Three Young Hungarian Poets: An Introduction

The three young Hungarian poets I have translated here have created a new subject matter, sensibility, and tone. Yet their highly individualistic poetics looks outwards towards man’s problematical existence in post-modern socialist society. Their poetry also provides some insight into the consciousness of the younger generation in what is the most liberal society in Eastern Europe today. Two of the poets, György Petri and Dezső Tandori, will be known to readers of the recent three-hundred-page Modern Hungarian Poetry, edited and with an introduction by Miklós Vajda (Columbia University Press, 1977). These two, together with Lajos Pintér, are of the post-revolutionary generation: their childhood was the upheaval of 1956, their coming of age the equally significant year 1968. Not surprisingly, their poetry does not focus affirmatively upon a collective future. Instead, while to some extent it is based on a poetics of the inner life, it peers outwards towards the uneasy and still not fully comprehended continuum between past and present. “Why are the young so miserable?” asked an older poet, sympathetically—only to supply the answer: because each generation needs its own apocalypse, which poets hand on “like a lyric relay-baton.”

These are descriptive poems, chronicling how life unfurls, and also recoils. They express both confrontation and circumvention. To western readers, accustomed to look for statements of opposition, it may be suggested that these poems owe more to communism than might at first be apparent. Only a society formally committed to creating a higher human type could stimulate such comparisons between promise and performance—disparities, incidentally, admitted by official spokesmen of their “pre-eminently contradictory system” which brings about “hitherto unknown psychological conflicts.” In Hungary, it is formally accepted that writers should play a critical role, though not without the proviso that they ought to be malleable. Our three poets do not fall into that condemned category of “nihilists” and “marginal” intellectuals. For example, though György Petri’s poetry has been described as one of “pessimism,” it is nevertheless viewed as “powerful, honest.”