George Szirtes
Converging Lines
In case anyone should have forgotten, there was a peaceful revolution, a
grand European revolution with global implications exactly twenty years ago
in 1989 though, if we have forgotten, it may be because we are still living in it.
It was Zhou En Lai who, when asked in the 1950s about the effects of the
French Revolution of 1789, is supposed to have replied: “It’s too early to tell”.
It is too early to tell with this one.
Too early and already too late. Time, the postmodern phenomenon par
excellence, is the great confuser and befuddler of chronologies. There we were,
thinking it marched forward, in its somewhat unremitting dialectical way into
some all but predetermined future, with evolution as a series of revolutions,
when it performed one of its periodic panic fits: a, more or less, bloodless
revolution. It was, said Francis Fukuyama, the end of history. Maybe it was then.
But history is not just events themselves, nor the consciousness of
experiencing those events: history is what we write about what seems to us to
have happened. Who did what to whom, in which order, why, and with what
effect, is, to put it mildly, subject to interpretation. In retrospect everything
seems inevitable: after all here we are at the end of it. It may be that the task
of rival interpretations is to offer us ever more convincing forms of inevitability,
to act as Benjamin’s Angel of History but with an agenda, a case to make and
a set of files to keep in order.
It was not just the physical Berlin wall that collapsed in 1989, but its equally
important metaphorical-ideological-psychological equivalent. The usual wall
consists of bricks held together by mortar. Should the mortar disappear the bricks
might remain in place, simply sitting one on top of another, but there would be
nothing except gravity holding them together—one good shove and over it would
go. The parties, the ministries, the armies, the officials, the management, the
cadres, the career paths, might all hang suspended for the equivalent of
a historical instant but then the wall would be gone. And that is what happened.
By 1989, the mortar that had held brick to brick had long turned to powder.
That mortar was compounded of belief, fear, and a kind of everyday confidence
in its sheer existence, a confidence that, however dreadful it was, there
was actually a kind of coherence, that things had to be as they were. I once wrote
that the characteristic late-twentieth century Hungarian gesture was the ironic
shrug, a shrug that worked its way through everything from social manners to
literature. There were few ideologues left standing by the time the shrug was
established. We were all Shruggists. What, asked my elderly party-member
cousin, in the March of 1989, what if a strong man comes to power in Moscow,
smashes his fist down on the table, and cries “Enough!”? His far more active
party-member son-in-law smiled, shrugged and replied: “The table breaks.”
Such walls and tables had been standing pretty solidly for forty years, that
is to say for at least two generations. Behind the Hungarian wall lurked the
memory of the years of Stalinist terror, the failed heroic revolution of 1956 and
the retribution that followed it. Beyond those lay repression, stabilization,
expansion, years of a nod and a wink, the shift towards relative prosperity at
the price of political acquiescence to the black economy and the accumulation
of foreign debt.
The key (unpublished) poem of the pre-1956 Stalinist terror was probably
Gyula Illyés’s “One Sentence on Tyranny”. The key prose works such as Tibor
Déry’s Niki—The Story of A Dog, and his short story, “Love”, followed shortly
after. The later ’50s and early ’60s were distilled with scientific precision by the
influential poet, Ágnes Nemes Nagy. A contemporary of other Central European
poets like Milosz, Herbert and Holub, she wrote ferociously disciplined verse
and experimental prose works which balanced fury, resignation, silent
resistance, a geological vision, biting sophisticated irony and a clear-eyed
humane quietism.
1956—when Soviet forces violently crushed the armed uprising against
Stalinist rule and Soviet occupation—frightened the Hungarian authorities and
by the late ’60s and particularly the late ’70s they were buying off any possible
opposition with the coinage of a certain limited tolerance and an equally
limited, but relatively broad, range of consumer goods; these were bought on
foreign credit, creating what Miklós Haraszti was later to refer to as ‘the
velvet prison’, a country that visiting Russians nicknamed ‘little America’ and
others as ‘the happiest barracks in the socialist camp’.
[...]
George Szirtes
won the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2005 for his book of poems Reel. His latest collection,
The Burning of the Books and Other Poems, was published in 2009 by Bloodaxe.
An outstanding translator of Hungarian poetry, he has also translated novels by
László Krasznahorkai, Sándor Márai, Dezsô Kosztolányi and fiction by Gyula Krúdy.
The essay published here is an edited version of the Introduction to New Order:
Hungarian Poets of the Post 1989 Generation. Anthologies in Translation Series.
Edited and introduced by George Szirtes. Todmordem: Arc Publications, 2010, 300 pp.
The poems following this essay were selected by Anna T. Szabó. They were not
included in the anthology and first appear in these pages.
