The Eighth Hungarian Tribe, 1983 (10. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1983-07-01 / 7. szám
July, 1983 THE EIGHTH HUNGARIAN TRIBE Page 5 NOTES ON GYULA ILLYÉS Life and poetry. Any poet’s biography is a fusion between what happened to him—the external framework of his life—and what he made to happen—his internal development through the poems he wrote. Gyula Illyés is a poet in the ancient Greek sense of the word. He is a maker, one who shaped his own life and who moulded his material, a rich fund of words, of folk-traditions, and of poetic inheritance, in a uniquely purposeful way. His ars poetica is “work—hard work” and his self-expressed motto is that one has to prove his worth time and again. Born in 1902, he came from a peasant family living in abject poverty at a little settlement in Western Hungary. One of his grandfathers was a shepherd and a Catholic, the other a cartwright and a Protestant. The joint efforts of his relations were needed to pay for his schooling. The differences between the creeds of his background made him an agnostic, the united goodwill of his people behind him helped him to remain a Christian. His early recognition of disparity between the poverty of his own class and the riches of their lords led him to Socialism. When his poetry, the expression of the forces that made him, burst on the literary scene, it represented the intrusion of spiritual trends of previously despised and outcast masses into the main stream of Hungarian literature. This was a revolution—said one of his critics—as the intrusion and acceptance of new classes is always tantamount to a revolution. But to him, his first poems, about the “Heavy Earth,” his uncles “The Three Old Men,” who toiled on it day and night, and his friends who reaped the “Second Crop,” were the repayment of a debt he owed them. The ideals he had chosen forced him into exile. He was a schoolboy, when at the end of the First World War, the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy collapsed and gave way to a liberal republic—which in turn gave way to a shortlived communist regime. Illyés joined the Hungarian Red Army as a soldier. Two years later, when the old order re-consolidated, Illyés took part in illegal activities. His task was to distribute aid to the families of imprisoned Communists. To avoid punishment he fled to Vienna; his next stop was Berlin; then came Paris, where he stayed for six years. He enrolled at the Sorbonne and earned his living with evening work: binding hooks, tutoring students, carrying parcels. Certain of his goal—to become a poet—or, if poets are horn, to become a better poet by education and by learning the tricks of the trade—he dipped into the conflicting waves of surrealism and expressionism and enjoyed the friendship of Tzara, Eluard, and Aragon. When a thaw in the political climate made his return possible, he went back to his home country, worked as a clerk, and wrote in his spare time. Soon he joined the Populists and formulated his literary program—best summed up by himself: “The blind man can see with his fingers, the mute can talk with his gestures; the blind and mute peasantry ... talks through its poets and writers." Clearly, the invocation to this task was his early poetry, but the extension of it included the “discovery” of the People of the Puszta for his contemporaries, in a sociological account of his own childhood, as it included his own searcli for a spiritual ancestor. He found him in Petőfi, whose best biography came to be written by him. At the beginning of the Second World War we see Illyés in the editorial of the influential literary journal Nyugat (West), with writers, poets and critics of left-wing sympathies grouped around him. When the Nyugat was banned, he resuscitated its spirit in the Magyar Csillag (Hungarian Star), which ceased for a time when the Germans occupied the country. Illyés kept up the fight as long as he could; with poems (Order in the Ruins), with a collection of essays and studies (Hungarians), and even with a memorial volume to his late master, the poet Mihály Babits, giving a platform to Jewish contributors; — but finally he had to go into hiding. In Central and Eastern Europe, the demands of society on a political poet of importance were and are far greater than elsewhere in the world. He is not only expected to admonish, to show the way in a symbolic sense, but is very often expected to participate in practical politics as well. If he refuses, his refusal is interpreted as a sign of disapproval. Not long after the liberation of Hungary, Gyula Illyés became a member of Parliament. Later, as the Hungarian Stalinists tightened their grip on the country, he withdrew from politics and from public life. But he did not cease to write poetry, and, like a man who plans to conquer unknown lands, he tried his hand at the novel (Huns in Paris), the report (Among Conquerers), and, with the greatest success, the drama (The Lesson of Ozora and The Beacon). He drew examples from the past, all alluding to the questions of the present; how a great national leader, like Kossuth, could be the focus of hopes for the rebirth of national and individual liberties. Illyés had started as thi spokesman of a class, but he became the living conscience of a nation. International recognition came as an extra gift to Illyés. After the honours won home and abroad, and the multiplying volumes of translations, people now start asking questions about his masters and about his poetic ancestry. Literary historians will answer with the names of József Erdélyi, Mihály Babits, Sándor Petőfi and János Arany. Students of comparative literature will trace his belletristic descent back to Villon and Burns and place him between Garcia Lorca and Éluard. But if he was asked, he might reply that he had been taught to write by his uncle, the cattle-herd Paul Czabuk. Thomas Kabdebo OUTLAW Gyula Illyés His brows, like tousled bushes caught in snow, the droop of his moustache, while in the crevice of each ear sprouted another snowy bush. What hair he had upon his head — retreating, hoary hair — was blown like frosty sky swept by the wind whirling above a wintry scene. That I recall, and how his eye, one good eye, like a winter sun appearing, disappearing in a frozen puddle, shyly shone. His voice, too, like the winter wind, or like that anguish hoarsely howled by packs of wolves who far away, and even now, are being killed. He stood framed by the door. He wolfed away at the huge mug of soup, and with a somewhat shaky hand wiped from his chin and chest each drop. Then, humbly setting down the mug before our gentle mother, he wished us ‘God bless’, and stumbled off towards the hiB uncertainly. He went, a fragment of a white and winter’s tale, hesitantly. He went as he had come, upon that close, oppressive summer’s day. Nichols, J. G. Outlaw (Betyár)
