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WORK TITLE: The Dispossessed
WORK NOTES: trans by Ottilie Mulzet
PSEUDONYM(S): Borbély, Szilárd József
BIRTHDATE: 11/1/1963-2/19/2014
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: Hungarian
https://www.harpercollins.com/cr-123942/szilard-borbely * http://www.asymptotejournal.com/interview/an-interview-with-szilard-borbely/ * https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/szilard-borbely
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born November 1, 1963, Fehérgyarmat, Hungary; committed suicide, February 19, 2014, in Debrecen, Hungary.
EDUCATION:Attended University of Debrecen, Hungary.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, poet, novelist, and educator. Taught at University of Debrecen, Debrecen, Hungary.
AWARDS:Attila József Prize; Palladium Prize, 2005.
WRITINGS
Contributor of essays and poems to periodicals. Poems appeared in English translation in the American Reader, Asymptote, and Poetry magazines.
SIDELIGHTS
Hungarian poet and author Szilárd Borbély was considered to be among the most important poets to emerge in Hungary following the end of Communist rule in 1989. In addition to poetry, Borbély wrote essays, drama, short fiction, and novels. His work often dealt with issues associated with trauma, memory, and loss. Some of his poetry has been translated into English and published in English periodicals. Borbély also taught in college and was an authority on Hungarian literature of the late-Baroque period. Among his most renowned Hungarian works are the poetry collection titled Halotti pompa: Szekvenciák, which means “Final Matters: Sequences,” and the novel Nincstelenek, which means “The Dispossessed.”
“He is considered one of the most important figures in contemporary Hungarian literature, having had an immense impact on the transformation of Hungarian poetry in the last decade, strongly influencing the conceptualization of poetry’s social role and linguistic-thematic possibilities,” wrote László Bedecs in the online journal Asymptote. In 2009 Parnasszus, a Hungarian literary journal, dedicated an entire issue to Borbély’s poetry and included an interview with the author by Bedecs, which was reproduced in an edited version by Asymptote.
In his interview with Bedecs, Borbély commented on art and poetry following the fall of Communism, noting: “I believe that the arts should actively and creatively address social problems; great art has always done so anyway. After the regime change, people tended to over-emphasize the injunction that the task of the writer and the poet is to write rather than make political statements. What was not emphasized, however, is that even if writers are simply doing their job, they are always “revolutionaries,” even if they retreat into the ivory tower, like [Paul] Esterházy [a Hungarian poet, harpsichordist, and composer] or Gustav Flaubert.”
Berlin-Hamlet
In his poetry collection titled Berlin-Hamlet, which was translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet, Borbély sets his free-verse poems in the urban environment. The reference to Hamlet in the title foretells the author’s questioning that comes from the famous Hamlet soliloquy that begins “to be or not to be.” A Book Binder’s Daughter Web site contributor noted: “The collection of free verse poems is divided into five interwoven themes, and each poem in a cycle is given a sequential number.”
The five cycles of poems are called “Allegory,” “Letter,” “Epilogue,” “Fragment,” and series of poems with various titles that identify a specific place in Berlin, such as “Krumme Lanke,” which is a lake located in the southwest of Berlin. The “Letter” cycle of poems revolves around quotations from Franz Kafka, the German novelist and short-story writer. The “Epilogue” cycle appears at the beginning and end of the collection and features highly personal reflections without reference to any other authors. The “Fragment” poems are all addressed to an unknown person and reflect the author’s deep personal loss and loneliness. The “Allegory” cycle of poems “are a mixture of philosophical observations,” as noted by the Book Binder’s Daughter Web site contributor. The variously titled Berlin poems ponder the history of Berlin and Borbély’s own relationship to the city.
“The whole is a closely packed series of dreamlike meditations, wrote New York Times Online contributor George Szirtes, adding: “There is an implied dramatic context and a narrator, speaking in the first person, who longs and reflects and relates himself to a notional ‘you,’ with whom an intense but fleeting connection had once been established.” Tyler Langendorfer, writing for the Music and Literature Web site, called Berlin-Hamlet “a work imbued with the incurable desire to be elsewhere, often in the presence of another.”
The Dispossessed
The Dispossessed: A Novel draws from Borbély’s own past history living in Hungary. The novel features an unnamed young boy narrator whose parents are a partly Jewish father and a mother whose family once had ties with the fascist sympathizers who preceded the communists in controlling Hungary. Living in a small village, the narrator’s family is essentially ostracized by the villagers, who are mostly Stalinists. The family lives a meagre existence, but the boy is scholarly in his attempts to learn not only about his own heritage but also Hungary’s tumultuous history.
“Scenes from daily life are rendered in the eternal present tense belonging to myth and legend,” noted Missing Slate Web site contributor and the book’s translator Ottilie Mulzet, who also noted: “The Dispossessed is not exactly fiction, nor is it autobiography.” The novel takes place during the rule of the Hungarian Socialist Worker’s Party, which lasted from 1956 to 1989, when communism collapsed. The boy’s father lives a hopeless life, which is reflected in his brutality, while the mother maintains a contempt for the peasants. Even though the family has been ostracized, largely because of the father’s Jewish background, the mother repeatedly reminds the children to remember their cultural and religious heritage.
New York Times Online contributor George Szirtes remarked that writing about personal misfortunes is not valuable in a literary sense in and of itself “unless the work amounted to something more. Borbély’s work is far more.” A Publishers Weekly contributor called The Dispossessed an “immensely powerful portrait of poverty” and “a window into an often obscured history.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, September 15, 2016, review of The Dispossessed.
Publishers Weekly, September 19, 2016, review of The Dispossessed, p. 41.
ONLINE
Asymptote, http://www.asymptotejournal.com/ László Bedecs, “An Interview with Szilárd Borbély.”
Book Binder’s Daughter, https://thebookbindersdaughter.com/ (November 22, 2016 ), review of Berlin-Hamlet.
EuorpeNow, http://www.europenowjournal.org/ (November 30, 2016), brief author profile.
Missing Slate, http://themissingslate.com/ (June 23, 2013), Ottilie Mulzet, “‘This gnaws away at my heart’: Szilárd Borbély’s The Dispossessed.“
Music and Literature, http://www.musicandliterature.org/ (January 31, 2017), Tyler Langendorfer, review of The Dispossessed and Berlin-Hamlet.
New York Times Online, https://www.nytimes.com/ (November 25, 2016), George Szirtes, “Deprivation: A Childhood in 1960s Hungary,” review of The Dispossessed and Berlin-Hamlet.
White Review, http://www.thewhitereview.org/ (January 1, 2014), review of The Dispossessed.
An interview with Szilárd Borbély
László Bedecs
Photograph by Zoltán Bakos
In 2009, the Budapest-based literary journal Parnasszus dedicated an issue to the poetry of Szilárd Borbély (1963-2014). The issue featured an interview, presented here in edited form, in which the author talked openly about the biographical and philosophical foundations of his poetry, and his doubts about the nature of artistic creation. Borbély, who was forty-five at the time of the interview, took his own life in early 2014. He is considered one of the most important figures in contemporary Hungarian literature, having had an immense impact on the transformation of Hungarian poetry in the last decade, strongly influencing the conceptualization of poetry's social role and linguistic-thematic possibilities. He received a range of literary honors, and his profound theological inquiry, which fully embraced the peculiar condition of post-late-Modernity, fixes Borbély's legacy alongside other great central European thinkers such as János Pilinszky and Vladimír Holan.
At the turn of the last century light, ironic, and playful poetic modes of expression in Hungarian poetry had somewhat marginalized poetic languages that aimed to address existential questions in serious terms. It seemed that a self-reflexive style of poetry emphasizing language, rhyme, rhythm, and intertextual games would dominate the literary field. Within this atmosphere Borbély published his seventh book of poetry, The Splendours of Death, which tackled questions of sorrow, God, and the nature of evil. A scholar of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature, he creatively adapted the forms and metaphors of Baroque liturgical poetry, using them to create poems that gave voices to the pain of the physically and spiritually weak.
Borbély's poetry, prose, and essays try to bring the readers closer to the lives of those who cannot speak of their trauma or suffering. They can be uneducated and poor villagers, survivors of the Holocaust, women grieving after a miscarriage, or victims of terrible aggression. Through Borbély's texts we readers become increasingly less cruel-hearted, and the following discussion of the genesis and context of his poetry illuminates many aspects of his truly significant and undoubtedly necessary artistic endeavor.
—László Bedecs
The real breakthrough for you came with the publication of The Splendours of Death, which reaches back to the literary forms of the Baroque in Central Europe. This book commemorates an unspeakable act: a brutal robbery on Christmas Eve, in 2000, in which your mother was murdered and your father left unconscious. Where does the poetic language of this volume, which has been rightly valued and celebrated, originate?
Well, I am not sure that it makes much sense to tackle the question in this way, since it would give the impression that there is an inherent causality to be discovered. When in fact there is none. This perspective would bring logic into something that lacks even the trace of it. Of course, I did have ideas about what I would like to do as writers in general do. Around the fall of 2000 I finished the manuscript of Berlin–Hamlet, which then took three years to be published. Naturally, I did make some plans about what would come next, but then they were all shattered, obscured, and mostly erased by the shock that came a few months later, on the second day of Christmas. It is difficult to remember now since a great many things just vanished from my memory due to the dreadfulness of the following six years.
