superstition. Practically, the internal rights of two spouses or lovers are formed by the personal contract between these two people, never even put in words. There are walks of life where a woman has many more rights than a man, whereas in others she has practically none. In order to get the best overall performance, it is most advisable that of the two the better one-in the widest possible sense of the word- should be the decision-maker. The one who is greater, the stronger one. If such is the case the other should not waste his or her actual lesser strength on competing or hindering the leader but should provide unconditional support. In everything. Can't this be a beautiful, noble ambition for a woman? Of course it can! I respect my wife very much because she likes my poem 'Everything for Nothing' which, for some readers, reveals the 'real' attitude of men."

I personally tend to find just the opposite message in the poem than the one coded into its reading tradition by its author and readers alike. As the poet states himself, it starts very "high", and this momentuous beginning does not yet point to the subject. "It's terrible, that I do see, / but it's true", the poem warns the author and the reader straight away, anticipating a shock. Attila József starts his poem "Téli éjszaka" (Winter Night) with "Discipline, discipline!" (Transl. Zsuzsanna Ozsváth and Frederick Turner) and, earlier, Rilke, stunned by the perfection beyond accidence of Apollo's torso had exclaimed, "You must change your life".

What can a human relationship be like under such circumstances? Can there be a relationship like that at all? If you will, the poem is a ruthless cry for help from an individual suffering from loneliness, an absurd idyll of hell.

Recalling the poem towards the end of his life, Szabó meditates on all these questions and calls it "foggy", with the question left unanswered at the end. "I didn't know what I could promise in exchange for fidelity. But I trusted myself and my willpower and that I would be able to find something valuable enough to give."

But still the poem expresses such a powerful male chauvinism that Szabó himself prepared all his life afterwards to write a counter-poem, to make some kind of amends. He didn't realize that what he had written was a text that takes the trouble to consider "tempering this Hell", in the words of his friend and fellow-poet, Gyula Illyés-a Yeatsian "tragic joy" as opposed to the humiliated and oppressed. If not with the hope of changing anything, then at least with the chance to share one's sufferings. It may have been this urge to make amends that brings about A huszonhatodik év (The Twenty-sixth Year. A Lyrical Requiem in 120 Sonnets), a great dirge for his love, who had committed suicide in that year of their relationship.

For a whole year then Szabó was lost for the present and the past is revived. It is in this past become present that the two people experience the years of pleasure again, one of them heading for suicide, the other already shown as the mourner-to-be. The poet is building up the mystery of "imagined imagination", while they are both present but he is also well aware of his loving companion's absence. The two, presence and absence, are presented as a continuous process, in imagined synchronicity. In the moments of discovering the great theme, the pain of "you are not with us any more" is filtered through the consolation of "you have been". Memories are recalled exactly, ruthlessly, but past scenes and situations appear now in a new light, security, confidence, permanence pervade the couple's relationship: "eternal presence, though pure imagination only".

Dorothea von Törne made a remarkable observation on reading the German translation of the cycle. She says that Huszonhatodik év is "one of the most intimate and most open pieces of poetry. ...It is open in the sense that-most uniquely for love poetry-it involves the reader. That is, the reader witnesses awe-inspiring efforts, those of Orpheus to bring back his love into our world. ... In these sonnets the lovers are very much dependent on the laws of the universe as well as on those of society still ruled by bourgeois morality. Christian ethics for Szabó are both compulsory and questionable. This is why we can read the cycle as a purification process which the reader is invited to join consciously."

[...]

