Barbarian Prayer [antikvár]

FOREWORD sAndor csoóri : witness Sándor Csoóri's poetry serves as a passionate mirror of post-World War II Hungary. It presents a world of toppled bridges, razed villages, the wounded and the dead, for above all, Csoóri is a witness, an unrelenting witness, to the turmoil of his homeland in recent times. Yet this witness keeps searching for answers, sometimes in the face of a beautiful woman, sometimes in an attachment to nature, and sometimes in the doggedly persistent belief in the value of the search itself. But he does not find answers usually, and most of his poems end with the speaker alone, remembering a past that had once held meaning, considering a future which, at best, will be filled with struggle. The present, under Csoóri's unrelentingly honest perspective, is one of lies and hypocrisy, a time in which the speaker is barely able to maintain his own integrity. Yet that is one of the major strengths of Sándor Csoóri's poetry: there is an individual self who is able to exist, albeit with extreme hardships, in an age and society which values the depersonalization of man. Csoóri's speaker is always an identifiable person, one with a past (however horrific), a present (however despondent), and a future (however tenuous); this is the voice of a human being, presumably the poet himself, who is struggling to maintain his independent individuality. As Csoóri has said: "From the first there has been present in my work, in whichever genre, a general sense of unease. About how to maintain the existence of the human personality in the world amid the great campaigns of depersonalization." ("Autobiographical Note", ARION 12 Budapest, 1980.) Csoóri has refused to surrender this concept of selfhood, either to the "great campaigns of depersonalization" or to the abstractions of much contemporary poetry. The voice of alienation and solitude comes from so deep within him that it is undeniable. When he writes of his own life, whether it be about an early love, or about a time when