The writing of The Splendours of Death was not a planned event in my life, and in this sense it was not the result of my so-called development as a writer. On that day, a wild sense of horror and uncertainty invaded my life, a disturbingly new dimension of the unpredictable. Nonetheless, I gradually experienced how my initial internal resistance—which compelled me to obsessively hide this event in my life from the intrusive attention that comes with being a writer, and to preserve the story of this humiliation, caused by the death and suffering of my parents, within the bounds of my own personal intimacy—was eventually broken.
So if the tragedy of your parents changed your view of the world and your poetic language in such a fundamental way, then, I suppose, you could not always fully control or manage this transformation.
During the process I continuously felt that I was not writing, but that a greater force was carrying me, and I was just taking down notes from time to time. The ability to write is essentially a gift, just like all talents are. We see these cases where people become enslaved by their own talents, because talent is selfish and cruel. It is the manifestation of that greater force which moves your hand, and moves people in general. This is how I ended up, against my will, presenting the bloody tragedy of my parents to the world, and ostensibly slipping into the position of one who pleads for commiseration. By nature, I do not like to make a show of my wounds. And the only way to effectively avoid revealing your real wounds is by following the example of beggars, and display painted bleeding to passers-by.
But returning to your previous question: I think that in writing The Splendours of Death I relied on the lyrical tools and language which I discovered and developed at an earlier stage. But the book was not created only from these.
The Splendours of Death also has a clear commemorative function and its realism is reinforced by the inclusion in the appendix of the news articles covering the attack, the trials, and the subsequent acquittal of the accused. Literary criticism in the last twenty years strongly insisted on separating the biography of the author from the work itself, yet in the case of your book it seems particularly difficult to do so. Were you struggling with the relationship of reality to poetry while writing the book?
You see, for more than a year after the event I resisted with all my strength against writing about this experience. It is difficult to describe with precision the state I was in. Back then I felt that everything that happened—from the police investigation to the painful yet understandable public attention and curiosity surrounding the event—was foul, dreadful, impure, and deeply humiliating.
Meanwhile, I was working at the university, and I was writing essays, reviews, articles, songs for operettas, librettos for children's musicals, journalism, whatever came up. I was working a lot mostly because I couldn't sleep, and my fear of becoming depressed compelled me to take on a great workload. Yet at the same time I had to be careful not to overwork myself, since that can throw one back into the nightmares of depression as well.
Furthermore, the awful state my father was in, his major depression and his circumstances which I was not able to improve, put an additional strain on our life. Fear, distress, and the bitter futility of all those sacrifices were poisoning our everyday existence. Those were truly tough years, but then our little daughters were born, so the grimness was mixed with the wondrous. And then, when the internal barrier which I had set against myself finally broke down, I found a language which made self-expression possible, and which enabled me to voice subjectivity in a different manner than what readers of poetry would expect.
As a result, to use an allusion, the book is not about the subjective, but about the sacred. The traditional flow of communal chanting sequences is disrupted by unfitting elements which sometimes touch on the personal, but on the whole they amount to a fictional construction. In other words, some elements do refer to reality but I cannot verify their truthfulness anymore.
Seven years after its first publication the book was released again, completed or perhaps finalized with The Hasidic Sequences. And I read somewhere that you are planning a new version. What is the reason behind this? Did you feel that the project was unfinished?
The manuscript is finished and closed; there is place for only one more poem, the closing piece, which would be the 120th poem. Back in 2006, when I submitted the manuscript, my father was still alive. He died on the day the book was sent to press, so we could not change the text anymore. The Splendours of Death is closely connected with my other book, While the Holy Infant is Sleeping in our Hearts. I planned to write a counter-play to this in 2005, so perhaps that is what I mentioned. I wanted it to be a Purimspiel, yet I had neither the strength nor the time to complete it. Nonetheless, I didn't give up. I still want to finish writing it.
By calling it "unfinished" I meant that your subsequent writings, your nativity play, your essays, and your prose all continue to examine the philosophical-theological questions presented in The Splendours of Death. How would you explain the essential idea behind this problem?
Since I do not see it as being simply one problem, I cannot give an explanation. It is rather an experience: flash-like revelations, intuitive discoveries, a maelstrom that carries you away. The Splendours of Death was born out of some kind of inspiration. And I don't mean inspiration in a religious way. What I experienced in the process of writing is that there are some greater forces at play here, which surpass us humans. This, of course, did not come as a total surprise to me since I am a believer, and as such, I do have some basic, vague experiences of God like any religious person.
But at that time, when I was writing most of the texts in the book, I truly felt that I was not alone. Naturally, I had no idea whose presence I was feeling. You know, in the months following the murder the radio in our room started to suddenly turn on in the early hours. I woke up and I turned it off. But then it happened again the next morning. This went on for a while. Then one night I unplugged it, and the radio stopped turning on in the morning. What I want to say with this is that the soul really exists. The world, I suspect, is not at all the way we have been imagining it ever since the Enlightenment. Yet the language by which we live is not aware of this entirely different kind of world.
For me, this is a fundamental experience or insight, but I cannot call it a problem since the very concept of a "problem" refers to a certain linguistic or logical operation performed within the framework of rationality. And there are things in this world which do not fit in such linguistic mechanisms that follow the mental patterns of Enlightenment-type logic. They cannot even be expressed as questions, or formulated as problems. Anyway, the insights I had while writing can certainly not be formulated. Nonetheless, the language of poetry is meant to deal precisely with a realm of knowledge that is not of this world—to place a gospel-like landmine into this sentence.
There is another important point here to make, one that I also understood in those days, namely that reality as such—this most significant idol which stands at the center of an undisputable cult in our Enlightened Europe—did not even exist two or three hundred years ago.
When I was referring to the philosophical aspect of your work I meant to ask, for example, if you thought that cruelty could be understood as a result of human actions. Can it be avoided? Or is it a misunderstanding to have such concrete expectations from poetry?
Not at all. What else can you expect of poetry? The real misunderstanding, a most harmful one, would be to expect nothing else from poetry but for it to be beautiful. If the poetic use of language has any use at all, then it is precisely to answer such questions.
However, I would like to rearticulate, if I may, the context in which you raised the question. Because the concept of "understanding," used in the sense you use it, places the problem of evil in the perspective of the Enlightenment idea of eternal progress, within the framework of anthropological optimism which on the one hand presupposes the a priori moral goodness of human beings from birth, and on the other, creates the optimistic fiction of equality, derived from the theory of law.
These assumptions are of course the necessary pillars of the secularized world, and one could hardly imagine the legal and ethical order of the secular state without them. Since, if we think about it, the human world is basically a strange web of customs, fears, desires, memories, and hopes. And as such it is essentially built on words, and by no means on so-called "reality"—a fiction in its own right. In Europe, for the last two hundred years, our world has been built on the words of the law.
So it was a major warning for humanity that at the time of the Holocaust all it took was the vote of a hundred men in the house of law for enlightened optimism to collapse. As easily as that, with the help of a few laws and decrees, the rational and efficient states of Europe, including Hungary, denied millions of citizens their fundamental rights. The very same rights for which the fathers and heroes of the bourgeois state had fought and died in the two previous centuries, and which were accepted as indisputable values by everyone. In other words, the existence of the modern, secular state and of its citizens rests on very thin ice.
I am trying to filter all of this through your poetry: I suppose you are saying that if the killer enters your living room with a steel rod in his hand then all the achievements of liberal democracy become ludicrous. But if this is so, what does it entail?
It is highly unlikely that I would have pondered such things if the attack had not taken place. If I had not experienced that our firmly upheld rights are simply illusions; that it is futile to trust the law or ethics, and to believe in the victory of good over evil. Because when the killer breaks into your living room, all of that means nothing. The killer can be a person, but it can also be an organization, or the executive organ of the state. And God remains silent. Since God can only speak through human words, and since only we can give Him a language and a voice. Without us humans, without our help, God is powerless and frail on Earth, just like his angels.
This is where we arrive at the theological questions.
Yes, because it is highly perplexing for me that all through the history of Christianity the Church eliminated the Gnostics, the Manicheans, and repeatedly used the tools of eradication instead of settling for a debate. In the name of absolute goodness, the Catholic Church committed terribly evil deeds. As a product of its guilty conscience, it created the idea of immaculate Goodness, which can give absolution from the burden of sin to anyone who committed such crimes in the name of their faith and for the protection of this absolute Good. The theological dogma which describes God as being omnipotent and infinitely good demonized evil. The mystics, on the other hand, stressed total self-devotion to, rather than service of, radical Goodness. This is why I speculated that the thinking of the Enlightenment originates in the mystics. Or, to put it differently, the radical Enlightenment belief in reason and the doctrinaire optimism that accompanied it, in fact has its roots in Christian theology.
The mystical experiences of Descartes, the theological speculations of Newton, Spinoza, Kant, Fichte, Hegel—they were all inspired by theology. If we accept that Enlightened Europe reframed the eschatological conclusions of the Church then we can see that the theological idea of the absolute Good lives on in the idea of rationalized science. In this sense, we imagine Evil to be the antithesis of this out-of-the-world Good. Yet that is not how things are. It's more like in the Szekler joke which says: "I only saw a giraffe once. But even that was something else."
