Straight Labyrinth
János Pilinszky in the Poetry, Music, and Thought
of Three Hungarian Artists
March 20, 2022 at 3 p.m. EDT
a Zoom event hosted by Diana Senechal
and the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers
“Throughout the event, I felt like I was sinking deeper and deeper into a special moment, a rare occasion when different elements (poems. music, talk) come together into something precious and delightful and whole.” — Veronika Kisfalvi (Montreal, Canada)
Pilinszky, music, poetry, discussion, all in one! Please join the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers (ALSCW), our host Diana Senechal, and our three featured guests—the poet Csenger Kertai and the musicians Gergely Balla (Platon Karataev) and Sebestyén Czakó-Kuraly (Platon Karataev, Cz.K. Sebő)—for an online discussion, recitation, and performance honoring the Hungarian poet János Pilinszky (1921-1981). You can download the basic program. We will leave time at the end for your questions and comments.
On March 20, 2022, we held an online event to learn more about Pilinszky and to listen to our guests in conversation, poetry, and song. Diana Senechal interviewed the guests about Pilinszky and his role in their art and thought; the discussion was combined with recitations of Pilinszky's poems and performances of the guests' own work. The event was free and open to the public via Zoom. (See details below.)
Pilinszky is known around the world for his intensity and brevity of word, his grief over the Holocaust, his solitude and longing for home, his combination of Christian faith and despair, and the translations of his work into English by Ted Hughes, Géza Simon, and others. But his poetry goes far beyond these descriptors.
What made this event special is not only its bilingual nature, not only its emphasis on an extraordinary twentieth-century Hungarian poet, not only its combination of discussion, poetry, and music, not only its featured guests, but the ease with which the audience was to be brought into Pilinszky's work. By focusing on a few poems—discussing them, reciting them, and presenting translations of them—we hoped to leave the audience with something memorable, to which they could later return.
The event was in English and Hungarian; no knowledge of Hungarian was required. We welcomed anyone interested in poetry, literary translation, songs and songwriting, Hungarian language and literature, or Pilinszky himself.
“Pilinszky added a dimension to our lives (all our lives, now, the life of poetry), he enriched us with want, with being lost, the dearth of existence pared down to the bone. The extraordinary catharsis of his poetic power arched over such dearth. It would be good to look now into those places to which he opened a breach, look in through the inner doors of the ante chamber, to those places where destruction is spread out like the sky.”
—Ágnes Nemes Nagy, "János Pilinszky: A Very Different Poet" (1981), translated by Rudolf Fischer
“Egy dimenziót csatolt hozzá Pilinszky az életünkhöz (most már mindnyájunk életéhez, a költészet életéhez), meggazdagított a hiánnyal, elveszettséggel, az egzisztencia csontig, képletig letisztított ínségével. Költői hatalmának kivételes katarzisa ilyen ínségre boltozódott. Most volna jó benézni oda, ahova ő nyitott rést, benézni az előszoba bentebbi ajtaján, most volna jó oda, ahol a pusztulás úgy terül el, mint egy égbolt.”
—Nemes Nagy Ágnes, "Valaki más" (1981)
Pilinszky image credit: Pilinszky János, Szép versek 1971 (published 1972). Photo # 44.
Photo of Sebestyén Czakó-Kuraly by Pál Czirják, published in Kortárs Online.
Photo of Csenger Kertai by Dénes Erdős, published in KULTer.hu.
Photo of Gergely Balla by Márton Ficsor, published in Mandiner.hu.