The Launch of Dezső Tandori’s Career in Periodicals and Anthologies

Abstract

Dezső Tandori’s first two books, Töredék Hamletnek [A Fragment for Hamlet] and Egy talált tárgy megtisztítása [Cleansing of an Object Lost and Found] are still widely celebrated as the starting point of one of the most important careers in Hungarian literature. But the two books necessarily go back to antecedents: his poems had been published in journals, periodicals and in an anthology ten years prior to his books. This long delay, while it was normal in the 1960’s mainly because of the cultural politics of Hungary and of the risk‐avoiding nature of book publishers, is still surprising since already the first poems of Tandori were received with universal praise. But further examination reveals that Tandori spent those ten years meticulously planning his first book, preparing not only the poems but also their sequence, that is, the main structure of the book. This structure is already laid out in the publications in journals, the order of the poems rarely changed later. This never published Egyetlen [Only One]? We know from interviews and recollections that the book was only allowed to be published in a mutilated form, but interestingly, we cannot find the extra poems supposed to be in this version of the book. The antecedents to his second book, Egy talált tárgy megtisztítása indicate a different process. Allegedly written in the time‐span of mere two years, it got published five years after his first book. While the samples of Töredék Hamletnek were published in several small dosages, parts of the second book were published in two big collections, both in the same journal ‘Híd’ [Bridge], and the order of the poems does not even resemble their final arrangement in the book. The different publication models allow us to see deeper into the creation and construction of the books, and also into the different creative methods of the author.