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Review by Andrew Sunshine "This little volume … is by an old friend of mine," Adam Makkai wrote me earlier this year concerning László Neményi’s What Else Can I Say? The poet, a librarian in a town outside Budapest, is "a shy and retiring person," Makkai continued. "I took a liking to his writings and started translating them—finally this little book emerged." What better way for a book to appear than as an act of love and homage? In Makkai’s handiwork I recognize the same impulse that led me last year to edit and publish The Alembic Space, a collection of essays by Joe Malone, a poet, translator, and former teacher of mine. Atlantis-Centaur, Makkai’s not-for-profit press, is receptive to projects of this sort. For that I am grateful not only as a sometime editor, but also as a full-time reader; I was therefore happy to accept Makkai’s recent invitation to serve as a director of the press. What Else Can I Say? is a gift to the poet, to English-language readers, and to the translator himself. Being unfamiliar with Hungarian poetry, I cannot tell whether and when Neményi’s poems are carried along by the current of his poetic heritage and when they run counter to this current. His poems assume a variety of shapes. Some are as short as a single line ("Heights" (33)), some sprawl over three pages ("Fog" (27)). There are sonnets ("Loathing Poetry" (89)) and other sorts of rimed or shaped verse, including one text which the reader is invited to rearrange ("After" (51)); but Neményi seems to favor free verse. It seems to be a good fit for his light touch, whimsical metaphysics, and symbolism. My favorite poem in the volume is "Julie Varga." This Julie Varga cuts a curious figure: part hick (filthy fingernails, walking barefoot in a cow pasture), part urban decadent (a boa around her neck)—still "eternally pretty" (odd, softly damning phrase). What is she doing floating bored in the "manure-marinated soup" that is the "devil’s Sunday lunch"? She is a sad figure, a little silly, dead drunk, unhinged by life—but perhaps she is life itself in all its incongruity, its mere prettiness. Here and elsewhere in Neményi’s poems human and urban detritus (boa, portable radios) or the waste in the fields—I mean cow droppings—intrude upon bucolic or pastoral scenes. In "Public Beach" (15), while sunning himself, the poet notes that the chicken drumsticks of his picnic lunch spread beside him are doing the same: he’s just another piece of roasting meat. Neményi delights in such awkward, illuminating juxtapositions. Neményi has an interesting way of constructing and developing a conceit. The short poem "For Peacefulness" (101) begins "With so much delight in my blood". It then proposes "to expel all lofty pains and sorrows" as though they were flunking students. They should become tenders of geese outside "The Walls" (sounds like a decree in a fairy tale) or else they’ll be sentenced to repeat what they failed—presumably a course in delight or happiness. But then the subject matter is described using terms from Marxist theory (base structure, superstructure), which perhaps suggests that the invocation of happiness at the poem’s outset was ironic. "What Else Can I Say?" (59), the long title poem, seems to be organized along a fault line between I and you, meadow and domicile, black and white, conscious and unconscious, nature and culture. In the poem’s nightmarish exploration of love’s tenacious, implacable, impersonal power, it seems as though the fault line vanishes, what was distinct merges: erotic love and the hatred between lovers have one source, the force which transforms itself through growth, change, and deterioration in plantlife or elsewhere in nature. There is violence and destruction throughout the poem beginning with the tearing down of the curtain between the lovers, but as details accumulate I get the sense that the poet sees this as an inevitable aspect of the whole of which he, a living being, is a part. At least a few poems here could be called "meta-poems," poems about poetry. "More Peacefully Than the Angels" (7) reads like an ars poetica. The poet seeks refuge in silence, but this is denied him by an intruder who comes by whistling merrily. The poem touches on the paradox of the poet’s art: while seeking after the word beyond all words--a utopian dream realized only in silence—his responsibilities condemn or compel him to speak or to sing. "Loathing Poetry" (89), a sonnet, approaches this theme, but in a darker mood. In Makkai’s translation, "loading" becomes "loathing," and the poet seems to suffer from a surfeit of art, reminiscent, perhaps, of the sadness animals feel after coitus. Perhaps "A Face" (73) is also a sort of meta-poem. This poem captures the subject regarding his face reflected and distorted in a vase when he passes it by. The vase, like words or a poem, is a vessel which gives shape to the figures it receives and is an object, a world, unto itself. Though Neményi often seems preoccupied with the decay left in the wake of time’s passing, his reflections are frequently whimsical and therefore brave. There is at times a chatty quality in his work, but not that of a single voice; it’s a sort of cross-chat which often feels like a palimpsest: text written over text without cancelling it out. Perhaps this is what leads in some poems toward surrealism and in others toward mystical intimations of other realities, other coexisting worlds. Andrew Sunshine New York City July 2007 Read an excerpt from this book opens in new window  |
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