To be, or not to be?<\/p>\n
Hamlet\u2019s enduring question is one that Szil\u00e1rd Borb\u00e9ly, acclaimed Hungarian poet, verse-playwright, librettist, essayist, literary critic, short-story writer, and, finally, novelist, answered sadly in the negative, through his suicide in 2014, at the age of fifty. <\/p>\n
Loss of life, voluntary or otherwise, permeates Borb\u00e9ly\u2019s writing, evoking a preemptive grief for what must pass away\u2014often violently and suddenly. Yet framing the loss and stitched inextricably through it is all the gusty, aching richness of life lived in spite of its inevitable transience; the animating spirit of its time, for good or ill. This same \u201cepoch-making\u201d quality that author P\u00e9ter N\u00e1das identifies in Borb\u00e9ly\u2019s poetry was embraced in Borb\u00e9ly\u2019s fiction by the Hungarian public upon the sensational publication of The Dispossessed<\/em> (2013), Borb\u00e9ly\u2019s first and only novel, which topped the country\u2019s best-books-of-the-year lists and prompted widespread conversation by ruthlessly stripping the mask of collective nostalgia from the brutal face of intractable poverty in rural villages. <\/p>\n The last major work published in Borb\u00e9ly\u2019s lifetime, The Dispossessed<\/em> presents a memory play filled with disjunct scenes of the author\u2019s early childhood in the 1960s in the remote border-village of T\u00farricse, scenes so scantly fictionalized they might as readily be called memoir. Through the eyes of a small boy, the middle of three children, those scenes reveal a squalid, terrifying life in a close-minded community rife with physical disfigurement and sickness; sunk in prejudice and despair; dominated by cruelty, molestation, violence, and the immanence of death, especially the death of innocent young creatures.<\/p>\n Beaten continually by both their parents, the boy and his elder sister most dread their mother\u2019s moments of suicidal desperation, when the children have to cling to her bodily to keep her from hanging herself in the attic or hurling herself down the well. Their mother, in turn, lives in terror of losing her youngest, an infant boy called the Little One, to any witless accident, as when she catches her kids playing \u201cthe cosmonaut game\u201d with plastic bags over their heads, including the baby\u2019s, turning the Little One\u2019s lips \u201ca purplish blue.\u201d Their father\u2019s constant frustration, driving him to drink, is being denied work by the communist collective, ostensibly for past mistakes on the job, actually because unshakeable old gossip deems him the bastard son of a Jew who lived across the road from his well-to-do parents\u2019 house until the murderous roundups during the Second World War. The narrator\u2019s mother sees the fundamental conviction behind the crushing social conformity that makes her husband embarrass himself by drinking every night with men who despise him; it is both her nemesis and her singular hope, and as readers throughout Hungary recognized, it remains almost as pervasively true today as it was fifty years ago: <\/p>\n No one who is born here ever wishes to go anywhere else. No one ever thinks it\u2019s possible to live somewhere else. To raise a family somewhere else. To build a house somewhere else. Far away from the river, where you wouldn\u2019t have to be afraid of the floods every spring. That\u2019s how peasants think. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n \n<\/p>\n \u201cBut we are not peasants,\u201d the children\u2019s mother insists. \u201cWe\u2019re going to leave here.\u201d<\/p>\n Their mother\u2019s view is diametrically opposed by that of their father\u2019s sister, the children\u2019s vibrant Aunt M\u00e1li, the most piquant character in the book. Barefoot, dwarfish, two-toothed, and vulgar beyond compare, M\u00e1li is a gleeful fixture at funerals, important social occasions where everyone scrutinizes every detail for faults. Untainted by the Jewish question clouding her brother\u2019s fortunes, M\u00e1li is a thoroughgoing thing of the village, drowning her secret pains like a bagful of kittens in a river of manic laughter and alcohol.<\/p>\n Appalling as the systemic abuse and dirt-poor conditions are for the family, Borb\u00e9ly freely admits in interviews that they didn\u2019t even have it the worst in the village. That distinction goes to the dark-skinned Roma consigned to dwelling at the far end of Gypsy Row, close to the narrator\u2019s meager home. When outhouses need mucking, the village men disdainfully summon the gentlest of Gypsies, a man named Messiyah, by asking in front of the local tavern, \u201cHas Messiyah left yet?\u201d As rendered in English, the title The Dispossessed<\/em> refers mainly to the fallen class status of the family, who come from former landowners or \u201ckulaks\u201d on both sides; in Hungarian, Borb\u00e9ly\u2019s title Nincstelenek: M\u00e1r elment a Mesij\u00e1s?