This means that we have to change the way we think about these concepts. But how should we use them? Good and evil are abstract categories, they do not exist in this world in a pure form.
This is true, but it is not a great discovery in itself. Water is not inherently good, and a virus is not evil. The human world is neither good nor evil, but a combination of the two. Dante used theological textbooks to populate the world of his poetic fiction with tales of crime and punishment—but these are just that, poetic fiction. Whereas in fact the killer is also a victim in a sense, and usually it is not by pure chance that someone becomes a victim. Good and evil exist only in the abstract sphere of morality.
The link between crime and punishment is maintained only by the fiction of the law—it does not derive from the natural world where you can find no trace of such a relation. Society is constantly trying to uphold these fictions, although we know of many cases when mass murderers lived long and happy lives.
The core values of Christianity and the Enlightenment do not have an anthropological foundation. I am aware that this is an alarming and uncomfortable conclusion. There is, however, a more ancient concept that perhaps offers more wisdom: the concept of Fate that obviously goes against the fiction of morality and that of the law. Our fate is something given to each of us, so we are not born with equal chances, and one life is not comparable with the other. The power of reason and theological fiction breaks down at this point, and all that is left are allegories, with their mysterious and awe-inspiring silence.
Christ is a symbol of human consciousness that—just like the figures and cults of saints—reaches far back into pre-Christian times. The figure of Christ or that of the Messiah casts a long shadow over the history of our culture and its dark abyss—since that is where he comes to us from. But the birth of Jesus brought a change into the story. The experience of God as mediated through faith receives its shape by the intervention of man. God is not real, he does not exist independently of man, because the unfolding of human history is the journey of God through the world. And I say this not as an atheist, but as a believer. I accept this duality since accepting it is one of the greatest secrets of our human existence.
There has been a lot of critical discussion of the influences of medieval and Baroque literature, as well as religious songs, on your poetry. How can classical works become the intertextual background of modern poetry?
If we dismiss the modern obsession with the author from the reception of a poetic text, then it becomes clear that biography as such is nothing more than a powerful intertextual element which is meant to make the literary work more accessible. In previous ages it was not the individuals but the various communities—mostly organized according to religious denominations, like Catholics, Cathars, Hussites, Calvinists, Huguenots, Jews—that established relations with the society at large.
Modernity, on the other hand, aimed at the development of an atomized social space, and everything seemed to be serving this goal. The individual became a legal subject and a moral actor in his or her relation to the state—this worldly and transcendent entity which replaced the community. This was the age of the bourgeoisie. But the middle class household also contained the staff, the servants, the nanny, the cook, the coachman, the doorman of the casino, and the personnel of the brothel. That is, a sizeable group of people with practically very limited legal rights, who were outside of the dominant moral order; like prostitutes, for example, who were completely subjected to the will and whim of bourgeois men.
The fundamental concepts of poetry, together with the various rituals of interpretation and understanding—which, even today, determine the popular reception of literature—were created by the thinkers and writers of Romanticism, and were envisioned to serve the public of the bourgeois age. The image of poetry in Hungarian literature is still embedded in this way of thinking. Our most important poets of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century, [Mihály] Vörösmarty, [Sándor] Petőfi, [János] Arany, [Endre] Ady, [Dezső] Kosztolányi belonged to this middle-class, they relied on servants, they were surrounded by a household staff, they regularly frequented brothels, and the women in their lives were mostly irrelevant when it came to the important decisions relating to society and politics.
The patterns of this mentality are still present; the socialist regime does not seem to have democratized them. This is why I consciously emphasized the Baroque elements, since I feel that through such a link I can draw attention to a radically different world and way of thinking that reveals the difference between principles and practice. The Baroque came before modernity, and before the triumph of the bourgeois world. In the Baroque age poetry still acted as a channel for common human knowledge, and I was always drawn to this. The reference to the Baroque and to the Middle Ages is important because they functioned according to a pre-historical language and mentality, in a somewhat similar way to the postmodern, which is the manifestation of a post-historical culture—a culture in which the idea of progress, the grand narratives and grand allegories of the Enlightenment have lost their power to interpret the world.
But doesn't all this rather prove the distance between these two worlds?
I would say that these two worlds are quite close. The practice of radical intertextuality, which provoked so much excitement in the 1980s, was a basic element in Antiquity, all through the Middle Ages, and then in the Renaissance and the Baroque. As it happens so often, postmodern writers "discovered" something that was simply forgotten and sidetracked for many years. The bourgeois world, with its legal and moral fictions, collapsed in the Second World War, most definitely in the Nazi extermination camps. When, after two decades, the young generation revolted in 1968 against the duplicitous rule of a lifeless world, they turned for inspiration to symbols and allegories coming from a great tradition.
The significant novelty of your poetry is the lack of irony in treating the tragic. The Hungarian poetry of the 1990s, in an almost exclusive manner, celebrated play, laughter, lightness, re-writing, travesties, and the overwhelming dominance of irony. Your work proves that it is indeed possible to create a poetic language which can address the issues of pain, humiliation, and marginalization in a contemporary way. Being a reader and interpreter of contemporary literature yourself, do you agree with my assessment of your work?
The "regime change" that took place in Hungarian poetry in the 1990s, replacing the weighty and gloomy poetic tradition with a lighter tone, was just as liberating and necessary as the hope, trust, and intellectual awareness around the political regime change of 1989.
Yet the overall picture of Hungarian poetry was never quite homogeneous, and for many poets irony—often mistaken by superficial readers for witticism—did not mean lack of seriousness. But as the regime change eventually left a bitter taste in the mouths of each generation, the language of poetry also became quite somber. This is distressing because, at the same time, humiliated people, whose number is constantly increasing, are becoming ever more silent, and are losing their ability to articulate themselves.
I believe that the arts should actively and creatively address social problems; great art has always done so anyway. After the regime change, people tended to over-emphasize the injunction that the task of the writer and the poet is to write rather than make political statements. What was not emphasized, however, is that even if writers are simply doing their job, they are always "revolutionaries," even if they retreat into the ivory tower, like Esterházy or Flaubert.
translated from the Hungarian by Szabolcs László
Szilárd Borbély is widely acknowledged as one of the most important poets to emerge in post-1989 Hungary. He worked in a wide variety of genres, including essay, drama, and short fiction, usually dealing with issues of trauma, memory, and loss. His poems appeared in English translation in The American Reader, Asymptote, and Poetry. Borbély received many awards for his work, including the Attila József Prize. He died in 2014.
Szilárd Borbély (1963–2014) was born in Fehérgyarmat in eastern Hungary and studied Hungarian philology and literature at the University of Debrecen, where he later taught. An authority on Hungarian literature of the late-Baroque period as well as a writer, Borbély was awarded several literary prizes, including the prestigious Palladium Prize in 2005. His first major critical success was his third book, Hosszú nap el (Long Day Away, 1993), praised by such writers as Péter Esterházy and Péter Nádas. His verse collections Halotti pompa: Szekvenciák (Final Matters: Sequences, 2004) and his novel, Nincstelenek (The Dispossessed, 2013), are considered among the most important Hungarian works of literature of the early millennium. His poems have appeared in English in The American Reader, Asymptote, and Poetry. Berlin-Hamlet is his first full collection to be published in English.
