A nyíregyházi Jósa András Múzeum évkönyvei 53. (Nyíregyháza, 2011)

Művészettörténet - Varga János: „Inditom levelem Penczelveniából Észak Amerika szeglete sarkából..." Varga Ignác verses notesza Amerikából

Varga János "I'm sending this letter from Penczelvenia the corner of North America.

.." Ignác Varga's diary in verses from America Two major groups of peasant written documents can be distinguished. One contains copied peasant manuscripts, the other group includes individual works in prose or verse. The boundaries are not always fixed in the case of functional categories: diaries in verse, especially notes in verse from the world war have an aesthetic function while the motivation of putting down memories pays an equally important role. Beside letters, military documents, drawings, notes and diaries from World War I, the Historical Archives of the Beregi Museum also preserves manuscripts in verse from the time of World War I. The notes in verse of Ignác Varga a peasant from Szatmár is one of them. He filled his notebook with poems during his emigration in the United States. The American settlements where Ignác Varga lived the years he made his notes can be identified despite the individual style and names with the help of the dates indicated at the poems. Among many other factors, the lack of printed products (books) motivated him to recall his memories and put them down in writing: this is how the selection determined by the subjectivity of the copier was bom. Ignác Varga's manuscript of poems belongs in the category of written folk records that contains a mixture of copied and individually divined works. Even in the case of copied texts, we can find versions that do not strictly follow the original text but show certain differences. The modification can have various reasons: in the manuscript he reproduced the popular poems learned at school as he had learned and memorised them. The exactly memorised text was written down close to the original version, although the official version was also modified according to the orthographic capacity of the copier. There are also divergences when the poetic-prosodic capacities of the person do not reach the ideal level to recognise the mistakes the failing memory commits in rhythm and rime. Another type of divergences in copying is when the original text is intentionally rephrased, modifying the poems to match the copier's own feelings and actual situation. This case can be observed when the original texts of Petőfi's poems are compared to the copies. Ignác Varga's poems can thematically be grouped in three categories: 1. poems of homesickness and feeling of being alien, 2. the so-called Kuruc poems 3. wartime, patriotic poems. In contrast to many other manuscripts from the World War, which were written to the public, this notebook with poems was primarily written for the author himself. Yet the possibility that this type of documents will later also be read by others cannot be excluded: he/she who writes for him/herself theoretically always writes to others as well. János VARGA Beregi Múzeum Vásárosnamény H^1800 Pf. 37. e-mail: microcog@citromail.hu 256