In this autobiographical novel, through the stream of consciousness method Somlyó relates how he survived deportation. The time span of the novel is a single day, the 28th of November, 1944, which is incidentally the birthday of the author. The narrator, armed with a fake passport, waits at the railway station at Józsefváros, having made a miraculously narrow escape: the Swedish register contains a name similar to his own, and although neither the number of the passport nor any of the other relevant detail corresponds, Raoul Wallenberg (the heroic Swede who saved hundreds of Jews in Budapest) accepts the document, and the gendarme forgets to intervene. The central character thus remains on this section of the ramp, remains alive. The novel serves as a document of the era and a sensitive chronicle of a bleak situation and humane attitude.

As usual in essays written by poets, the governing principle in György Somlyó’s studies is that the analyses derive from the work and characteristic traits of the author who writes them. This distinguished expert of French literature allows the reader into his workshop as a translator. Among his portraits drawn of writers and poets, there are his eminent predecessors (among others, the poet’s father, Zoltán Somlyó, and other great figures of the Nyugat), his own contemporaries and friends (particularly noteworthy is his study of Sándor Weöres’s Psyche), as well as French authors he had become familiar with by translating them. According to Somlyó, personal relationships and objective judgment of the work are not contradictory factors. His studies emphasize the role of aesthetics and thought in an over-politicised world; he believes it is possible for canons in literature to exist in parallel.

 

“The two-volume collection of studies, thanks to the excellent editing...selects form and arranges sixty years of writing so that we get a clear survey of the main topics and historical development of Somlyó’s oeuvre as an essayist and writer of studies, of his preferences in Hungarian and world literature and of his theoretic-aesthetic, critical and translator’s convictions as well.”

                                                                                  -Gyöngyi Mikola

 

To quote the words of a younger fellow poet, László Bárdos, “Somlyó is the apostle of modernity, of Rimbaud’s theory, ‘to be modern, throughout.’” His oeuvre is almost completely characterised by the artistry of form he ‘inherited’ from the poets of the Nyugat, but which he, in fact, made convenient for his needs through a set of translations (e.g., the Paul Valéry translations). He especially delights in the sonnet and the antique Greek forms from which he departs only for the sake of a few prose poem volumes (A mesék könyve, The Book of Tales). Among the Hungarian poets, he found his masters in Lőrinc Szabó, Milán Füst and Lajos Kassák, and, in the more distant past, János Arany. After World War II, he came close to the poets of the Újhold (New Moon), then, following brief enthusiasm for the Stalinist system and the subsequent crisis, by the end of the 1950s he found his mature voice, a poetry of constant inner contemplation and playful variety.

            Somlyó belongs to the modern stream of Hungarian and world literature. Somlyó also published a book of poems written in French (Parisiens).

 

“We hardly have another contemporary poet whose books are so full of allusion, motivic reference, mentioning of names as are his: from the Chinese to the Greek-Latin classics, from the Middle Ages to the present, and not at all simply from the poetry of the great western languages, however frequent they might be, but from the Greek Kavafy to the Russians.”

                                                                                  - Béla G. Németh