The Dispossessed
263.38 (Sept. 19, 2016): p41.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
The Dispossessed
Szilard Borbely, trans. from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet. Harper Perennial, $15.99 trade paper (304p) ISBN 978-0-06-236408-1
Hungarian essayist and poet Borbely's first novel captures the pain of poverty and prejudice in post-World War II Hungary through the eyes of a young boy. The unnamed narrator is the son of a man with Jewish heritage and a woman with familial ties to the Kulaks, fascist sympathizers who once controlled Hungary before being overthrown by communists. Growing up in a small village in the late 1960s and early 1970s, he and his family are alienated by their fellow villagers and forced to live in near squalor. Though his life is defined by hunger and want, the boy uses his energy to learn about his heritage and Hungary's violent history, including two wars and forced relocation. The boy's voice is striking for the measured way in which he recounts violence, the material desires he and his sister hope to have filled, and the simple, bleak facts of his family's existence. Through brief vignettes and stories told to him, the boy explains his world and the people who inhabit it, often weaving together mundane daily routines with illuminating details that highlight his family's profound suffering. As the middle child of parents concerned with more pressing worries than his emotional needs, the cruelty of the boy's life is at times overwhelming and deeply unsettling. This immensely powerful portrait of poverty is at once a window into an often obscured history, and a timeless testament to the struggle of those in need. (Nov.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Dispossessed." Publishers Weekly, 19 Sept. 2016, p. 41+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA464352688&it=r&asid=72c47a72ada6830324a6dcce4e084b35. Accessed 30 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A464352688
Szilard Borbely, Ottilie Mulzet: THE DISPOSSESSED
(Sept. 15, 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
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Szilard Borbely, Ottilie Mulzet THE DISPOSSESSED Harper/HarperCollins (Adult Fiction) 15.99 11, 15 ISBN: 978-0-06-236408-1
In his first and only novel, Borbely describes growing up in a remote village in northeastern Hungary.Borbely, an acclaimed poet and writer in his native Hungary, once promised his father that he would never write about his dismal childhood. His father died in 2006. In 2013, Borbely published a brilliant, and biting, depiction of his destitute boyhood in a remote Hungarian village. The novel was highly acclaimed, and now, in his debut in English translation, Borbely’s work promises to be a major gift to English readers. His is a massive talent, with a dark taste for the absurd placing him squarely in the company of Gogol, Kafka, and, more recently, Bohumil Hrabal and the filmmaker Emir Kusturica. In the 1960s and '70s, Communist years, Borbely’s family was ostracized because of his mother’s landowning ancestors and rumors of his father’s illegitimacy. They were desperately poor. From a young boy’s perspective, Borbely describes his father’s chronic unemployment, his mother’s ongoing attempts to fling herself down into the well. The boy, his older sister, and their baby brother sometimes went hungry. There weren’t enough resources to support unnecessary life, and so, as Borbely writes in one unforgettable passage, “all newborn animals”—including sparrows, mice, and kittens—had to be “exterminated.” Then the boy shifts his gaze. “We should take my little brother someplace, as well,” he tells his mother. When she demurs, he pushes back. “But why was he brought here?” he insists. “There are enough of us already.” In Mulzet’s magnificent translation, Borbely’s prose is caustic and lucent, tart and somehow burnished. He writes in short, staccato phrases that seem bitten off, chewed at the end with an acerbic twist. He has a fantastic wit; he excavates the darkest whimsy from the bleakest of situations. “But the angels sent him to us,” his mother says of his baby brother. His response: “I don’t understand what angels have to do with it.” Borbely died in 2014, but there is a back catalog of poems, essays, and stories yet to appear in English. Here’s hoping Mulzet brings us more before too much time passes.
An exquisite addition to any library of the dark, the bleak, and the absurd, Borbely’s inauguration into English is a magnificent one.
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"Szilard Borbely, Ottilie Mulzet: THE DISPOSSESSED." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Sept. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA463216145&it=r&asid=1fed9cf081b2a2117ec1305bad25d3b0. Accessed 30 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A463216145
Deprivation: A Childhood in 1960s Hungary
By GEORGE SZIRTESNOV. 25, 2016
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Szilard Borbely Credit Lenke Szilágyi
THE DISPOSSESSED
By Szilard Borbely
Translated by Ottilie Mulzet
288 pp. Harper Perennial. Paper, $15.99.
BERLIN-HAMLET
Poems
By Szilard Borbely
Translated by Ottilie Mulzet
101 pp. NYRB/Poets. Paper, $14.
By the time Szilard Borbely’s parents were robbed, his mother beaten to death on Christmas Eve, in 2000 (his father, also beaten, was to survive for six more years), he had written a variety of books — poems, essays, studies, operas — but he was chiefly known as a poet with a good many prizes and awards behind him. The last book of poems he finished before that time, “Berlin-Hamlet,” had to wait three years for publication. The prose work “The Dispossessed” — it is self-defined as a novel, but one can hardly call it fiction or precisely a memoir — appeared in 2013 and took the country by storm, topping practically every list for Book of the Year. The only book after that was the 2014 edition of another volume of poems, “Halotti Pompa” (“The Splendor of Death,” first published in 2004), which he had written partly as a response to his mother’s death. But he himself was dead by then, having taken his own life in February.
No point in leaping to conclusions. We have long learned to draw a line between lives and works, and the treacherousness of the literary first-person singular has been exposed time and again. Quite right too, we might say, nor is the identification of the two in Borbely’s work to be taken for granted — yet they both cannot help informing each other in a peculiarly intense way.
Even so, there would be little of necessarily literary value in accounts of and reflections on a personal tragedy, unless the work amounted to something more. Borbely’s work is far more. The personal tragedy does not remain personal: It is, in his case, a crystallization of the human condition under stress, a process that had begun in Borbely’s work before the murders, and one that was immediately linked in his mind with Christianity, Judaism, the struggle with historical poverty, and an understanding of human helplessness and violence.
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The theme of deprivation forms the bedrock of “The Dispossessed,” and to the general reader its conditions will seem shockingly primitive, though as Borbely himself said in a late interview, his deprivation was nothing compared with those of the Roma in his small village. We are not in “Angela’s Ashes” territory, still less in the land of misery memoir. We are in a remote corner of Hungary not far from Romania in the 1960s. World War II has come and gone, and its survivors, both Jews and soldiers of the fascist regime, have returned to vastly changed lives. These are post-Stalinist, post-1956 uprising times, but the Stalinist party is still the dominant power in the village, and both the death of Stalin and the failure of the revolution have passed the village by. This is where the young narrator lives with his mother, father and big sister. The father is brutal, helpless and increasingly defeated; the mother is brutal, helpless and contemptuous of those she regards as peasants; the children are often unruly and often beaten. Nevertheless, they are united with the mother by love.
The richness, inventiveness, the sheer graphic quality of the language, beautifully rendered by the translator Ottilie Mulzet, takes the fierce and often obscene terms of the village and offers them to us as a form of luminosity. It’s not a trick. It’s not fake religiosity. It is, and we accept it as, life. We could perhaps describe it as dirty realism were it not for the variety of voices within it, in longer passages where individuals speak of some mysterious historical semi-magical event, or in those where the attention is on the sheer fascination of natural detail. The book is not a single text: It is a compound.
Nor is there clear narrative progression. The book is composed of short passages that move to and fro in time, in which the developing theme of belonging and outsiderness takes on different facets. Key among these facets is the question of the father, who is regarded by the rest of the village as suspiciously Jewish. Only one real Jew remains in the place, a Holocaust survivor, who has been reduced to a despised odd-job-man status. Anti-Semitism runs through the village like foul water, unthinking, freely articulated, always available. The narrator is bullied as a Jew because of his father. The Jew is “the yellow egg on the underside of the potato leaf. . . . People crush them between their nails, like lice.” The phrase “to pay the Jew” means to defecate.
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But this is not a book about being Jewish. It is, rather, an account of presences, of the family circle at the core of it, the extended family making frequent visits and the rest of the village spreading like an ancient sore that is unlikely ever to be cured. Loss and lack of love lie at the heart of it.
As does God, whose name is seldom invoked without obscenity. But it is not God who is being cursed: God is invited to do the cursing. Small creatures perish and endure lives of filth and cruelty in this corner of God’s earth. People may curse in God’s name, but he is everywhere, casting a divine glow over the place. He, a suffering crucified God, is in the language without ever announcing himself. “It was during this time that the angel might have arrived, when the flesh of the downy plum grows firm under its blue skin. Drops of dew ran down it in the early autumn morning. Whoever touches this pale transparent layer leaves a trace with his fingers upon it.” All is marked and traced. The events in the book happen a long time before the murder of Borbely’s parents, but murder is latent throughout.
“Berlin-Hamlet,” the book of poems, is a different matter. It consists of a sequence of letters, fragments, allegories and locations and is part memory, part desire to meet someone. The whole is a closely packed series of dreamlike meditations. There is an implied dramatic context and a narrator, speaking in the first person, who longs and reflects and relates himself to a notional “you,” with whom an intense but fleeting connection had once been established. The narrator is isolated, living under the skin of a perceived state of affairs that he sees, as through a mirror, with painful clarity.
I arrived in this city only to
discover: I now can see
in the mirror that shade
who steals after me.
That shade hovers in a space that we, in retrospect, may read as antechamber to “The Dispossessed.” “The Dispossessed” is the soil of the past, “Berlin-Hamlet” the urban space of the present, where consciousness of the soil has to make some kind of temporary dwelling. It is a beautiful, authoritative book, again translated by Mulzet.
After Borbely’s death, Laszlo Krasznahorkai, whose work has a certain affinity with Borbely’s in prose, wrote in a Facebook post: “Dear Szilard, I did not understand you. I loved you.” If there is a line of literary succession, it might, in Borbely’s case, include Zola’s “Germinal,” Kosinski’s “The Painted Bird,” Andrei Platonov’s “Soul” and Krasznahorkai’s own “Satantango.” It might seek visual parallels in Bosch and Brouwer. But these are various independent works, and they don’t constitute a tradition as such. What is clear is “The Dispossessed” is a great sui generis book that, for all its cultural differences, touches us deeply. We recognize it as tragic, truthful and visionary wherever we are.
George Szirtes is a poet and translator. His most recent book is “Mapping the Delta.”
