Return to Article Details A Nation Dismembered. The 1920 Treaty of Trianon in Hungarian Poetry

A Nation Dismembered. The 1920 Treaty of Trianon in Hungarian Poetry
Selected and edited by Csilla Bertha and Gyula Kodolányi
Hungarian Review: Budapest 2019
215 pages
ISBN: 978-963-86217-3-3

A Nation Dismembered. The 1920 Treaty of Trianon in Hungarian Poetry, the English-language anthology of Hungarian poetry on Trianon, selected and edited by Csilla Bertha and Gyula Kodolányi, is based on translated works from the Hungarian volume of Szétszaggatott ország. Trianon a magyar költészetben [A Nation Dismembered: Trianon in Hungarian Poetry] (ed. Zoltán Bíró Lakitelek, 2010) and Querela Hungariae. Trianon és a magyar irodalom [Querela Hungariae. Trianon and Hungarian Literature] (ed. Béla Pomogáts, Budapest, 1996), alongside a selection of verses from Homeland in the Heights. An Anthology of Post-World War III Hungarian Poetry (ed. Csilla Berta, Budapest, 2000), In Quest of the “Miracle Stag:” The Poetry of Hungary Vol. I-II. (ed. Ádám Makkai, Chicago, 1996-2003), I Remain. Voices of Hungarian Poets from Transylvania (ed. Gyöngyvér Harkó, Csíkszereda, 1997), as well as from Gyula Illyés’s What You Have Almost Forgotten (ed. William Jay Smith and Gyula Kodolányi, Budapest-Willimantic, 1999) and Katalin Mezey’s Again and Again. Poems (ed. Nicholas Kolumban, Budapest, 1995).

A considerable number of the poems from this anthology “were banned from secondary publication for decades, and thus remained all but unknown even among readers otherwise well-versed in the history of Hungarian literature” (Pomogáts 37). Furthermore, as Donald Morse writes in the “Introduction” of the volume, this “remarkable collection by Hungary’s major poets,” which is available “for the first time in contemporary translation into English demonstrates that for one hundred years these poets, as their predecessors had before them under equally terrible circumstance, articulated those national values that had to be preserved as they defined what it meant and what it means to be a Hungarian whether inside or outside the present political borders” (27), presents the case for a global Anglophone audience, well beyond the readership of Central and Eastern Europe.

At the book launch and later in his review of the book, John O’Sullivan said that this volume “celebrates a national tragedy in poetry of both heart and mind, by expressing such emotions as grief, loss, indignation, sorrow, and anger,” remembered and rethought by a considerable number of Hungarian poets, transmuting that injustice into works of art that arouse “sympathy, soothes hearts, and perhaps changes minds and attitudes as well (O’Sullivan 2021). Published by the Hungarian Review and the Batthyány Lajos Foundation, with a subtle cover design made by István Orosz, this book had its virtual launch on November 26, 2020 organized by the Danube Institute and the Hungarian Review, alongside a selection of poems recited in an online streaming by Balázs Szirtes (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjq7U46_-Ho&t=17s).

This anthology is not divided according to chronology nor by a particular local or regional context but is smartly partitioned according to certain types of poetic responses to the changes the Trianon treaty induced in Hungarians, who lost two thirds of their country’s territory as well as two-thirds of its population by the second decade of the twentieth century, and which has substantially influenced the perception of the Hungarian identity since. The poets of this volume, as Béla Pomogáts remarked, come from all regions of the former Kingdom of Hungary including

"not just national conservatives and not only the national radicals, but also the great liberal middle-class thinkers and artists under the banner of the periodical Nyugat (Mihály Babits, Dezső Ksztolányi, Gyula Juhász, Árpád Tóth, Zoltán Somlyó, Zsigmond Móricz, Gyula Krúdy, Frigyes Karinthy), as well as up-and-coming young talents like Attila József, Gyula Illyés, Jenő Dsida, and Zoltán Szabó) all spoke in the voice of sincere pain about the gaping wounds of post-Trianon Hungary, about the dire predicament and anguish of Hungarian torn away from the mother country. Some of these writers had lost theor homeland, their native towns or the setting of their youthful days: Kosztolányi lost Szabadka, Dezső Szabó Kolozsvár, Árpád Tóth Arad, Aladár Bodor Losonc. Adding to their number, Gyula Juhász and Gyula Krúdy had respectively lost Nagyvárad and the Szepes County, which they had called home in their youth. Zsigmond Móricz had lost Transylvania…”" (Pomogáts 32)

Their art searches for the soul of the nation after Trianon’s traumatic loss by grounding it primarily in the creative function of language, which connects communities that have been forcefully separated by imposed borders.