Lőrinc Szabó poses the great questions of life in his cycles. Indeed, in this sense, his volumes can also be considered cycles. He made a vow when he turned the cycle form into a means of orientation, and built up his meditations from the bits and pieces of his biography. What Yeats in his late period separated into short poetic summaries and prose recollections, Szabó united in a major poetic work. After all, is Tücsökzene (Cricket Music) simply a series of poems, or is it a composition with a unified structure? Nobody should be fooled by the fact that it was written in over two years, from the summer of 1945 to the spring of 1947, during which period it was reshaped again and again; he even added yet another cycle for the second edition in 1957 (all editions since have published this version). Tücsökzene consists of poems of a unique structure: 18 iambic, 10-syllable lines, mostly rhyming couplets. As for its subject matter, it begins as "autobiographical recollections" in the summer of 1945, when he is told that his uncle, a protestant clergyman who had been the one spiritual mentor of his youth has died. But even before this, he had been writing his poetic memoirs in parallel with editing his collection of translations Örök barátaink, (Our Eternal Friends, 1941) and rewriting his earlier poems, Összes versei (Collected Poems, 1943). He finds this moment suitable for a summary: to sum up his way to maturity, the war and the siege of Budapest, his political humiliation. Besides, the cycle is a huge philosophical poem as a whole. It keeps surveying the meaning of life, the place of man in the universe and among his fellow men. "In a moonlit night I was once again shaken by the huge gap between the individual and the universe, between the shrill happiness of the outside world and my internal struggles", he writes on the cover of the first edition, and he repeats it in a radio interview ten years later. It is the interwovenness and separation of biography and philosophy that makes Tücsökzene so unique. The continuity of the cycle is based on a parallelism: the way of the poet's consciousness from a lost harmony to a harmony hopefully to be found, and the way of life from a lost idyll to societal coexistence hopefully within reach. Discontinuity, on the other hand, is inherent in the fact that this parallelism is upset over and over again, turning biography into philosophy having little to do with the events of the life of an individual. From his Diary of 1945 it seems that he gained inspiration from biographies and Bildungsroman novels he read at the time, especially Der grüne Heinrich by Gottfried Keller. Each and every poem of the series and the cycle as a whole bears the mark of the need for education. This is what leads to the conclusion of "No. 347" (which he thought so important that he read it himself on the radio) where he speaks of an "inventory that remained a fragment", and presents a vision of the self trying to build up a universe, "it was a nice desire to say Nothing Will Suffice". Man can find a role, a field of activity, but this does not mean he has solved his life. For a poet, this means the need for constant renewal within the process of creation. He pinpoints the one moment of life that makes it into a work of art and surveys the ability of poetry to perform this transformation. The poet lives with a consciousness that floats between the facts of reality and the generalizations that can be drawn from them. By liberating the dynamism of an active mind he strives not for quietude but for the completeness of motion.

Artistic creation, recollecting one's biography are based on memory, so it involves an incessant effort to turn towards the past. Memory is the bringing back to life of something already nonexistent, turning it into an existing work of art made of a different material. This is why the question arises, "possibly matter is no other thing than memory as well?" ("No. 313"). The poet's conciousness turns to the past, to the very creation of art, to the problems to be solved. The process of creation is the sum total of two parallel surveys in the past: retracing the biography and a constant checking to see if the questions asked during the recollected period are still valid. The poet did not write the pieces of the series in the order they appear now-he wrote bits and pieces of it all jumbled up, but always keeping in mind the task he set for himself by deciding on a particular time perception.

The product is built within this framework in the poet's mind, in which it is possible to constitute at the same time the present of time-shaping memory and of the mind controlling and determining the process of creation and the progress of the text being as it is born, by definition, in linear time.

"Strange, / but it seems true that the Universe is the range / of a Poet's Brain.", says one of the last poems of Tücsökzene. This reminds us of passages by Goethe, whom Szabó admits to reading frequently at the time. One of them is about Goethe saying to Eckermann, "I know it is difficult, but the life of art is to perceive and represent strangeness. And also: as long as we remain within the limits of the general, anybody can imitate us, while nobody can imitate us doing something particular. Why? Because the others have never experienced it. It is needless to worry and say that the particular will not be understood by the public. Each and every character, however particular, and each and every object, from a stone up all the way to humans, has a general aspect, because everything in the world is repeated, there's nothing that exists only once."

A simultaneous perception of the finite and the infinite, the acceptance of the limits, the human mind deep-rooted in existence, all these are together in the closing lines of this majestic poem, stressed by the use of cross-rhymes. This peak of poetic creation and human existence, with all its secrets and self-limitations, gives the only possibility of safety in an uncertain life. This is the safety that makes it possible to conclude the process of creation, it makes it possible to construct the poem, and this means the balance of life in the perspective of death. This is a Faustian moment, the safety of a certainty never quite reached, the unity of the finite human with the infinite universe in human consciousness, in the case of the poet, in a poem.

... and, stopping suddenly,
your earthly consciousness will be unbound
but safe, the big blue meadow's heavenly
star-set cricket music stir and resound.

This transcendental idyll concludes the first version of Tücsökzene in 1947. It is the summary of all the experience a man has gathered by his mid-life and a contemplation of all the facts of his existence: with its wealth and with its finiteness.

---

Lóránt Kabdebó
is Professor of Hungarian literature at the University of Miskolc, of which he is now Rector. He is an expert on Lőrinc Szabó, and the author of more than a dozen books, including literary criticism and collections of interviews with writers and poets.