CONTRIBUTOR:
Szilárd Borbély
TRANSLATOR:
Ottilie Mulzet
ONLINE EXCLUSIVE
January 2014
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The Dispossessed
The Dispossessed is Szilárd Borbély’s first novel, although he has been active – and widely acclaimed – as a poet, literary historian and essayist for more than twenty years. Its first print run sold out almost immediately. To state that the book has touched a raw nerve in today’s Hungary is something of an understatement; nonetheless, Borbély’s portrayal of growing up in the country’s rural northeast during the beginning of the Kádár era (1956-1988) haunts the reader for its unsparing truthfulness and attention to small details. The novel’s narrator is a child – possibly Jewish, although he himself is uncertain about it – who registers and remembers colours, scents and sounds from the unchanging brutal microcosm that is impoverished village life. A historical note: The Arrow Cross was a fascist political organisation, allied with Nazi Germany, that held power in Hungary from 15 October 1944 to 28 March 1945. Under Ferenc Szálasi’s rule, the Arrow Cross oversaw the murder of approximately 200,000 Budapest Jews, as well as continuing the deportations of rural Jews to Auschwitz which had begun under the previous government of Admiral Miklós Horthy. Béla Kun was a Communist revolutionary and leader of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919. Overthrown by Admiral Horthy, Kun fled to the Soviet Union, where he was killed in Stalin’s purges.
—O.M.
—
When Mózsi came back from the forced labour camp, he no longer looked like a Jew. He was just like anyone else. He came back like the other refugees who were looking for their homes, their belongings, the families left behind here. Like everyone else who could not stop living. He lugged the burden that was life. He was bald, and he wore a threadbare soldier’s uniform. His luxuriant hair of old, his curled ear locks, were nowhere to be seen. No longer did he wear his black caftan. Nor his hat. Nor his white shirt. Never again the mourning-shirt fringed at the corners, which the men had always worn.
In the village, nobody talked about what had happened to these clothes. Mózsi too did not ask. Just as he didn’t ask what had happened to the goods from the shop. The books from the shelves. The hooks from the wall. The clothes from the cupboards. Compassion from the hearts.
Mózsi, emaciated to the bones when he returned, sat down in front of the plundered house which the village had taken apart every single night, breaking the gendarmes’ seal. Our uncles and their kin were the first to start the mayhem at that time.
‘Nobody dared to say anything to them, because they were members of the Arrow Cross, and at that time everyone was very afraid of the Arrow Cross men,’ says Máli.
They didn’t even greet each other under the cover of darkness. They hurried, they moved around. There were those who turned up even more than once. Mutely, wordlessly, they ransacked the house and the shed. They broke apart the cupboards, grabbed the damask tablecloths right in front of each other, clutched the vases taken from the shelves. They did this in the darkness, as if they didn’t recognise one another. And they never again spoke about these nights. The village became filled with secrets. There were only hands reaching in the darkness for the dinner plates, the tableware, the woollen underwear, the sought-after Berliner scarves, the toys the children left behind. They took the prayer shawls as well, the matzo plates, the embroidered Shabbat yarmulkes. They unloosened the mezuzahs from the doorframe. And then they were disappointed, because there was no paper money inside, just a bit of rag with scribbles on it. When they took apart the decorative chests, they didn’t even look at each other. When they dug up the earth in the larder and in the pantries. When they broke apart the chimney, and examined it brick by brick. Because they were searching everywhere for the hidden treasure. For the legendary Jewish treasure, spoken of in undertones in the tavern. They were looking for money, for the silver cutlery, the genuine pearl necklaces, the engraved pocket watches, the earrings of precious stone.
They considered Jewish property to be their own, because they had been telling each other for years that the Jews had taken it away from them. From the Hungarians. They had to get it back. To have it returned to its rightful owners was their due.
But now, when they tore apart the pillowcases and the quilts, when they turned out the straw pallets, ripping apart the upholstery of the divan, what they came upon was too scarce, because the coveted treasure that was stolen from them was nowhere to be found. The longed-for objects, which they thought they had seen with Mózsi and his family—all the objects the family didn’t have when the gendarmes took them away. Then they searched, they hunted obsessively. In the meantime they already suspected one another: maybe the more cunning among them had already stolen the items. Once again they were too late, because they never had any luck. They had observed everything however, what kind of clothes the family was wearing, kind of jewels they had. They had counted up the takings of the shop for many years back. And the treasures were nowhere. But they had to be somewhere.
‘That fucking Jewish gold has to be hidden somewhere,’ they kept repeating bitterly.
‘Where can it be? Where can those filthy Jews have shoved it?’ they muttered to themselves. There was a certain recognition in their voices. These Jews were clever, they knew how to hide things so well. But the villagers’ anger was greater. Rancour and greediness mixed with the eternal yearning of the poor.
During that time they talked about the legendary wealth of Mózsi and his family every evening in the tavern. They calculated, they reckoned how much their income could have been over the years. They were searching for the margin. The margin between imagination and reality would not leave them in peace. The legend of Jewish gold electrified the imagination of the village. They spoke about it in undertones during the day as well on the Ramp.
‘Mózsi and his family had so much gold,’ they hissed into each other’s ears, ‘that you could pave the entire street with it from the Ramp to the belfry.’
They imagined that they remembered the precious jewels, the glittering brooches, the heavy candelabra, the silver cutlery, the diamond earrings of the women.
‘Neither Szále nor Rézi took these things with them. They didn’t even give it to the little girl,’ said the women, who, watching carefully on that May day through their sobbing tears, scrutinized everything through the fingers of their hands held in front of their faces. All of it was engraved in memory, everything the deportees had: the blouses, the shirts, the bodices, the skirts, the box-calf boots.
‘They weren’t wearing earrings,’ they said.
‘There wasn’t even any jewellery on the little girl. If there had been I’d remember it,’ they kept repeating.
‘Of course it’s possible that they hid it somewhere in the house or in the shed or they crammed it in there—in a place—where only women can tuck away smaller items,’ they kept saying with a delicate laugh.
And the men reached over to that place, so they could hear the women’s shrieks as they jumped away from the approaching hand. Of course there were some who jumped too late. And some who didn’t even jump away at all, but towards it. Everyone laughed about this on the Ramp.
*
‘When they took away the Jews,’ said my grandfather, ‘it was May. The carts came from Csaholc. The people were already waiting on the Ramp, because it had been announced. Everyone knew that they were coming for them on the third day of May. Mózes and his family were at home, by then it was forbidden for them to leave the house, they could not come out. Young Mózsi had already been taken away for forced labour long ago. At the beginning they still heard from him. A few postcards, short letters written hastily. Then not even that. Old Mózsi prayed so much. From dawn until late in the evening. Maybe by that point he wasn’t even sleeping. In his tasselled white shirt, with the straps on his arm and on his forehead, he chanted prayers the entire day. His wife just cried. Szále, their daughter-in-law, had stopped crying by then. She didn’t speak to anyone. She just hugged her children to herself. She was dread itself. She did not move. Just waited. I’ve never seen anyone so afraid.
May was beautiful. The winter of forty-four had been hard. Starting from nineteen forty, when the Germans attacked the Russians, every winter was hard. The trunks of the trees cracked open. The crows fell down one by one from the branches. There was nothing for them to eat.
“Maybe the winter from forty-three to forty-four was the worst.” The old people used to say that. Bad news was coming from the front, but only spoken of in whispers. On the radio, the only news was of victories. Of smaller tactical withdrawals. Of the realignment of troops being carried out for the coming attack. Of course, everywhere people were talking about the approaching Russians. Talking openly about the Arrow Cross. They cursed the Regent, whom, however it was strictly forbidden to insult. But mainly they threw mud at the Jews.
Your great-uncle and his family were the biggest Arrow Cross men in the village. They carried out all the Jewish pranks. They snuck in through the garden and smeared pig shit all over Mózsi’s door. They wrote JEWISH PIGS on the limestone wall. And then JEWISH PIGSTY. They were having fun. At the beginning everyone was ashamed, but nobody dared say anything. And they even denied doing it. But then they started to boast.
‘‘The Jews made the war, they created Communism. They were behind Trianon too, and the crisis, the big Crash.’ They yelled this. They smeared everything on the Jews. As the military situation worsened, and they talked about how they would round them all up, women, children, even old people, and take them to Germany to work, your great-uncles got louder and louder. By then they were going into Mózsi’s shop during the day, pointing at the goods that were still there, at this or that, whatever took their fancy. They had no intention of paying. If Mózsi asked for money, they just guffawed.
‘‘Shit is what you’ll get,” they said. And when they were going to the outhouse they didn’t even say, “I’m going to the outhouse,” but they would say “I’m going to pay the Jew.” And then they sniggered.
‘‘Report it, Jew,” they said to Mózsi if he spoke up. They never greeted him anymore the way they used to in the old days, saying: “Upon my honour, Mr. Mózes! How is your health today, dear Mr. Mózes?”
By now they just cast out their words with contempt.
‘‘Add it to the rest, Jew,” they said haughtily, when they took things out of the shop without even a greeting. They looked at him with loathing. They no longer shook his hand, because Jews are filthy. There is some contamination in them, they knew.
‘‘All Jews must be avoided, because whoever fornicates with them commits racial degradation,” they read on the announcements put out on the Ramp, “and whoever helps them shall be slaughtered on the spot.” Who would want to get himself slaughtered?
Come evening, in the tavern they guffawed with laughter at terrified Mózsi, who was afraid of them. Who was so self-confident before. So proud. Like some lord, that’s how he used to act.
Your uncles were still young lads, they still had one or two years left before their call-up for military service. They were the ones who set the tone in the village. All the men were at the front. They marched up and down in Kepecgyep like members of the Levente corps. They drilled with cudgels made of hazel wood. They worshipped Szálasi. And in the spring, they became even more bold. There was nothing they could not do. There was no one who dared speak up to them. They were free, like the flea that God let go.