The first chapter “A Scream from the Poets of Hungary” contains a sheaf of poems depict the atmosphere around the announcement of the peace treaty, its anticipation, and its immediate response. Endre Ady’s “Hail the Victors” (transl. Péter Balikó Lengyel) recalls the “memories of blood” (41) and Árpád Tóth’s “Holy Cripple, Rise Up!” (transl. Thomas Cooper) talks of an “orphaned home,” with the “old heart of the mutilated trunk,” believing that its “ancient arms will grow anew” (42-43). Dezső Kosztolányi’s “A Scream from the Poets of Hungary to the Poets of Europe, 1919” (transl. Péter Balikó Lengyel) is a cry for help in a “strange mother tongue,” addressed to all poets of the continent in a historic time when the poems of the Magyars “are reduced to screams/unheard through all this brimstone fire” (44) and where the artist can only ask questions that begin with sorrowful words of “Woe” and end with the funeral image of the “grave” (Dezső Kosztolányi “On Hungarian Ruins,” transl. Paul Sohar, 45). Kosztolányi is present in this section with two more pomes, “Rhapsody” (transl. Péter Balikó Lengyel) and “Beggar of Tears” (transl. Paul Sohar), where he laments of a lack of “place to call home” in a desperate situation in which “absent ears” do not hear the “silent tears” of those who loiter like ghosts (46), “howling pain into universe” (47). Sándor Reményik’s “To the Hungarians of Translylvania” and “A New Testament” (both translated by Thomas Cooper) bear the light of hope in the darkness of the dictum’s night with stanzas that conclude in sentences such as “[W]e’ll never leave this place,” “we remain Hungarians,” and “our hearts will beat […] Hungarian” (48-49) and assuming that

"A springtime yet will flower, a spring
of souls, and close we’ll huddle in
The Nook that’s left to us as home." (50)

The mourning mantle of “The Crucified Nation” by Gábor Oláh (transl. Paul Sohar), together with the image of the “freshly built walls around me” in the poem of Mihály Babits, “Mutilated Hungary” (transl. also by Paul Sohar) ‒ another cry of an orphaned nation ‒ are both artistic mementoes of the historic trauma. The last two poems of the anthology’s first part show the spiritual and religious ways in which Hungarian poets try to cope with the inevitable loss Trianon induced in all areas of life, including that of the arts. One of these is Sándor Sík’s “To Our Lady of Andocs” ‒ Andocs is a famous Hungarian place of pilgrimage in Somogy county ‒ (transl. John M. Ridland and Peter V. Czipott), a poem invoking the help of the Blessed Virgin, the patron saint of the Hungarian nation in dealing with the trauma the treaty of Trianon causes, while Attila József’s “The Song of a Grieving Hungarian” (transl. Paul Sohar) seeks out God in all corners of a once great country ranging from Erdély (Transylvania) and the Northern Higlands (or Uplands) to the lines of the Dolomites for help in dealing with the loss.

