Attila Jozsef: `Can You Take on This Awesome Life?' by Thomas Kabdebo Argumentum Kaido/Cardinal Press, 220pp (no price given)
Like all stereotypes, the Romantic image of the poet as tortured spirit is not wholly without foundation, although we English-speakers might do well to temper our enthusiasm for this myth with the realisation that few of our tormented poets bequeath more than the odd ripple outside the marginal world of their medium.
East of the now vanished Iron Curtain, however, the poet's significance has long permeated the mainstream of life, albeit on occasion posthumously or clandestinely, or both. In Hungarian literature, Attila Jozsef is the quintessential iconic poet, outrageously talented, politically driven, a molten flow of emotions, champion of the oppressed and powerless, love poet par excellence, as artistically gifted as he was personally doomed.
Jozsef was born in 1905 in Budapest of working-class parents. When he was two, his father abandoned the family, which was perhaps more of an economic setback than an emotional one, since the poet mistakenly believed all his life that his father had emigrated to America. (In fact, he had taken up with another woman.) The death of his mother in 1919, when he was fourteen, was to have a devastating effect on his emotional and psychological development, for she had struggled in menial jobs, not always successfully, in order to rear her three children. Only the marriage of Attila's eldest sister, Jolan, to a well-heeled and rather generous professional prevented the orphans from submerging in postwar poverty. A flavour of the Jozsef emotional staple is given if we note that Jolan soon divorced her lawyer husband, who later married the middle sibling, Etel.
However, the future poet's meagre diet, both emotionally and nutritionally, had already mapped out the graph of his adult life. A precocious talent, he published his first collection, The Beggar of Beauty, when he was just seventeen. Possessed of a remarkable memory - he knew by heart hundreds of Hungarian poems, and was also able to recite most of his own oeuvre - he quickly showed his mastery of Hungarian prosody, forging his verbal inventiveness and artistic vision to produce a prolific, not to say torrential, output in a wide variety of forms.
He soon established himself as a writer of promise, although in his brief lifetime he never quite entered the central cultural current. It is not hard to see why that was so, for although Jozsef has subsequently earned the title of greatest Hungarian poet of this century, a combination of factors made him well-nigh impossible to define. The interwar period was politically fraught, with Jozsef identifying with and speaking on behalf of the proletariat and the peasantry even as he enjoyed modest patronage from some quarters of the middle and upper classes.
His own political affiliations were constantly mutating, not unlike those of his near contemporary Albert Camus, so that he simultaneously owed apparent allegiance to different political strands. Most importantly, his poetry defied definition, ranging as it did from love poem to propagandist rallying cry, from surreal to coldly political, from lyric to folksong. In art, unfortunately, material and critical success come easier if one can be categorised. Jozsef, on the other hand, could produce in the space of a few weeks such diametrically opposed work as the sublime "By the Danube" and the apoetic horrors of "The List".
Hungarian's peculiar resistance to translation into English has meant English speakers have been unable to enjoy and assess to any reasonable extent the magnitude of Jozsef's poetic achievement, although surely such a task is not beyond us. As it is, even the plain prose renditions and sometimes metrically hamstrung versions in this book convey enough to convince us of the scale of his talent. "Ode", "Welcome to Thomas Mann", "Without knocking on the door" and "With a Pure Heart" exemplify the intensity, freshness and insight of his vision.
As Jozsef the poet soared, Attila the man buckled beneath the weight of his psychological inheritance. He loved numerous women with a fierce passion, although he either failed to consummate these relationships sexually or experienced sexual deficiencies when he did. Small in stature, he was never physically robust. He turned to psychoanalysis ostensibly to solve what was a personality disorder, but ended up exploiting these Freudian insights into childhood to fuel his poetry. As one of his loves, Marta Vago, put it, the poems were his life, the poem was everything.
No one, least of all so emotionally fragile a man as Attila Jozsef, could sustain such a Faustian pact. On December 3rd, 1937, at the age of 32, he threw himself under the wheels of a goods train in Balatonszarsz o. His poetic legacy is a phenomenon, a new wellspring in Hungarian literature and language. It is to be hoped the sixtieth anniversary of his death will divert some refreshment from that source to the English-speaking world.
In the meantime, Thomas Kabdebo has produced a brief but intriguing introduction to the life and poetry of Attila Jozsef. Neither a biography nor a strictly academic treatise, it is more a clear-eyed homage to a major poet and will at least make accessible some of his important works. A remarkable feature of this book is the sense that Kabdebo is assessing Jozsef on behalf of the Hungarian people, that his regard for the poetry is emblematic of its centrality in Hungarian culture. Wishful thinking, perhaps, but that passion and place for poetry is something we ought to nourish again for ourselves.
Bill Tinley is a poet and critic