Skylark - Dezso Kosztolanyi [2]
A parlament a falra ment (Parliament hall has gone to the wall). First of all, of course, my poor translator goes to the wall, indeed, bangs his head against it, tearing out his hair. But such is life: hard. My life is hard, so was poor Kosztolányi's, why should the translator be the one to get off lightly? Yet even irrespective of the meaning of this sentence (that parliament hall has gone to the wall), one can appreciate its manifold beauty, rhyme and symmetry. This sentence formed the foundation of my children's political education. The Hungarian parliament, that unbelievable and–to Hungarian eyes–beautiful, if arguably intolerable, pseudo-Gothic building, at once announces the age of the young Kosztolányi, the incomprehensible self-confidence and ambition of the beginning of the century and the undeniable emptiness of its intentions. Driving past this building, all I had to do was point and the children would merrily whoop, “Parliament hall has gone to the wall.” In those days, anything more about the Hungarian parliament, or our so-called socialist democracy, simply wasn't worth knowing.
Kosztolányi was perhaps the world's greatest rhymer, or master of rhyme. The Hungarian language is particularly well suited to this circus stunt, indeed it is hardly even a matter of bravado. Hungarian, unlike other languages, to this day treats rhyme, that cheap and dubious element, as a generally accepted and usable possibility.
I would even venture to say that it was Kosztolányi who did most to make the Hungarian language what it is today. To change a language visibly, perceptibly, at the everyday level, is something very few writers ever achieve. Kosztolányi changed the Hungarian sentence. The Hungarian language anyway stands in a dramatic relationship to the sentence. Our language, as Babits wrote, “doesn't roll along on such well-worn wheels, doesn't think in place of the writer. It lacks those solid, ready-made phrases, those tiny components of style on which the English or French writer can draw without so much as thinking.” In Hungarian there are no clearly defined prohibitions; in a certain sense everything is possible and everything has to be invented over and over again. Every single sentence is an individual achievement. This individuality is both good and bad.
Kosztolányi simplified the Hungarian sentence, made it shorter, purer. The nineteenth-century sentence was long-winded, the meaning wandering through long periodic structures, and in any case the Hungarian long sentence is a dubious formation because the words do not have genders and the subordinate clauses are more uncertainly connected to the main clauses than in the reassuring rigour of a Satzbau (German sentence construction). Such sentences totter along, uncertain even of themselves, stammer a little; in short, are extremely lovable.
These are our internal affairs, important internal affairs; let's look at what lies beyond the sentence.
First of all, in the spirit of Kosztolányi, we might say: nothing. Beyond language there is nothing. There are only words, and from these words the poet builds up everything, not just his books, his works, but ultimately he assembles himself and his own fate through words–his feelings, his father, his lovers. This is, of course, an exaggeration, even if it happens to be true. It is true because a writer–in the opinion of this present writer–should not have something to say, and an exaggeration because it would not be a good thing if his books didn't have anything to say either. If the writer speaks, that's pedantry; if the book keeps silent–then what's the point?
Kosztolányi's books, let's be precise here, speak about death, about play and about Kakania, or rather about the interweaving of all three, sometimes about their identity, about the confusion of twentieth-century man for whom life is a game, the whole world is a game,