The second part of the anthology incorporates verses depicting a range of sentiments oscillating between the poles of despair and hope, all written in the interbellum years. This part starts with Sándor Reményik’s four poems “The Church and the School,” “Any Way You Can,” “The Plaints of a Christmas Tree” (all translated by Paul Sohar) and “What Makes the Hungarian?” (transl. Thomas Cooper) that ponder on how can a nation survive without most of its country being lost. The answer lies, according to Reményik, in not giving up “the church and the school” (62) that hold the abstract soul of the nation that lives in a “painful compromise” with “whatever was left to stay” (63). Gyula Juhász’s “Testament” (transl. Péter Balikó Lengyel) and “Meanwhile” (transl. Thomas Cooper) bring into the focus special places of Léva, Sziget, Makó, Szakolca, Várad, sites of “what used to be the home,” (66) where memory “casts forget-me-nots” (67). Similarly tied to a special topography, Gyula Illyés’s “By the Danube in Esztergom” (transl. Thomas Cooper) casts a glance on Esztergom, the country’s royal set until the 13th century, now a border and “Europe’s wordless sign” (71). Kosztolányi’s “My Native Land, Now Sunken in Sorrow” (transl. Péter Balikó Lengyel) even poses the existential question of “if I still exist at all” (68) in a context of erasure and dismemberment. The other poems of this cluster, including that of Árpád Tóth’s “In Fields of Wheat” (transl. Thomas Cooper) and László Tompa’s “Solitary Pine” and “Fear Not” (transl. John M. Ridland and Peter V. Czipott) see the national loss in terms of metaphors of nature: poplar trees, fields of wheat, forests, mountains, plains, and, above all, the solitary pine; all mementoes of shocks and suffering looking “the times straight in the eye” (74). “The Hungarians Go to Confession” (transl. John M. Ridland and Peter V. Czipott) by László Mécs, sided by Ákos Dutka’s two poems, “I Must Go Home” and “The Song of the Carpathians” (both translated by Thomas Cooper) and Dezső Győry’s “If Once We Disappear” and “Warning Signals” (both translated by John M. Ridland and Peter V. Czipott) voice the despair of Magyars hearing “strange music, foreign, in our mother’s house” (77), lingering in a newly designated space and howling the question “Where, today, is the border ‒ not of the country but Hungarian Life as a whole?” (80). The last poem concluding the second part of the anthology is Jenő Dsida’s popular “Psalmus Hungaricus” (in Péter Balikó Lengyel’s excellent translation), a paraphrase of Psalm 137 of the Book of Psalms, where the yearning for Jerusalem is replaced and then equated with the yearning for one nation, a nation of people “by the Tisza River,” and “by the Danube River,” those “among the northern hills,” and “in southern hills,” including all Magyars living “in Asia, Africa, in Paris or America” (87). This is how Dsida laments in his idiosyncratic “search of every lost Hungarian” (87):

"May my drink of water turn to bile
if I forget you in your trial!
My tongue be impaled by a nail
of red-hot iron,
if it speaks of other lands awile!
my eyes be robbed of heaven’s holy light, if cast not on my people –
you saintly doom, my only blind delight! (82)
The lament turns in the end from a personal cry into a universal act of lament, a psalm for everyone, a universal memento:
O, sing the psalm so it may flood the Earth
like a singeing brimstone fire billowing forth from hell.
Make old Europe cover her ears,
and groan in trepidation,
and go insane under the spell!
May we dine on snakes and wine on their venom
if we ever forsake you,
oh, Jerusalem! (87)"

