Fraternity-Testvériség, 1956 (34. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)

1956-11-01 / 11. szám

FRATERNITY

11

DÁNIEL BERZSENYI (1776=1836), HUNGARIAN HORATIAN POET

By Joseph Reményi I

Considering that present-day Hungary is under Soviet control, it ought to be of interest how the Hungarian creative spirit expressed itself in the past when political persecution and censorship treated the free voice of the spirit with suspicion, prison and execution. One receives more than superficial knowledge of a people’s character through the works of its poets; and a poet of repute, such as Dániel Berzsenyi, is a good example of the bitterness, but also of the fortitude of the Hungarian spirit in an era when one could hardly travel without police permit. Of course, the position of Hungary under the Austrian yoke was less disastrous than it is today: at times poets could speak out in spite of the censorship, as in the 19th-century Russia Pushkin could sing truthfully, although his frankness finally led to dire consequences. When Coleridge stated that the man who has no beauty in his soul can never be a genuine poet he evidently assumed that every type of social structure is prone to dim the fervour of the creative individual, and this necessitates infinite strength and pain on the part of the poet in order to remain true to himself. The poet’s “inner orientation”, this indispensable source of self-confidence, is consistently shaped by “the beauty of his soul”. It is only thus that a man like Berzsenyi could reach the stature of Hungary’s greatest writer of odes; that, in a certain sense, he was able to forge the language into an authentic literary medium. All his works reveal the true poet, voicing the problems of his nation and his own, regardless of whether he wrote odes in classical metres, preferring Alcaic and Sapphic measures, or whether he wrote love and bucolic songs, pointed epigrams, elegies, epistles, philosophical poems, fusing emotions with ideas in a subtle or direct manner. His essays on aesthetic, ethical, pedagogical and agrarian problems are of less significance

Although part of Berzsenyi’s poetry derives from Horace (his precursor in this field of Hungarian letters was the monk, Benedek Virág. Horace’s Hungarian translator), he drew essentially from the fullness of his experiences or from the history of his native country. His poetry seems like the nerve-centre of a nation’s tortured spirit and his manner, in its intensity, the natural expression of a creator who lived and wrote tirelessly for a better and happier Hungary. He wanted a unified Hungarian society, able to face the future with hope. Despote hesitation and resignation, in his poetic works and critical probings he showed a spiritual courage which would not allow him to accept defeat as inevitable. In his attitude he could be defiant, but he preferred poetic pensiveness and encouragement from the nation’s heroic past.

Dániel Berzsenyi was born in the village of Egyházashetye, County Vas, in 1776, and died on the estate of his wife in Nikla, County