Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2000. [Vol. 6.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 26)

Studies - Enikő Bollobás: "My son is a Magyar": Ideas of Firstness and Origin in Charles Olson 's Poems

particular relevance for Hungarian readers: "The chain of memory is resurrection." It is here that he celebrates apocatastasis not as a return to origins but as process and textuality, the interconnectedness of textuality, or the processional textuality of memory and imagination. This is "the chain of memory" that leads him back to his supposedly Hungarian background. All that has been suddenly is: time is the face of recognition, Rhoda Straw; or my son is a Magyar. The luminousness of my daughter to her mother by a stream: apocatastasis how it occurs, that in this instant I seek to speak as though the species were a weed-seed a grass a barley corn in the cup of my palm. And I was trying to hear what it said, I was putting my heart down to catch the pain Resurrection is. It is the avowal. It is the admission. The renewal is the restoration: the man in the dark with the animal fat lamp is my father. Or my grandfather. [...] The poem attempts to tie into the process of remembering, to recreate the momentum of the soul's "onslaught," the human capacity for apocatastasis

, the soul's attack against time and death. This staying in process is achieved by accepting the "landlessness" in life, the abyss created by endless generations, and makes for an emotional tension ("putting my heart down / to catch the pain") not easy to solve. Since the originary condition is impossible to reach, an originary condition can be approached by staying in process: in this case remembering and imagining. It seems that the poet's Hungarian roots, imagined or otherwise, are also part of this apocatastasis. Even though Olson could not even have known that in Hungarian the words lizTE^AzTÄY-ÄIl 1

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