Hungarian poetry has a pathos about it that tends to make one uneasy. Hungarian poets usually talk in elevated, sublime tones – their lyrical vision is frequently focussed on history, the trials and tribulations of the fatherland and the nation, confusions over love and the soul. Only at rare moments does this poetry turn reflexive or catch a view of its own mannerisms, of the pose forced upon the poet by this prophetic voice. While moments of irony are few and far between, Hungarian poetry is oppressively aware of the unmitigated predicament of humanity as a whole or at least, that of a national community.

 

This is the kind of poetic diction (among many other things) that Endre Kukorelly deconstructs when he conceives poetry as an ironic view of the self, a medium in which radical exposure of the I becomes a subject of reflection. The I that speaks in his poems is exposed to emotions, forgetfulness and contingency, and this is how it searches for a lyrical language in which to capture itself – without pathos, but with a determination to face up to the linguistic manifestations of contingency.

 

Words do indeed find their way to Kukorelly, but the I often experiences this encounter as being at the mercy of language. The identity that emerges by grasping memories, feelings and sensual perceptions keeps slipping out of focus. Signs of personal presence offer proof of identity from time to time within the sentence, and it seems for a moment that we can focus them and align them into something coherent, but then the syntax immediately disintegrates, and the poem eventually enacts the imperfection of human memory.

 

This is how we can read the poem “A Fa” – a record, as it were, of a father's single gesture and smile. Expropriating a single paternal gesture as fact appears to guarantee the personal existence of the lyrical I. If the poem can guarantee that the father’s half smile is addressed to the lyrical I, then the speaker’s personal existence becomes confirmed. Yet, the act of recollecting his father, the man's gesture and facial expression, also brings back doubt: “don’t think that it was meant for me though”. Instead of facing up to being neglected, the lyrical I divests the father of his intentions (“not quite / as if he wanted to, not like / he really didn’t want to either”) or accepts that they are undecipherable. This way, taking advantage of the metonymic, unpredictable operations of memory, he can re-appropriate the belief that the gesture was, indeed, addressed to him.

 

Thus, the poem, born from this recollection, enacts the way in which a fact is narrated as a probability, the way in which the I expropriates a narrative and makes it a basis for his personal identity. In this sense, the title (“A Fa”) indicates the fragmented nature of memory and the way in which memories and experiences are available for free, lyrical use. This in turn re-interprets the poetic principle of confessional poetry and honesty. (See also the poem “A Variation”).

 

“I’ll stroll perhaps a little less” uses a childhood memory again, that of a fencing foil, to gain an insight into the impossibility of controlling memory or fixing identity. “Just so / things change, I won’t list them now, I couldn’t even get them / all. I didn’t hit anything totally on, and they / never hit me.” This way the lyrical subject exposes the I who is being written as a personal narrative at the mercy of memory and simultaneously reserves for him the possibility of poetic “reinvention”.

 

Now that we have described the lyrical I's processes of self-reflection, let us examine in passing how this kind of poetic diction functions rhetorically. As Kukorelly became gradually inscribed into the literary consciousness of this country over the 1980’s and 90’s, critics usually described his poetry as being under-rhetoricised, talked of anti-poetry and the re-contextualisation of vernacular phrases, about easy transitions between various modes of speech, of fractured coherence. All of this bespeaks some major post-modern poetic project, revolutionising Hungarian poetic diction – but a general tendency of this kind is reduced into a one-off precisely by the unique perspective of the I that speaks in these poems.

 

The I, exposed to universally valid rules of language, fills the otherwise empty conceptual categories of language while allowing the words and sentences themselves to shape his poetic diction. The sentences, found by pure chance or arriving all by themselves, thus become organised into poetry – this is how Kukorelly’s type of poetic speech develops.

 

Kukorelly says somewhere that “that small grain of language which crops up in me comes to carry everything else later on”. This “grain of language”, however, is not a major message or dense ontological wisdom which floods the reader with pathos – much rather is it the sheer possibility of emerging poetic diction, the “little bit” that is enough to set the basic tone for “everything”. Thus, for instance, the ice crunching under the snows of February (“February 14, 1999”) is a “grain of language” which can set off a train of lyrical self-reflection and help the poet on to recognise that “just this little is enough of everything for me”. This poem comes to comprise the poetic dimension of poetry emerging from the accidentally given “grain of language”; the ontological dimension of totality manifesting through the petty experiences of everyday events; and the subjective dimension of the I who deducts the joy of sunshine from his loneliness.

 

This is arguably one of the central achievements of Kukorelly’s poems: they show the unique (the I, the experience, the memory) by exposing it as prey to the mundane workings of reality (of language, of regularity, of forgetfulness, respectively), and he allows it to fare as best it can. Thus, he chucks the word into a sentence, leaving the I at the mercy of language, and listens "to the many many things/ rustle, rustle”.