<\/em> pointedly pairs the idea of penniless \u201chave-nots\u201d with the critical question of the departure of one whose name deliberately echoes the Messiah. Here, Borb\u00e9ly suggests, is a place even salvation might turn its back on.<\/p>\n Borb\u00e9ly often approaches such moral challenges in mythic or religious guise, particularly in relation to Jewish matters. Here the reflexive hatred of Jews, who loom disproportionately large in the local imagination, even (or especially) in the virtual absence of any Jewish population, turns out to mean more than mere anti-Semitism, lumping together as the villagers do under the catchall word \u201cJew\u201d anyone with any ambition or means to escape the village\u2019s constraints. In such subconscious manner is the Other-as-Jew regarded as an existential threat to the community, and so roundly cursed at every turn (even using the outhouse is sarcastically called \u201cgoing to pay the Jew\u201d). Yet it is in a like manner that the children\u2019s mother fights to keep her tenuous dream, her reason to endure, alive:<\/p>\n \u201cWhy are we different?\u201d I ask. \n<\/p>\n Both in characters and lack of predictable shape, The Dispossessed<\/em> owes a fair amount to Chekhov. (Hypochondriac Aunt M\u00e1li wears black as if she\u2019s a much older woman; when asked what she\u2019s mourning, she blithely snaps, \u201cMy wretched whore life.\u201d) More surprisingly it nods to Vonnegut, too: from the outset, the boy, fascinated with prime numbers, marks each and every encounter with a prime, whether in ages, dates, or quantities, by noting that the number \u201ccan\u2019t be divided, only by itself, and one.\u201d So it goes. Yearning for the indivisible is what braces the child; math helps when all else hurts. But another autobiographical novel that The Dispossessed<\/em> perhaps most echoes in terms of grinding poverty and insurmountable prejudice is The Color of Smoke<\/em> (1975), Menyh\u00e9rt Lakatos\u2019s bildungsroman of a teenage Roma boy in early 1940s Hungary. Where Lakatos, however, uses earthy adolescent sex and humor to leaven a creeping sense of frailty and doom, Borb\u00e9ly takes a poet\u2019s more lyrical tack, no less raw in language or color, but far lighter in touch, accumulating featherweight scenes to arrive at what Borb\u00e9ly calls, in his phenomenal poetry collection Berlin\u2022Hamlet<\/em> (also translated by award-winner Ottilie Mulzet), \u201cthe non-existent terminus\u201d where art and life meet in transit through time.<\/p>\n In so doing, for all its heartbreak, The Dispossessed<\/em> avoids the ultimate grimness of later life: in 2000, at Christmastime, Borb\u00e9ly\u2019s aged parents were assaulted by burglars in a home invasion, his mother beaten to death and his father knocked senseless, the assailants never brought to justice. Borb\u00e9ly cast his response to that horrible event in poetry, in Halotti pompa: Szekvenci\u00e1k<\/em> (Splendors of Death: Sequences<\/em>), then cast his mind back further in prose to the shared suffering of those formative years. A trial and a testament, The Dispossessed<\/em> is also a filial portrait of love and perseverance in the midst of despond, a candlelight faithfully tended against the infinite darkness without.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" To be, or not to be? Hamlet\u2019s enduring question is one that Szil\u00e1rd Borb\u00e9ly, acclaimed Hungarian poet, verse-playwright, librettist, essayist, literary critic, short-story writer, and, finally, novelist, answered sadly in the negative, through his suicide in 2014, at the age of fifty. Loss of life, voluntary or otherwise, permeates Borb\u00e9ly\u2019s writing, evoking a preemptive grief […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":166,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[66286,3996,65976,24996,54556,66296],"class_list":["post-306546","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-harper-perennial","tag-hungarian-literature","tag-jason-newport","tag-ottilie-mulzet","tag-szilard-borbely","tag-the-dispossessed"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306546","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/166"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=306546"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306546\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":332406,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306546\/revisions\/332406"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=306546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=306546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=306546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
\n
\n\u201cBecause we are not from here,\u201d says my mother.
\n\u201cSo does that mean we, too, are Jews?\u201d my sister asks.
\n\u201cThat we will be,\u201d answers my mother.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n