314
PARTISAN REVIEW
Living
by
the
Word
I REMAIN: VOICES OF THE HUNGARIAN POETS FROM TRANSYlVANIA.
Edited by Gyongyver Hark6. Translated by Paul Sohar. Pro-Print.
$
I
3.00.
Show me the poets you read,
and I'll tell you who you are
Show me the poets you rally around,
and I'll tell you what will become of you.
-"The Voice,"
Alad~lr
UszlMfy
IT IS IRONIC THAT ONLY AFTER the fall of the Berlin Wall, the retreat of
the Soviets from the Eastern Bloc, and the atrocities of Bosnia and
Kosovo did the term "ethnic cleansing" begin
to
ring familiar
to
Amer–
ican ears. A famous poem of Gyula I\Iyes's published in
19()5,
"While
the Record Plays," chronicles in terms both metaphoric and literal
Romania's much earlier program of ethnic cleansing of the Hungarian
minorities in Transylvania for much of this century. In verse bald as news
reports, IIlyes's poem recounts the abduction
,mel
public execution, car–
ried out with chilling deliberateness and efficiency, of a group of Hun–
garian villagers. Not depicting any particular documented incident, but
imaginatively reconstructing a pattern of atrocities against Hungarians,
the poem shows how the wrath of the powers that be is roused by triv–
ial differences of custom-"the women did not cook nor make beds as
theirs did.... men did not greet one another as they did." The selected
victims are hauled off to the marketplace by henchmen who
-because of
hlah-blah-blah
and moreover
quack-quack-qllack
and likewise
quack-blah-quad:
-would beat and behead them,
of historical necessity-because of
twaddle-twiddle
and
twiddle-diddle .
...
The phonograph record of the poem's title, blasted over loudspeakers
during the executions in mockery of the dead, refers
to
the illusion of nor–
malcy maintained by the West, especially during the C:eausescLI regime, in