In the evening they smashed in Mózsi’s windows. The old man cried out.
‘‘Who are you?” he asked.
‘‘The Messiah is here,” they said. But they couldn’t hold out for too long. They did not wait for an answer. They broke out in raucous laughter. The night watchman didn’t dare to speak to them. They went over there at midnight, after the tavern. Or at dawn. When they were already drunk. Anyone who had to do a little job relieved himself. They hushed one other to be quiet. Like drunkards. They pissed on the doorframe. Then some of them, whoever needed to, shat in front of the door. When they farted, the raucous laughter broke out.
The day has eyes, the night has ears. Everyone heard everything. By the spring of nineteen forty-four the pranks were happening every day. They took everything from the shop. Mózsi still wrote down who had taken what. He did the inventory every evening. But as for paying their debts, no one paid them.
Mózsi let them take the things away. What else could he have done. By this time, the entire village was in debt to him. When the gendarmes came for them on the third, and they put the family into the cart, it was almost a kind of relief. Mózsi’s wife, old Rébi, lamented. And again Szále was crying. She embraced her two children. Many who were gathered that day on the Ramp wept for them. Mainly the women. There were sorry for the children, the innocent. But everyone kept their traps shut. No one spoke a word.
The Jewish families from the neighbouring villages were already sitting on the cart with their permitted allowance of hand luggage. They too were weeping. The gendarmes were malevolent, haughty. They shouted at the people.
‘‘Get lost! There’s nothing for you to look for here! This isn’t a circus! Don’t stand there gaping! You can get on too if you want! There’s plenty of room!’ It was evil, but well, an order is an order.
The Jews cried out as the carts set off towards Berek.
‘‘My God, what did you do to us, Béla Kun? What did you do…” As if Béla Kun could have been responsible for everything.
Then the carts disappeared on the way to Berek, and the row of linden trees leaning towards each other above the road closed in behind them. They disappeared from our view. The dust settled, and yet the people stood there for a long time, watching where they had gone. The women were sniffling. They dispersed from the Ramp only very slowly.
Those who had debts thought about their debts. About how they no longer had any debts. They felt relieved. As long as Mózsi didn’t come back, they would not have to come up with the money. No authorities knew how much they hadn’t paid. Only the list of debts would betray this. The gendarmes put the seal over the entrance to the house.
‘‘Somehow, we have to make that list disappear,” they said.
That’s what they were talking about that night on the Ramp,’ my grandfather said.
*
When I hear talk of Jews, I feel like I’m suffocating. If I hear the word Jew, my throat contracts. I gasp for air. My ears start to ring. They will notice me. I’m afraid that I will give myself away. I try to behave as if I’m not interested at all. At times like that, I hold my breath. I am not allowed to breathe for a while. I know that I can’t hold my breath for a long time, but I don’t move. I don’t dare take a breath. My ears are burning. They certainly can see that too. I have to look in a mirror. I am afraid that my ears betray me. They often talk about Jews. The words are full of menace. I am afraid of the words.
The carob tree ripens in the autumn. Its fruit is a long, brown capsule. It looks like the husk of a pea or a bean, only larger. The seeds spread out within. The coiling husks of the carob tree are the colour of chocolate. Dark brown. Some of them are as long as a grown-up’s forearm. While still fresh, not yet dried out, its flesh is sweet and fragrant. In the village, they call it Jewish shit. Máli calls it that too. This is also the name of the tree. ‘The Jewish shit has ripened,’ they call out to each other on the Ramp. ‘Tell the kids!’
Then they laugh.
They always laugh when they use ugly words. When they say cock or cunt. They like to get the children who are still learning how to talk to repeat after them: cunt, cock, together fuck.
‘Say “Your mother’s cunt!”’
‘Your father’s bloody cock!’
‘May God shove his cock into you,’ they repeat.
Everyone has his favourite. When the children repeat the words that are meaningless to them, they burst out in laughter.
‘Again, one more time!’ They can’t get enough of it.
‘Jewish shit, Jewish shit,’ they repeat. ‘The Jewish shit has ripened!’ They like to say this. They like to hear this.
I am afraid of this word that everyone repeats with such joy. I gasp for air. I can’t laugh with them. Everyone else, though, is laughing.
I’m thinking of old Mózsi. About the piece of paper, the one he wrote the debts on.
‘He can wipe his ass with it,’ they said.
This piece was selected for inclusion in the January 2014 Translation Issue by Daniel Medin, a contributing editor of The White Review. He helps direct the Center for Writers and Translators at the American University of Paris, and is Associate Series Editor of The Cahiers Series.
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTOR
One of the most significant poets to emerge from Central Europe after 1989,
SZILÁRD BORBÉLY has created an oeuvre that unflinchingly examines questions of loss, absence, trauma and memory. He has been awarded several important prizes for his work in Hungary. English translations of his poetry have appeared in The American Reader, Asymptote, and Poetry Magazine. He died in 2014.
Ottilie Mulzet translates from Hungarian and Mongolian. She is currently completing a Ph.D. on the subject of Mongolian riddles and proverbs. Her artwork, prose, and photography have appeared in the Prague-based journal Revolver Revue since 2000.
THIS ARTICLE IS AN ONLINE EXCLUSIVE FROM JANUARY 2014.
By Ottilie Mulzet Alone in BabelJune 23, 2013
‘This gnaws away at my heart’: Szilárd Borbély’s The Dispossessed
Reviewed by Ottilie Mulzet
–Szilárd Borbély, Nincstelenek: Már elment a Mesijás? (The Dispossessed: Has the Meshiyah Left Yet?) (Kalligram, 2013)
'Seemingly simple, yet utterly devastating': Szilárd Borbély
‘Seemingly simple, yet utterly devastating’: Szilárd Borbély
Szilárd Borbély’s new book The Dispossessed: Has the Meshiyah Left Yet? explores the world of extreme poverty and deprivation experienced in a tiny Hungarian village, close to the Romanian and Ukrainian borders, in the mid-1960s. It is narrated by a small boy who records his family life, and the lives of the villagers, with a clarity and an “unknowing knowingness” that shocks in its determination not to look away from the brutality, the cruelty and bestiality that for the most part determines their lives.
Within the Hungarian literary and cultural context, for reasons that are too detailed to outline in depth here, this is already a deeply radical gesture. Suffice it to say that the lives of the poor in Hungary—the desperately, the eternally poor, the people mired in what American sociologists like to call the culture of “deep poverty”—have never really been rendered like this, in such seemingly simple, yet utterly devastating prose.
The situation of the boy’s family is even much more desperate—due to the father’s presumed Jewish heritage, the family is relentlessly ostracized. For all intents and purposes, they are the Untouchables of the village. (Officially, they belong to the Greek Catholic Church, in a predominantly Calvinist setting, creating yet another layer of marginalization, even in a society where religion was officially absent.) The father is clearly far too traumatized to discuss this matter—and nothing is ever discussed openly in this milieu. (Later on, he is actually forced to flee the village and can only visit his family in secret. The little boy actually doesn’t mind, because he is usually drunk and often violent). Even the word itself, “Jew,” fills the little boy with terror. (“The Jew can never be seen. The Jew is just a word. He’s always there, because they are always talking about him, but he is invisible.”) At the same time, the mother continues to exhort the children to not forget that they are Jewish, and in one of the most deeply haunting scenes of the book, she lights candles on the Sabbath and instructs the children to look out of the window “to see if the Messiah is coming,” an enactment of the family’s enigmatic Jewish roots necessarily performed in secrecy and in the absence of the father. The brilliant portrayal of the trauma of all of these overlapping and often conflicting identities brings to mind the words of the Czech folksinger Jaromír Nohavica: “Only the unmarked will be saved.” Throughout the narrative, the little boy seeks consolation in the idea of prime numbers, “which can only be divided by themselves. And by one.”
The Meshiyah, referred to in the book’s subtitle, is the name of the vaguely Christ-like figure mockingly called “Meshiyah” (a distortion of Messiah), a Roma man (in a village where every dog is named “Gypsy”), who is doubly scorned as both a Roma and a “tota” (i.e., as a “Slovak,” because he was born with a speech impediment). Never dressed in anything but the villagers’ cast-out clothing, his task in the village is to remove the excrement from the villagers’ outhouses. When they need their outhouses cleaned, they come to the village pub and call out, “Has the Meshiyah left yet?” As in Borbély’s ground-breaking collection of verse, Death Magnificent (Halotti pompa, Kalligram, 2006), there are no distinct delineations between the Christian and Jewish Messiahs: both equally haunt the life of the village as cast-off, despised presences, or as presences that can only be evoked in secrecy.
I write about poverty because I see a continual disintegration in terms of how poor people are treated… This gnaws away at my heart
Scenes from daily life are rendered in the eternal present tense belonging to myth and legend. Moreover, the villagers speak their own dialect, confined exclusively to the village itself. Yet, though the schoolteacher from the city tries to beat the non-standard Hungarian words out of the children, it becomes clear that some of these linguistic deviations are undeniably eloquent. The examination of language and its automatic internalization by the children within the microcosm of the village is one of the most important contributions of this work, bringing to mind, for example, such works as Viktor Klemperer’s Lingua Tertia Imperia.
