A Literary Point of View

I have now picked up a few pieces of literature from Hungary, as recommended by a dear family friend; and if this is a true sampling, this is a bleak body of literature. Valerie, if you’re reading this, did you recognize the empty hole of loneliness and disconnection at the center of these works?

The first is an allegorical novel called Metropole by Ferenc Karinthy (1999), a magical realist work in which a man on his way to a linguistics convention finds himself in an unintended stopover in a crowded city where no one speaks a language in any way recognizable, even to the linguist, and word patterns remain elusive, while everyone everywhere is thronging and rude. This reminds me of a Kazuo Ishiguro book called The Unconsoled, where a man goes through daily routines with a benumbed insomnia. Is it a coincidence that this book too takes place in central Europe, or that its first location is a Hungarian café? In any event, on the jacket, events of Metropole are described this way: “One claustrophobic day blurs into another as [the main character] desperately struggles to survive in this vastly overpopulated metropolis where there are as many languages as there are people.”

Another novel, which will be much more fun according to Stephanie, is Dezsö Kosztolányi’s Skylark (1930). The context of this novel is described this way: “Unintelligent, unimaginative, unattractive, and unmarried, Skylark cooks and sews for her parents and anchors the unremitting tedium of their lives.” One can’t help but draw a line between the unremitting tedium in one book and the aphasic linguist pushing his way through hectic mobs in the other.

Finally, a book of poems by János Pilinszky (Selected Poems, translated by Ted Hughes and János Csokits, 1976) gives voice to an even more tangible despair. Here are a sampling of three of the less violent poems that I find, in the first two cases, beautiful, and in the last, hilarious:

“By the Time You Come”

I am alone. And by the time you come

I shall be the only one still alive.

Just feathers in an empty roost.

Stars instead of a sky.

In my orphanage, unburied,

as on a wintry dump

picking among the rubbish

I keep finding scraps of my life.

And that will be flawless peace.

Even my heart inaudible.

All around me the ecstatic

barriers of silence.

Naked eternity.

And yours, simply yours.

A majestic simplicity

made for you, from the first day.

Like a lumpish basketwork dummy

time just sits, without a word.

Desire has no longer any limbs.

It has only a gasping trunk.

By the time you come I shall have lost everything.

No house, no soft bed.

I shall be able to lie undisturbed

in a bleak ecstasy.

Only you must not rob me, you must not desert me.

If you are weak, that is the end of me.

And horrible, to awake, in a bed

among pillows, hearing the noise of the street.

“The Desert of Love”

A bridge, and a hot concrete road—

the day is emptying its pockets,

laying out, one by one, all its possessions.

You are quite alone in the catatonic twilight.

A landscape like the bed of a wrinkled pit,

with glowing scars, a darkness which dazzles.

Dusk thickens. I stand numb with brightness

blinded by the sun. The summer will not leave me.

Summer. And the flashing heat.

The chickens stand, like burning cherubs,

in the boarded-up, splintered cages.

I know their wings do not even tremble.

Do you still remember? First there was the wind.

And then the earth. Then the cage.

Flames, dung. And now and again

a few wing-flutters, a few empty reflexes.

And thirst. I asked for water—

Even today I hear that feverish gulping,

and helplessly, like a stone, bear

and quench the mirages.

Years are passing. And years. And hope

is like a tin-cup toppled into the straw.

“Fable”

Detail from his KZ_Oratorio: Dark Heaven

Once upon a time

there was a lonely wolf

lonelier than the angels.

He happened to come to a village.

He fell in love with the first house he saw.

Already he loved its walls

the caresses of its bricklayers.

But the windows stopped him.

In the room sat people.

Apart from God nobody ever

found them so beautiful

as this child-like beast.

So at night he went into the house.

He stopped in the middle of the room

and never moved from there any more.

He stood all through the night, with wide eyes

and on into the morning when he was beaten to death.