SZABÓ LŐRINC: ÖSSZEGYŰJTÖTT VERSEK
Első megjelenés: The Hungarian P. E. N., 1962. No. 3., 28–29.
Magyarul: Magyar Napló, 1993. június 25., 10–11. (Ford.: Máté J. György.) Közreadja Sz[alay] L[ászló].
A cikket Ferenczi László irodalomtörténész, a The Hungarian P. E. N. akkori szerkesztőjének a felkérésére írta Pilinszky. (Lásd még F. L.: Emlékek Pilinszky Jánosról. In: „Merre, hogyan?” [szerk. Tasi József], PIM, Bp. 1997. 252–255.), ill. F. L.: „Csak a máé a rettenet…” Kráter, Bp. 1999. 237–242.
A kéziratnak sem az eredeti, magyarul írt változata, sem annak fogalmazványa nem maradt fenn a hagyatékban. Az angol fordító személyét sem ismerjük.
A szöveget Barabás András és Máté J. György fordításának felhasználásával közlöm.
A cikk teljes szövege angolul:
ÖSSZEGYŰJTÖTT VERSEK
(Collected Poems)
by Lőrinc Szabó Budapest, 1960
Lőrinc Szabó was already considered a modern classic in his lifetime. This was because his works were of unparalleled organic and undeviating unity in the field of Hungarian lyrical poetry. He built up and developed his poetry from one volume to the next, as though it were a philosophy, with almost thesis-like thoroughness.
Yet there have been few among our modern lyricists who have harboured so many bold contradictions as he. An enumeration of his contradictions indeed seems almost the best and most faithful characterization of him. As a young man he first became a literary translator – a worthy colleague of Mihály Babits and Árpád Tóth. He was a learned poet par excellence, yet in his first independent volumes he appeared on the scene almost as a savage, with unbridled gestures of demolishing and building. This twin aspect was the most characteristic trait even of his youth: the visage of a translator and critic, refined to the point of fastidiousness, on the one hand, and that of the naked-primitive savage on the other.
Which was the true one?
He never wanted to decide the problem, nor to resolve his contradictions. He loved the elemental facts of existence effusively, the earth, this luxuriant paradise run wild, yet his cleverly cool spectacles glinted on his face with native homeliness.
He was marked simultaneously by a love of order and unrestrained anarchy. And besides the unbridled anarchy of the instincts, no one more faithfully interpreted the tremulous hopes of the worried, desolate petty-bourgeois, his semiconscious groping in the eternal twilight, his grotesquely pitiful vicissitudes.
He was an anarchist and a petty-bourgeois, a philologist and a savage. And what else?
A naive child, and perhaps the most merciless psychologist of modern European literature. In his poems begging for pity and mercy, he was most unsparing of himself, as there are certain moments in life when only a child can bear to express the naked truth. Yes. He was able to live in the manner of a heathen, with a thirst that was beyond society, and yet in his old age it was he who wrote the adolescently tragic and magnificent volume of „eternal” love and „eternal” loyalty – the Twenty-sixth year (Huszonhatodik év) – the poems of the year of mourning after a love of twenty-five years. He thirsted for life, and was at once pessimistic and unbelieving to the very marrow. But it was precisely this unresolvable duality which rendered his poetry so vivid and intense – he was nurtured by the same duality as the destructively-constructive world of the elemental forces. His tenacity, his inexhaustibly manifold psychological wealth, each and all drew their sap from this elemental duality, of the same kind as with creation itself. He knew as precisely as nature the tacit equilibrium of the opposites, the secret of calm and grandiose construction spanning from cradle to grave. Throughout the planned contruction of his life’s work, he was simultaneously guided by his conscious erudition, the precision of the philologist – and the instinct of the termites, who find their way about their dark labyrinths. He devoted time and attention to chiselling even the smallest of his building-blocks, so a thousand labours of detail, and his life’s work nevertheless – often for this very reason – has the force of a single block.
An unmusical poet – was the opinion of many, through he construed his music for the most sensitive ears. It was a negative music this, which created an equilibrium or established its acoustic stress through its blind silence at the points of the ecstatic outburst of the contents, through the halucinations sensed in the deafness of the world interpreted.
In the years after the War we felt he had completed the grand structure of his life’s work. And then, with dazzling tour de force, he repeated and surpassed himself in one single volume – Cricket’s Music (Tücsökzene). He created a mirror image of his own poetry, projected onto the play of the waves of remembrance. Cricket’s Music is verse that stands marchless among the modern lyrics of the world. And if Proust’s work is a modern Divina Commedia, then Cricket’s Music is a lyrical remembrance not only of things past – in its wonderful structure, like a dream within a dream, like poetry within poetry, there also quivers the mirror image, together with the memories of his life, of the whole of the art of Lőrinc Szabó, now purified to form recollection and vision.
His death in 1957 deprived us of one of our greatest twentieth-century poets.
J. Pilinszky