The Dispossessed is not exactly fiction, nor is it autobiography. Borbély stated in an interview that his father once asked him not to write about their life in the village where he spent his boyhood years—a promise that Borbély kept until after his father’s death in 2006. Then, he states, he felt the need to work with the material contained in the present volume. “I write about poverty because there is nothing more tedious than poverty,” he has said in a recent interview, “and because I see a continual disintegration in terms of how poor people are treated, whether they are Roma or Hungarians. And because today I would hardly be able to get out of that milieu that I came from. This gnaws away at my heart, it is deeply upsetting to me.”
One of The Dispossessed’s Hungarian reviewers, Ákos Győrffy, put it this way: “We live in an agonizing society. Slowly but surely, we will be able to state that a third of the country’s inhabitants are as dispossessed as the dispossessed in this novel. This is a huge problem: it will be an even bigger problem. I fear that we have already passed the point of no return.”
Ottilie Mulzet translates from Hungarian and Mongolian. She is currently completing a PhD on the subject of Mongolian riddles and proverbs. Her artwork, prose, and photography have appeared in the Prague-based journal Revolver Revue since 2000.
Ottilie Mulzet’s English translations of Borbély’s ‘curious and terrifying’ poems have been published by The American Reader.
Szilárd Borbély’s
The Dispossessed & Berlin-Hamlet
January 31, 2017
by Tyler Langendorfer
Szilárd Borbély was one of Hungary’s leading contemporary poets, as well as a noted translator, literary historian and dramatist. A recipient of many of his country’s most prestigious literary prizes, his oeuvre was largely unknown in the West at the time he took his own life in 2014. To the good fortune of English-language readers, two of his most notable works became available this past November, each in a masterful translation by Ottilie Mulzet: the poetry collection Berlin-Hamlet, first published in 2003, and his only novel, The Dispossessed, a sensation among the Hungarian reading public upon its original publication in 2013.
The Dispossessed by Szilárd Borbély tr. Ottilie Mulzet (HarperCollins, Nov. 2016)
The Dispossessed
by Szilárd Borbély
tr. Ottilie Mulzet
(HarperCollins, Nov. 2016)
The Dispossessed is a fictionalized memoir of Borbély’s impoverished 1960s childhood in a northeast Hungarian village, a short distance from the Romanian border. The author’s father made him promise that he would never write about this experience, but when he died in 2006, Borbély felt obligated to break his silence. Rural poverty at the time was a marginalized topic in the nation’s literature and socio-political discourse, and its continuous neglect by the government deeply troubled him. He considered the conditions of post-communist Hungary to be even more prohibitive of social mobility, in spite of the more than 30 years that had passed since his escape from this milieu. In The Dispossessed, the unnamed child narrator illustrates that it is a moral as well as material poverty in which this pain has its origins.
For there is a prevailing “culture of brutality” within the village, as Mulzet mentions in her introduction, a disrespect towards anyone deemed an outsider. It’s most glaring form is a widespread, all-consuming anti-Semitism, one that long predates the national government’s complicity in the Holocaust two decades earlier. Another is the grave mistreatment of the Roma, perennial scapegoats within this society, forced to beg or take on degrading work, such as cleaning outhouses, to survive. In the mold of the self-serving and distrustful characters who populate his compatriot László Krasznahorkai’s novels, behavior in this village seemingly withdrawn from contemporary historical events is actually rooted in the “ancient world” of the peasants; a past the latter claim to erase through silence. Yet Borbély does not shy away from exposing the thinly-veiled legacy of the regent and Nazi ally Miklós Horthy, nor from underlining the divisive and duplicitous rule of the Soviet-influenced communist party.
These historical factors are behind the communal terror wrought on the narrator’s family. The father, rumored to have Jewish heritage, and a class enemy as the son of former landowners, is over time denied even the most menial labor by the local party officials. His drinking habits and meager income drive his wife to despair, and she, like her husband, takes out her frustrations on the children. At times she threatens suicide. With the mother overwhelmed by her housework, the narrator and his older sister spend more hours performing chores than at play. Other village children adopt their parents’ bigoted stance towards the siblings, which results in the boy being assaulted in the street. Under these circumstances, the life of an individual family member— “a solitude born as one”—is often burdensome to the others, and Borbély deftly employs shifts in chronological sequencing to emphasize the stark revelations of an absence: a death in the family in one case; expulsion from the village in another.
These hardships, and the daily life of the community, are related in an arresting, incisive language; rhythmic, frequently shortened sentences that attempt to assemble meaning as understood from a child’s perspective. Characteristic of this prose are instances where the narrator names or describes an object or action, then provides the more colloquial expression used by himself and other children—an indeterminate “we”:
We walk across the turned-up earth. We call it sodground. Ogmand’s sodground. When we go into the forest to gather wood, we pass this way. Sometimes we go in the direction of the Szomoga family fields so that we can walk along Kaboló Road. Because it isn’t so muddy. We call that puddle slick.
Yet it is not in words where he finds solace. It is numbers, specifically, primary numbers—those that “cannot be divided”—that are his preferred method for the introduction of order and meaning into the adult world; through disparities in age (“between us there are twenty-three years. Twenty-three cannot be divided”), or the passage of time between events (“he waited for another thirty-seven years, but the Messiah didn’t come”). He also identifies with them, for they are “like us in the village. The ones that stick out from the others.”
Borbély’s aesthetic is shaped by his personal concerns; most are theological in nature, but a great number are epistemological as well; his view is that modern language is often ill-suited to address the tribulations of human experience. In a 2013 interview with Asymptote where he discusses the origins of the poetic language utilized in his final collection, The Splendour of Death, Borbély declares: “if we think about it, the human world is basically a strange web of customs, fears, desires, memories, and hopes. And as such it is essentially built on words, and by no means on so-called ‘reality’—a fiction in its own right.” This underlying philosophy—that only words form the basis of “reality”—cuts to the heart of Borbély’s narrative presentation in The Dispossessed. What confronts the reader as “real”—the jarring imagery of squalor, the drudgery of the everyday—cannot be accepted at face value. For the material reality of the villagers is enveloped in various degrees with the mythical, legendary and biblical. Voices integrated within the text situate the village within these ontological frameworks: the boy envisions an angel’s arrival in time for the plum harvest—a harbinger of a death; a grandfather’s folkloric tale of Romanian ancestors, a migratory religious community forced to convert by a Hapsburg envoy (a character reminiscent of Kafka’s authority figures); a rabbi’s story from before the war, about how the current world, where the “ground is always watery . . . . [and] will be swallowed by the mud of the earth.” As with other instances, none of these examples detract from Borbély’s visceral, realist depiction of his subjects, but rather lend an added dimension to the worries that occupy their emotional life: a justification for the existence of death (in the case of the angel), belonging (how does the boy’s ancestry factor into his identity as a Hungarian?) and fear (of the river that threatens to flood the crop fields).
Language, however, in spite of the grandiose themes it can convey, also conditions fear in the village’s oppressed population. The boy’s father, a character reduced to submission by years of harassment and ostracization, “pronounces people’s names only rarely” and is reticent to use the word “Jew” in conversation. The same applies to his son, who feels like he’s “suffocating” when he hears the word and is even unsettled by the letter “j” at school. It is as though the act of naming alone possesses its own abstract terror.
Conversely, their persecutors are unrestrained in their use of anti-Semitic vernacular (e.g. to “pay the Jew” means to defecate), but at the same time, this language also reinforces their dependence on feelings of inferiority. For the specter that haunts the collective memory is that of the Jewish Mózsi family—who all save one perished following their deportation—ambitious, and superior to the villagers in worldly success and dignity:
Everyone is always mentioning the Jew. The Jew is the one who is nowhere. The Jew is the one who conjectures. Who isn’t happy with what he has. All the things that we have gotten used to already. The way we do things isn’t good enough for him. He always wants something else. The old people know, and my father’s people, too, that the Jew is the one who cannot be understood. The Jew is a bad conscience, and the Jew is remorse that can only be alleviated by contempt.
The above passage suggests that there is more behind the community’s behavior towards the figure of the Jew than unbridled hatred. It is also motivated by the persistence of their guilt over their passivity, and in some cases, proactive role in his demise. But there is another crucial aspect. Disdain for the one “who isn’t happy with what he has,” suggests that the villagers also have desires and dreams, beyond “the eternal yearning of the poor.” Yet without the material and institutional resources needed to fulfill them, they languish in resentment.
This can be difficult to acknowledge in the face of the villagers’ vulgarity and malice. In a society where a bearded Gypsy is mockingly named “Messiyah” (instead of “Messiah”) and spat upon, the notion that the villagers would harbor any hope of redemption or transcendence seems improbable. Yet Borbély does provide reason for such hope. The most notable is the mother, who, in spite of her flaws, does love her family, and is fully conscious of the their need to leave the village. She despises the peasants who “die in the same place they were born” and “know nothing of truth and comfort.” Throughout the novel, she reiterates their superior status (“we are not peasants”) and recognizes that a different life in a different place is possible. The narrator echoes these sentiments:
No one ever thinks it possible to live somewhere else. To raise a family somewhere else. To build a house somewhere else. Far away from the river, where you wouldn’t have to be afraid of the floods every spring. That’s how the peasants think. But we’re not peasants.