The third part of this book, “Shards of a Lost Homeland,” envisages the log-term effects and long-distance views of the Trianon treaty, with special focus on entreaties, contritions, and most of all, on apocalyptic visions. Gyula Illyés talks to the mediators of the treaty in “To the Arbiters of Peace” (transl. Péter Balikó Lengyel) and describes the “impure settlements” in “While the Record Plays” (transl. William Jay Smith and Gyula Kodolányi). The “Mothers” (transl. John M. Ridland) by János Székely evoke, on the background of Pieter Brueghel the Eldest’s visual metaphor of contemporary times, the image of subversive mothers, who never cease giving birth to children, even if their first-borns are killed. In a similar mood, “fallen face-first on the litter of leaves” (95) in Árpád Farkas’ “On the Litter of Leaves” (transl. Len Roberts) tracks down the “man that speaks out his thoughts/like the one who hasn’t been slapped in the mouth/like the one who takes his breath/from the bowels of the earth” (95). Next, the excerpts from Gizella Hervay’s “Banished Rainbow” guide the reader into a revealing world of bomb-craters and barbed wired skies she calls “the threshold of my country,” which is “dissembled and re-assembled” (97), a world where human bodies are rubbles of brick and where “only in imagination can you get home” (96). In addition to this picture, “Assimilation” (transl. Paul Sohar) by István Kovács stands as an exclamation mark for all acts of dissolution, appropriation, and incorporation of cultural items that can hold the soul of a nation: legends, land, home, tombstone, faith, the past and the future—all in a present, painful tense. The “quartered homeland” (99) of Subcarpathian-born László Vári Fábian’s “Ady’s Twilight” (transl. John M. Ridland), the division as mathematics in Aladár Lászlóffy’s “An Unsettling History Class” (transl. Paul Sohar and Ádám Makkai), along with the line of a “historic Hungary ripped apart” (101) in Alajos Kannás’s “Manifesto” (transl. Paul Sohar) bear witness of poetic grief over a wound that still hurts. So does the “empty mangers empty stalls” (102) topology and the cause of Csángó-Hungarians in Sándor Kányádi’s “Behind God’s Back” and “Heretic Telegrams to Pan Cogito on the Other Side. The Third (Urgent) Telegram” (transl. Paul Sohar); both Kányádi poems stand as mementos of a harsh injustice, just as Sándor Gál’s “Entreaty” and Lajos Zsélyi Nagy’s “A Czechoslovakian Hungarian Poet’s Supplication to the Lord” (both translated by Peter V. Czipott). The figure of “lorries trucking toward Europe” (107) with that of a “slow diaspora” hovering in a present that “cannot even be expressed” (108) in Károly Jung’s “Belated Contrition” ring similar tones with Emese Egyed’s depiction of various nightmares in “Awakening” (both translated by John M. Ridland and Peter V. Czipott) — all lyrical images of the ways in which these artists were trying to cope with the legacy of Trianon in their own lives. Kornél Döbrentei’s “It is Accomplished,” (transl Paul Sohar), Dénes Kiss’ “Trianon Eighty Years On” and Péter Szentmihályi Szabó “The Cursed, the Blessed” (both translated by Thomas Cooper) follow this train of thought as well as the last two poems of this chapter, Sándor Lezsák’s “A Stroll in the Grand Trianon (transl. transl. Peter V. Czipott) and Sándor Csoóri’s “Nail and Bones” (transl. Péter Balikó Lengyel).

“Imre, he let go… more and more” is the fourth chapter of the anthology and includes dialogues, parallels and contrasts in time and space starts with “In the Church of Marosszentimre” by Zoltán Jékely. This poem stands in active dialogue with the next one in the anthology; Jékely’s poem ends with the line of “those cut down by time’s swift sword” (121), a verse echoed in the last line of István Kovács’s “History” (both poems translated by Paul Sohar). The second intricate dialogue is between László Tompa’s “Bathing the Horses” (transl. John M. Ridland and Peter V. Czipott) and Árpád Farkas’s “Epilogue to ‘Bathing the Horses’” (transl. Peter Czipott) dedicated to Tompa; the third connects Sándor Reményik’s “Atlantic Tolls” (transl. Thomas Cooper) and Sándor Gál’s “The New Atlantis” (transl. Len Roberts); the fourth poetic pair in this chapter is between Sándor Kányádi’s “Black and Red” (transl. Len Roberts) and Tibor Tollas’s “Dances from the Villages of Szék in the Alps” (transl. Paul Sohar) around the dominant colors (red and black) of Transylvanian folk art in the village of Szék and their subsequent legacy in the diaspora of the Alps. The topic of the penultimate duo of poems centers on the minority status of Hungarians in the Carpathian basin, seen similar with that of Indians in North American reservations. Tibor Tollas laments in his “Indian Dirge” (transl. Paul Sohar), written in 1984, with the following stanzas:

"Enclosed in the ring of new conquerors,
there’s another people, deprived of their say.
Their fate is the silence of gravestones…
‒ The Indians of the Carpathians ‒ they are today." (134)

In turn, Géza Szőcs’s “Indian Words on the Radio” (dedicated to poet William Least Heat Moon, of Osage ancestry, who stood up for the rights of the Hungarian minority in Transylvania in 1985) makes it clear that “[T]he Indians do not let anybody down. / The Indians do not let us down” (135). Finally, the last lyric dialogue in this chunk of dialogues is István Domonkos’s “Rudderless” (transl. Owen Good) and István Ferenczes’s “Echoes to the Blues” (transl. Paul Sohar) both about being “homeless on my homeland” (143).

