Dávid Locker: Reflection Holds the Knife
"The stakes of Locker’s subjective poetry are without a doubt life itself: the experience, understanding, and operation of both ourselves and the world," from A Bay of Megaphones, a new bilingual anthology of young Hungarian poets, a poem by Dávid Locker in Austin Wagner's translation, introduced by Katalin Szlukovényi.
16th May, 2023
The stakes of Locker’s subjective poetry are without a doubt life itself: the experience, understanding, and operation of both ourselves and the world. The narrative momentum and colloquial familiarity of his free verse sweeps the reader along with a crushing force. ...
Along with the evocation of tradition, both original and well thought-out according to Eliotic standards, I consider the formulation of tension between city and countryside to be particularly important from a thematic point of view. A parallel can be drawn between this theme and the folk-urban argument that was so important in Hungarian literature a century ago, but which modern Hungarian poetry hardly reflects on. The absence is surprising, considering how commonplace the importance of political tension is in the media, and theoretically bears strong resemblance to questions raised by critical trends which deconstruct other hierarchies – feminist, postcolonial, and those focusing on the situation of various ethnic and religious minorities. This is why the way in which the better part of Locker’s extensive poetry, through frequent sketches of a caricature-like but empathetic figure of the lyrical self – born on the other side of the border, raised in the countryside, and university-educated in Budapest – explores many important aspects of this set of controversial issues is indispensable.
Dávid Locker is a tremendously exciting young poet. With the precision and strength of a gut punch, he poses the disconcerting generational question: what is happening, what even can happen, in literature beyond the postmodernism which has long since reflected on a modernity disillusioned with Romanticism? His poetry so far is a convincing attempt at a response.
Katalin Szlukovényi
Reflection Holds the Knife
These are those afternoons when,
like the wind on the platform does dry leaves,
sadness sweeps the reflection from my sentences.
The stifled light of early autumn is all it takes,
and the trees, rusting like
the dented faces of receding trains.
Only on such afternoons, mundane from the offset,
do I allow myself
lines such as these.
And how many poems did I write of sad autumn leaves!
I compared the eyes of my first love to the stars;
in them the blue of the seas.
I gazed at Fejér County’s run-down rows of backyards in the train window,
and typed into my phone, heart thumping: my home.
With pathos – that’s what I would say now,
but at the time I didn’t yet know the word;
when I first heard it in
one of my poetry seminars, it lay dormant in me for years.
When I wrote these at sixteen years of age, I wanted nothing more
than to express myself.
I didn’t notice
I was doing so with others’ sentences.
And yet: as I look back now from this drawn-out waiting,
I think that if ever there was any sincerity hiding in my words,
it died together with those poems’ borrowed sentences
which I shamefully stabbed in the heart,
and shoved into the bin to bleed out.
You all see, I got this from you.
This constant fear of unreflectability.
From you, Deconstructive Acolytes,
Open-Minded Workshop Foremen.
From you, who for two generations learned
that everything you’re able to believe in
is at best an illusion,
at worst a construction.
It was from you I learned this aimless waiting –
well, not for the barbarians
(what does “barbarian” mean?),
just for nothing.
If ever there’s a sunset without irony,
and someone doesn’t find that gaudy,
they’re a sentimental fool: I learned this from you.
It’s impossible for something to simply be: pretty.
I got this from you.
From you, because of whom we are writing to one another.
It doesn’t matter.
I started this poem to show you:
it is possible to write sorrowfully of autumn without being cheap.
But it’s no longer sadness speaking from within me,
it’s anger.
Because if I really think about it, I too am sick of poems about autumn,
the curdled brown sunlight fills me with warmth, but it’s no use.
And the next time a highschooler compares his girlfriend’s eyes to the sea,
I’d be lying if I said my buddy and I weren’t sniggering.
I adapted to be able to adapt.
For me, there’s no way back.
And so nothing remains,
only hope.
The hope that between two sentences,
pulsing with anger and grinning with reflection,
something from this sad cringe-painted splendor trickles through:
from within you,
a sea-eyed
bleeding-heart
star-spangled
naivety.
Translated by Austin Wagner
Öbölnyi megafon – Fiatal magyar költők antológiája / A Bay of Megaphones – Anthology of Young Hungarian Poets contains new poems by young Hungarian poets in Hungarian and in English translation, with essay introductions to each new poet by their mentor, an established Hungarian writer.
Mentees (poems): Soma Kazsimér, Gergő Korsós, Eszter Kósa, Edward Kovács, Zita Kubina, Dávid Locker, Mona Aicha Masri, Dániel Nagy, Anna Ősi, Anett Rékai.
Mentors (essays): János Áfra, Kornélia Deres, Ferenc Gál, János Géczi, Ákos Győrffy, István Kemény, Endre Kukorelly, Katalin Szlukovényi, Krisztina Tóth, András Visky.
Translators: Anna Bentley, Owen Good, Edmond Kulcsár, Ágnes Márton, Austin Wagner.
Photos: Balázs Som, Levente Vigh.
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