The mother often turns to religion for comfort when her hopes are deferred, and in one of the novels most symbolic scenes, has the children, as if they were practicing Jews, pretend they are waiting for the Messiah. This moment of acquiescence to accusations of Judaism, a major cause of their plight, is in a sense subversive, as it enables her children to believe in a better world, even for just a short time .
Perhaps the most poignant moment in The Dispossessed occurs when the narrator asks his mother for a violin. It is a request prompted by the gypsy Aladár, who on Christmas Eve plays his instrument as he “goes from house to house.” The boy notices that “Aladár is afraid of everyone,” yet “when he plays his violin, he isn’t afraid.” He concludes: “I would also like to not be afraid. It’s not that I want to learn how to play the violin but that I want to not be afraid.” The beautiful, by means of artistic expression, is an escape from worry, however brief its duration.
This is one of the most powerful themes in The Dispossessed, and perhaps the one that Borbély wished to resonate above all others. The poor, though largely neglected by the ruling body of their society, are not incapable of an appreciation of, and need for, the beautiful. Borbély encourages us to scrutinize their failures as human beings, but also subtly proposes that many of these lives, at some level of consciousness, long for a more dignified existence.
By the novel’s end, the family manages to move away from the town. Their departure, however, is only true in the physical sense, as the narrator asserts that the experiences of their previous life will remain with them for the rest of their days. They will be marked by a privation of spirit, a “transience that could never be familiar.”
Berlin-Hamlet by Szilárd Borbély tr. Ottilie Mulzet (NYRB, Nov. 2016)
Berlin-Hamlet
by Szilárd Borbély
tr. Ottilie Mulzet
(NYRB, Nov. 2016)
The theme of unfamiliar transience is every bit as evident in the urban setting of Berlin-Hamlet, a work imbued with the incurable desire to be elsewhere, often in the presence of another. Within its stanzas, the poetic persona, embodied by a roaming consciousness, alights on Berlin scenes past and present, composes letters to a person he’d like to meet, and, within the schema of the eponymous Hamlet’s famed soliloquy, recasts the dilemma of “to be or not to be.” It seeks meaning in the internal and external; in the acts of self-negation, contemplation, bodily gesture, recollection, written and verbal expression. The poem titled Fragment II, where the entire human race is referred to as “stumbling amateur actors” on the “theatre of speech” is perhaps most representative of these ruminations:
Every word futile, which does not sever
•
that thread woven by the Fates, the reticent midwives
of thought. For reflection is
•
boundless, while in place of
resolve and deeds, words
are contemplated.
As the above lines imply, there is a common discord between the divine (e.g. “the Fates, the reticent midwives / of thought”) and human expression (“every word futile”) throughout these poems. In their incompatible semantics, the persona cannot arrive at any guiding principles or surroundings that align with his conception (if one exists) of home or the “familiar.” In a more demonstrative manner than in The Dispossessed’s closing lines, Borbély’s stanzas (most notably, those that allude to the destruction of European Jewry) dismiss the possibility of a future messiah, or any analogous form of deliverance.
While a despondency anchored in the past defines the existence of each protagonist by the conclusion of Berlin-Hamlet and The Dispossessed, the grim beauty of Borbély’s artistry nonetheless manages to attain its own form of transcendence. It is the outcome of an inherent paradox in his creative approach: the exploration of language’s fallibility nonetheless yields singular modes of expression, capable of reflecting an isolated interiority and the shared experiences of the many. Nor does the reader’s worldview remain unaltered in its engagement with these works. Borbély’s “labyrinth of voices”—the destitute, the spiritually adrift—call out beyond their spheres of loneliness, rendering once distant and unknown sufferings in a sympathetic yet unembellished light.
Tyler Langendorfer is a writer and translator. A former editorial assistant with the London-based New Books in German, he now lives in Brooklyn.
November 22, 2016 · 11:57 am
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Review: Berlin-Hamlet — Poetry by Szilárd Borbély
I received a review copy of this title from NYRB. This collection was published in the original Hungarian in 2003 and this English version has been translated by Ottilie Mulzet.
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My Review:
berlin-hamletI was debating whether or not to even attempt any type of review of this collection of poetry. The layers of imagery, references and allusions to great figures like Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Attila József and Erno Szép could never be unpacked or fully explained in one short review. But I found the language and images of Borbély’s poetry so moving that I decided I had to at least attempt to put some thoughts together in order to bring more attention to this Hungarian poet and his tragic end.
The collection of free verse poems is divided into five interwoven themes and each poem in a cycle is given a sequential number. The cycle of poems entitled “Letter” are based upon quotations extracted from diaries and letters of Kafka. Borbély puts his own unique touch on each of Kafka’s quotations by rewriting and reworking them. Kafka is the perfect figure through which to mix images of Berlin, with city he had a connection through Felice, and Hamlet, whose indecision is reminiscent of Kafka’s own hesitancy about his relationship. The first in the series of “Letter” poems is the perfect blend of elements that include Kafka, Berlin, and reticence:
[Letter I]
At last I have a picture of you as I
once saw you. Of course not as when
I glimpsed you
for the first time, without your
jacket, bareheaded,
your face unframed by a hat. but
when
you disappeared before my eyes into
the entrance of the hotel,
as I walked beside you, and nothing
as of yet
connected me to you. Although I
longed only
for the strongest tie to bind me to
you. Tell me,
don’t your relatives pursue you
altogether too much? You shouldn’t
have had time for me, even if I had
come
to Berlin. But what am I saying? Is
this how I want
to bring my self-reproaches to an
end? And finally,
wasn’t I right not to have come to
Berlin? But
when shall I see you? In the
summer? But why
precisely in the summer, if I shan’t
see you at Christmas?
The second cycle of poems specifically deals with the city of Berlin and Berbely’s visit there in the mid-1990’s. Each poem in this series is given the name of a specific place or a district in Berlin. Poem titles include, “Naturhistorisches Museum,” Herrmann Strasse,” and Heidelberger Platz.” The translator, in his afterword, points out that it is in this series of poems where Benjamin’s Arcades Project is heavily alluded to. The poems are a blend of Borbély’s personal experience of Berlin with that city’s complicated history. In “Krumme Lanke” he opens with a memory of the “last days of the Reich” and proceeds to tell a story of two soldiers who ignore their superior’s orders and have a clandestine meeting. The poem then shifts without a transition to the poet’s own memory of walking next to Krumme Lanke: “Our conversation/ was more of a remember, a/revocation of all that had happened earlier. Like a/ film being played in reverse.” There is a deep sense of wandering that pervades these poems as he visits train stations, various seedy parts of the city and the natural history museum and uses these places as starting point with which to reflect on Berlin’s past and the poet’s present.
The series of poems entitle “Epilogue” do not appear to have any specific references to famous authors and are the most deeply personal and reflective. These poems only appear at the beginning and end of the collection and show us a writer who is battling many emotional demons:
[Epilogue II]
For the dead are expected to know the
path
above the precipice of the everyday.
When
they leave the lands of despair, and
depart
towards a kingdom far away and
unknown,
which is like music. Swelling, a solitary
expectation everywhere present. this
music
does not break through the walls. It
taps gently.
It steals across the crevices. Silently it
creeps,
and cracks open the nut hidden deep
within the coffer.
Next, are a series of poems entitled “Fragment” which are all addressed to an unnamed receiver. There is a deep sense of not only hesitation but also loneliness in these poems. He begins the first “Fragment” poem:
Yes, I could express it simply by
saying
that our conversation left in me a vacant space. Since then, every
day contains this space.
Of the five different categories of poetry, the “Fragments” are my favorite because Borbély’s own voice, pain, and struggle come through most clearly. I found a line from “Fragment III” especially chilling and laden with foreshadowing: “My need is for those who will know/how/all of this will end.” Borbély tragically takes his own life in 2014at the age of fifty and there are hints throughout his poems that allude to his melancholy.
The final category of poems are called “Allegory” and are a mixture of philosophical observations which still maintain obvious references to Kafka. The first poem in the collection especially evokes images of Kafka and his complicated relationship with his father:
[Allegory I]
The pierced heart, in which lovers
believe, recalls me to
my task. Always have I desired
to be led. My father’s spirit instruc-
ted me
in ruthlessness. what he missed in
life, he now
in death wished to supplant. I did
not
find my upbringing to be a comfort.
the spirit of our age is for me
excessively
libertine. My scorn is reserved for
the weak.
Finally, a word must be said about the afterward which was beautifully written by the translator. It serves as a thorough introduction to Borbély’s life, literary influences, and style of writing but is also a fitting eulogy for this gifted poem whom the world lost too soon.
About the Author:
borbelySzilárd Borbély is widely acknowledged as one of the most important poets to emerge in post-1989 Hungary. He worked in a wide variety of genres, including essay, drama, and short fiction, usually dealing with issues of trauma, memory, and loss. His poems appeared in English translation in The American Reader, Asymptote, and Poetry. Borbély received many awards for his work, including the Attila József Prize. He died in 2014.