Bruce Berlind
Ottó
I first met Ottó Orbán sometime in the
late 'seventies or early 'eighties. My sense of him from the beginning was
of a man who knew the ways of the world and was wryly amused by them. Only
later did I learn-less from his demeanour than from what he wrote about his
formative years-that the wry amusement was, in part at least, a hard-won dodge
to live with some painful, unhealed wounds. The basic facts are by now well
known: that his Jewish father was beaten to death during a forced march between
concentration camps; that his poverty-stricken mother placed him for a time
in what he termed a "Dickensian boarding school for war orphans," how he was
traumatised by the air raids over Budapest; and that a decade later he required
hospitalisation in a psychiatric clinic. But the pain was not yet over. In
the mid-to-late 'eighties he was stricken by a rare form of Parkinson's Disease
that became progressively worse for the remainder of his life. It took the
form of violent, almost continuous spasms that incapacitated him for a normal
life. After 1988, he wrote me, "I travel mainly between my armchair and my
PC, making the Fates (and my colleagues) angry with the rapidly growing number
of my books." (1994)
But even as the pain of his disease was increasing, so was his recognition
as one of the best poets of our time. This elated him and fuelled both his
energy and his sense of irony: "God is chasing me [with] a creative horde
of his angels, I am writing like crazy, have finished two new volumes of poems,
a book of essays, survived a grim winter and two series of long lasting infusions
in a day-time hospital, and most recently won the Kossuth Prize... I was on
the TV, a flaming spirit chained to a wreck, a guy knocking with his newly
got silver-headed stick on the marble floor of the Parliament Building's Great
Hall. Shaking hands, hampagne, speeches, cables, guests..." (1992). And the
honours kept coming: ..."in 1993, I [was] elected member of the Széchenyi Academy
of Letters and Fine Arts, which is closely connected to the Hungarian Academy
of Sciences. You see, that's what I really am: an undercover Albert Einstein
who receive[s] a lot of invitation cards day by day which he must throw away
again and again because he is unable to sit for two or three hours at a meeting
or something like that. Thrift, thrift, Horatio! Working at home, taking care
of my flowers on the balcony of our fourth floor city flat, that's my new
life style." (1994). When I wrote him that my wife was suffering from a herniated
disc, he replied: "Please, give my best regards and sympathy to Jo Anne. I
know what ruptured disc means, [I'd] been a Disc Jockey too some years ago
riding like [a] devil on my own spine." (1995). And this, where even the wit
is painful: "There is a war in my home, my illness and me are fighting for
each square inch of my body. The latest reports bring news about my attacked
hands. Some burning nerves or whatever coming from my spine." (1997).
A word about our book, The Journey of Barbarus, which was published in 1997.
Originally, the manuscript was absent for the first section, now subtitled
"Travel Documents." Although most (perhaps all) of the poems had appeared
in Hungarian, there had been no book with that title; and while a book of
1993, Útkereszteződés Minneapolisban (Minneapolis Intersection) was devoted
to Ottó's "American" poems, he was especially anxious, after the times he
had spent here, and the importance of those times to him, to have a book published
in America. The title was his, as were the contents and their arrangement.
My job, in addition to making the translations, was to interest a publisher.
When that finally happened, the publisher had reservations. He read the American
poems as objective accounts and failed to understand why they were important
to Orbán. He missed what can be summed up as personal warmth. I sent the letter
on to Ottó, commenting that I would be entirely sympathetic if he asked me
to terminate negotiations. His response was long, and I shall quote what seem
to me the most revealing parts.
I can't agree with him, of course. I have exactly 1001 arguments
against him. Let us see just one: what he is seeking in every poem, in vain,
he states, the vulnerable human element[,] is implied in the entire composition
as a whole. My impersonal way, my Jamesian Professor style-that is my intellectual
sanity and sensitivity I tried to preserve during the endless period of
40 years of Communist Rule. Living in an ill-fated, crippled and misinformed
small country a more or less clever intellectual is predestined to adore
a stable and strong empire. I, on the contrary, wanted to find my personal
way, to discover what I think of America. It was quite a pleasant surprise
to understand I love it-our best choice among the bad ones on this earth.
If this is not a personal approach, what is?... He is simply not right.
But then, in what is a characteristic acknowledgment of opposites-what is
in fact a major strategy of his aesthetic as a poet-Ottó continues:
And yet, in a curious way, he is. Here in Hungary the audience
knows me and my story. All those fine details of a Nineteenth Century Gothic
novel which I must entitle My Life... And now they are listening to the ageing
poet's daily struggle with his incurable illness, as between two attacks
he feeds poems into his oldish PC... A rather human story, I dare say. And
all that is completely unknown for the possible American reader. Let's cut
it short. My offer: a new opening chapter of six poems [there were finally
eight] on personal matters, entitled Travel Documents. All the poems are
among my best and none of them was published in English so far.
It was a brilliant solution: the additional poems provided
a biographical background, and consequently a prefatory rationale, for his
life in America. (I must add that the superb roughs of these poems were made
by the Orbáns' daughter Katalin, who was then a graduate student at Rutgers
University.)
Our final meeting was in late May of 1995, when my wife and I had dinner at
the Orbáns' apartment with their two daughters and our mutual friend, Miklós
Vajda. Just before we sat down at the table, Ottó took a medication which
immediately overcame his uncontrollable, spastic movements for the duration
of dinner. Afterwards he was clearly exhausted, and we soon said goodbye.
But it was at that final meeting that he gave me a new poem which he asked
me to translate: "N.N.Á. az égben." (Á.N.N. in Heaven, see HQ 140 for the
translation.) N.N.Á. was of course Ágnes Nemes Nagy, Orbán's early mentor
and the first Hungarian poet I'd ever translated. She had died in 1989, and
the fact that I still felt her loss (and still do) made my work on Ottó's
poem all the more strange and moving. As I wrote him that August, "Working
on the poem has been eerie. Over and over I'd say to myself 'Now what does
she mean by this?' or words to that effect-and then the circuitry would straighten
out: 'BUT THERE'S NO SHE-OTTÓ WROTE THE POEM.' But it happened again and again.
This must attest to an uncanny accuracy in your resurrecting Ágnes-pictorially,
but more important is how her mind and sensibility moved, or might have in
the circumstance." And Ottó's response: "It's just great. I've resurrected
poor Ágnes, you have resurrected me. It's an enterprise. The Everlasting Spirit
Distillery." (1995). I'll drink to that
