BOOKS
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rime in rapid flighr
while rhe people are asleep.
Transylvanian poets function as secret transmitters of hope, common
expe rience, and empathy. Thus, it is not surprising that one Transyl–
vanian poet has chosen to pay tribute to a black American blues singer,
while another invokes Native Americans as brothers-in-colonization.
"Blues," by Istvan Ferenczes, invokes Louis Armstrong in its lament for
all those deprived of a homeland and who make art out of their personal
suffering and displacement:
Ladi es and gentlemen
rhe man in whose blood
rhey pa n for gold
Louis Armstrong
now sings for you-
Gcza Szocs's "Indian Words on the Radio" is dedicated to the Native
American writer William Least Heat Moon. As the note accompanying
the poem explains, Moon was a member of the
u.s.
delegation to the
f985
session of the Cultural Forum in Budapest. There, he spoke on
behalf of SZ0CS, then under house arrest in Transylvania, presumably for
incendiary writings since "the policeman watching the rSzocs'sJ house
[hadJ orders to tear the paper out of the typewriter if the poet should
ever sit down to it." Moon appea led to the Romanian government to
honor its poets, and to all participants of the conference to make pub–
lic the names of silenced poets worldwide. Szocs's gratitude emerges in
a serio-comic poem mimicking drumbeat rhythms and showing Indians
in a cavalry-to-the-rescue role blazing across Siberia.
Throughout the volume poems seethe with anxiety over the role of a
poet writing in a little-known and increasingly devalued tongue in a
global environment in which all language grows slippery and meaning–
less as it is increasingly put in the service of insidious forces-of the
market or of political mendacity. Bela Marko's metaphor for poetry's
potential futility is a "Blind Man's Mirror":
Will I be superfluous, wiped clean
like a blind man's mirror for the lack
of real use and hang around for the
blind to wave at so that I wave back