The last chapter of the book,“‘Homeland in the Heights’ and in the Depths,” contains poems that transcend physical borders through language, culture and spirit, and begins with Gyula Illyés’s “Homeland in the Heights” (transl. Vernon Watkins) and “A Wreath” (transl. William Jay Smith and Gyula Kodolányi). The world of “Sándor Kányádi’s “Towards Noah’s Ark” (transl. Len Roberts and Mariann Nagy) focuses on the power of language and urges all to pay attention so that “not one word, / not one dialect words should be left out” (151) from the cultural ark that can save the nation. The “seething dust of words” (152) in András Ferenc Kovács’s “Psalmus Transylvanicus” (transl. Péter Balikó Lengyel) and Sándor Csoóri’s “A Vision in Broad Daylight” (transl. Péter Balikó Lengyel) return to the power of sounds and images which poets are projecting for the readers. The optimism of Ferenc Bartis’s words in “And Yet We Live!” (transl. John Ridland and Peter V. Czipott) and the memory of the Hungarian pastry “baked that dawn in a clay over/in the mountain” in Katalin Mezey’s “Meeting Hungarians in Transylvania” (transl. Nicholas Kolumban) elevate the mood and share with many a sense of expectation, of hope. Paraphrasing Bartis’s chorus-like lines of “[A]nd yet we live…,” Árpád Farkas “The Good Lord Osmosis” exhibits the same idea with “we do still exist! […] we still breathe! We are alive!” (159) as it does “Open Skies” (transl. Ádám Makkai) and “Tunnels in the Snow” (transl. Len Roberts). Positive messages from far away are also caught in the net of the last chapter: one of these is in Albert Wass’ “Message Home” (transl. Thomas Cooper), which claims that “the water flows on, only the stone remains/But the stone remains” (164). In the same token, “This Is Already the Resurrection or: The Low-Altitude Flying of the Nation” and “Questions to the 26th-century Poets” (transl. Len Roberts) by Géza Szőcs talk about a certain resurrection of the nation and enduring Hungarian towns over borders; so does Ádám Makkai in th penultimate poem of the volume, “One Day We Shall Create” (transl. Péter Balikó Lengyel) and Mihály Babits in the world of the house, the town, the “country according to the map,” “the true country” (172), Europe and the globe in “My Native Land” (transl. Watson Kirkconnell). The anthology concludes with Gyula Illyés’s famous essay “In Answer to Herder and Ady” (transl. Richard Robinson), which brought considerable international attention at the end of 1970s for presenting through universal values and rights the desperate situation of ethnic Hungarians in then totalitarian Romania. The book also contains biographical notes on the poets (191-207), translators (209-211) and editors (213-214), very helpful especially for an international audience.

A Nation Dismembered. The 1920 Treaty of Trianon in Hungarian Poetry is a practical anthology of poetry as part of the literature of Trianon that helps understanding in terms of “language, historical tradition and cultural community” (Pomogáts 34-35) the historical trauma that is still haunting Hungarians. In addition, the volume’s publication language calls for an open, international dialogue on Trianon a century after the treaty, when “there is little trace exhibited of international or supra-national re-thinking” of this event “except among professional historians” (Morse 19). With its profoundly human dimension, the universal world of poetry might thus show the way. Moreover, as Ádám Makkai’s In Quest of the “Miracle Stag:” The Poetry of Hungary, which was a pragmatic “canonization gesture” (Bollobás 285), this volume can also be a model of anthologizing not only the literature of Trianon but also of Hungarian poetry in English.

This book, is primarily intended for international, English-language readers interested in the history of Hungary, of Central and Eastern Europe, but also for those with interest in Hungarian literature in general and Hungarian poetry in particular. It is a volume especially welcomed for the Hungarian diaspora throughout the globe, for the first, second and multiple generations of Hungarians worldwide — and for everyone captivated by Hungarian literature and culture.

 

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