Ágnes Nemes Nagy

...

Kassák loomed in my life like a phantom classic car. It was as if a Ford automobile of 1900s vintage had slowly pulled into our street. It was not his modernity that first impressed me but his antiquity.
Then again his novelty. Old-new, new-old: how often I turned that antithesis over in my mind. But why was I turning it over so late in the day (in relation to the clock of world literature), in the late Forties and early Fifties?
I shall try to answer that first of all in my capacity as a private person. The reason is that it was then that I realised I could no longer write in the way I had done up till then. It happens to every poet several times in the course of her or his life. In my case it occurred after the initial youthful élan and the first unquestioning volume, and that just happened to be-post hoc ergo propter hoc?-in the early Fifties. I started groping blindly for tools, words; it was above all the spaces between words that came to hand. And that went on bit by bit until, one way or another, I had built up for myself a form of poetic diction into which I was able to cram the maximum amount possible of ellipsis. To start with, I only expatiated on associations, tinkered with dropping form; then, emboldened by that, I tore up the rational links, eliminated the self of the author, omitted subject and predicate. Around a decade and a half later it turned out that I wasn't exactly setting the world on fire. The poetry mainstream had carried on flowing behind my back, and when I was able to face up to it again I found, with a touch of astonishment and delight, that I both resembled it and yet didn't.

About what did I not see eye to eye with him? His axioms. I never felt that his obliteration of the art of the past was either necessary or feasible. Anyway, my life would not be worth a button without Sophocles or Csokonai. I also looked askance on his idea of "totally new" art. Not that he meant it like that. He continually astonished me with his intellectual appetite. He was seventy-six years old when he demanded that I give him the low-down on the alexandrine, its structure, history, everything possible.
The zest-that I did grasp. The power of the deep-rooted eruptions, the social and intellectual fervour, shone through despite the forty-year age difference, the disagreements, geological eras. He could not strive for less than what he wanted.
Then there was his renowned obstinacy. A turn-of-the-century proletarian, a pencil-wielding foreman, chorusmaster for innumerable isms, even at eighty years of age he was as hale as many thirty-year-olds, somehow reminding one of the lions that, in Rilke's phrase, "know no decline".
What was the basic relationship between us? Kassák impressed me. I noted that feeling all the more as fate decreed that it would not bless me with it too often. I knew him for twenty years, from his sixtieth to his eightieth year. During that time I had plenty of opportunity to become acquainted with his sovereignty, with the way an old person resists temptation. The temptations of old age are not less than those of youth. Who knows how much time one has to rebel against the world. Or to what end. But he, the perennial rebel, never posed himself questions like that. He couldn't give a damn about his own age, because at any time, whatever the situation, he only ever sought to find salvation in his own way.
To put it another way: he was able to renounce things. It was this, this first and foremost, that was impressive about him. He did not renounce things because he was an ascetic; he wasn't, he had the same desires for one thing and another, for worldly good, for fame and fortune, as people (writers) generally do. And how greatly he was still able to delight, at the age of seventy or eighty, each time he gained some late token of recognition! That late delight, that vitality, too, was no trivial lesson for those who knew him.
But the point on which I was closest to him I cannot even put a name to. It was the kernel of his individuality, a kind of steadfastness, the untarnishable sameness of old metals. It is no use my trying to define it. All I know is the response to this quality: I esteemed Kassák. Beyond differences and similarities, beyond disputes and human interaction, let me say it again, doffing my hat: I esteem him.

(1975)

Ágnes Nemes Nagy
(1922-1991) was a poet, essayist and translator. After the war she and her husband, the critic Balázs Lengyel, founded Újhold, a literary journal, which was banned in 1948. Unable to publish, she translated and taught in a secondary school. Her translations include work by Corneille, Racine, Moliere, Victor Hugo, Saint-John Perse, Rilke and Brecht. Selections from her poems have been published in translations by Bruce Berlind, Hugh Maxton and George Szirtes. A selection from her essays was published by The Mellen Press in 1998.