William Penn Life, 2002 (37. évfolyam, 1-11. szám)

2002-11-01 / 10. szám

Magyar Nyelv

To My American Countrymen

(Üzenet amerikai véreimhöz)

My brothers and sisters, whom our common curse Has taken away, dispensed in distant land,

Perhaps, we are too often in your thougths.

Hungarian life runs to its great peril

And from the deluge only those shall emerge,

Who are lured far from this catastrophic lurch.

Faraway Magyars, how I envy you.

Here, at home, everything is rotten to the core, You are happy, far from this ancient shore.- Endre Ady (1877-1919)

(Translated by Leslie Könnyű)

with her support that Ady went to Paris, where he spent many years.

At about this time, his new poetry appeared, poems which were entirely different from anything that Hungarian poetry had produced in both tone and message. His first volume of this type of verses,

"New Poems (Új versek)", was published in 1906.

This was followed by "Blood and Gold (Vér és Arany)" in 1907, "In Elizah's Chariot (Az Illés szekeren)" in 1908, "I Would Love to Be Loved (Szeretnem ha szeretnének)" in 1909, "From Verses of All Mysteries (A minden titkok verseiből)" in 1910, "Fugitive Life (A menekülő elet) in 1912, "Love of Ourselves (A magunk szerelme) in 1913, and "Who Has Seen Me? (Ki látott engem?)" in 1924, with volumes of short stories and newspaper articles in between.

Ady's poetical world is a great self-contained world, his language powerful and individual. The wide range of his themes included the revolutionary heroes and movements of Hungarian national history, the backwardness of Hungary and the terrible visions of the "Hungarian wasteland." Another group of themes explored the thousand and one aspect of love, the unashamed presentation of his love for Leda, the warped complexities of love and the evocations of passing, sensual love affairs. Still another strand of his work is constituted by poems evoking death, fleeting time, downfall, fear and solitude-verses that convey restlessness, the strain and worries of the modem big-city dweller, the seeking of refuge in God and Ady's personal quarrel with Him.

Ady had a strong poetic consciousness, a strong sense of vocation. He was one of the race of "poetapostles." He integrated sensuality and retirement into quiet love, the lust for money and an overriding yearning for a real, full life.

Ady's poetical world is ruled by symbols. He created a system of symbolism, and through his symbols he surveyed the world. In his system of symbols, money became "the Great Lord with the Boar's Head (A disznofeju Nagyur)" and Hungary appears as the "wasteland," the "moors" and the "slough."

He built for himself a novel prosody: the accent of his verse is determined by its meaning, but it is pierced by the beat of the western meter and of old Hungarian verse. On the whole, Ady's poetry is at the same time modern and ancient, existing in the mainstream of the latest European intellectual trends but rooted in the time-honored core of Hungarian tradition. The richness of his verbal flow and the multitude of his own coinage or revivals from the archaic Hungarian vocabulary combine into a fascinating idiom, one unlike that of anyone else.

As the number of his published poems, stories and newspaper articles increased, so did his longing for death. The theme of escape and feelings of frustration and solitude became more frequent. However, behind the note of frustration and world-weariness there is always a flicker of hope.

His state of health grew steadily worse as his poetry increased in

profundity, clarity and universality. Suddenly, in his later love poems— known as the "Csinszka poems " addressed to his wife whom he married in 1915—a new note was struck. Now we hear the voice of a man in quest of the purity and beauty of love, happiness and refuge.

In his last poems— "Ahead of the Dead (A halottak elen) in 1918 and the posthumously released "The Last Ships" (Az utolso hajók)" —we hear the voice of the lonely poet suffering for the sake of mankind. This voice, increasingly simple and somber, rings with the grim force of the biblical prophets.

Ady was a philosophical poet, a wild and barbaric thinker, a Hungarian kinsmen to Nietzsche. He stood on the boundary line of superstition and myth, creating visions instead of thoughts. He was tormented by Dostoyevski's God-fever, the eternal mystery which escapes the meshes of culture. He broke with the bashful, idyllic tradition and regarded love as a gloomy strife, expressing himself in naked and harsh words.

Ady became the prophet and revealer of the tragic fate of his nation, but he saw his subject in the light of eternity, raising it above everyday matters of politics and social problems. This conception was new and revolutionary, as was his language. His style if far from artistic: its forms are not the result of conscious calculation, but rather flow like outpouring lava. His language is not generally comprehensible; his poems point beyond themselves, full of secret meaning like a magic sign or rune. Of all Hungarian poets, his poems are the most untranslatable. It took much time before the Hungarian public realized that behind the seemingly meaningless symbolism there lay a rich "Ady-world."

When hé died in January 1919, all of Hungary mourned for him. |\\|H |

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llilliiini Nil life, November 2002