Áprily Lajos: Biography

Lajos Áprily (Brașov, 14 November 1887 – Budapest, 6 August 1967)

Lajos Áprily was a József Attila Prize-winning poet and literary translator. He was posthumously elected to the Digital Literature Academy in 2017.

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He was born on 14 November 1887 in Brașov to a Saxon bourgeois family. He took on the pen name Áprily in 1918. A year later, the family moved to Praid. His father was fluent in Hungarian, German, and Romanian, and got a job as an accountant for the local match factory. Áprily’s childhood experiences with nature had a profound influence on his life and poetry. His parents, János Lajos Jékely and Berta Ziegler, a German from Pilsen, spoke German with one another, and so Áprily had a German accent as a child. Growing up in a Székely village, Áprily spent his summers with his mother in Brașov. „This parallel world of feelings in Praid and Brașov, the frequent alternation of the two perspectives, the assessment of Hungarian village life from a German point of view, and the German perception of the Hungarian point of view […] taught me early on to be critical and prevented me from developing a narrow-minded bias.” – quotes Zsigmond Vita from Áprily’s unpublished 1908 autobiography.

In 1899, due to the closure of the match factory, the family moved to Cluj-Napoca, where Áprily became a student at Reformed College. In 1904, his father lost his job and a failed business venture took all his savings. The young Áprily tried to support his parents, who had fallen on hard times, by giving German language lessons. At college he excelled in poetry recitation, and was also attracted to a career in acting, but eventually enrolled in a Hungarian-German course in 1905. This was the year his first poem, „Remembers” („Emlékszik”), was published in the University Journal of Cluj-Napoca.

He finished his university studies in 1909. This was also when his poem „People” („Emberek”) was published in the Transylvanian Papers (Erdélyi Lapok). Negative criticism from a teacher who objected to the excessively modern tone of his poems discouraged him from publishing for a long time afterwards. Although he wrote steadily and with increasing maturity in his own voice, for a decade his wife was the only one to read his poetry.

In 1909 he began teaching at Bethlen College in Aiud, and from then until 1926 the family’s life was tied to the city. In 1911, he married Ida Schéfer, whom he had met during his student days in Cluj. Their children – Zoltán (1913), Endre (1914), and Márta (1920) – were born there. In addition to teaching Hungarian and German, from 1920 he also taught French, led a study group, gave lectures on literary history, and regularly organized excursions for his students and fellow teachers. The family also survived the First World War in Enyed, the shock of which is preserved in his cycle of poems entitled „Names” („Nevek”), written in memory of his students and fellow teachers who died in the war.

In early 1921 Áprily’s first volume, Village Elegy (Falusi elégia), was published. It was well received by the literary circles, and the poet soon became a prominent figure in the Transylvanian Hungarian literary scene. In 1923, his second volume, entitled Evening Dialogue (Esti párbeszéd), was published.

In 1926, Áprily moved with his family to Cluj-Napoca in order to fulfil his increasingly important role in the organization of Hungarian literary life in Transylvania. He took up a teaching post at Reformed College in Cluj and became the editor of the literary supplement of the daily newspaper Opposition (Ellenzék). In 1926 he helped found the Helikon Writers’ Society, and from 1928 he became editor of their journal, the Transylvanian Helikon.

During their years in Cluj, the family built a small summer house on the banks of the Someș River, where the most important literary figures of the period (Sándor Reményik, Aladár Kuncz, Jenő Dsida, Miklós Bánffy) were frequent guests. In addition to his 1926 volume Rasmussen hajóján (On Rasmussen's Boat), he published an anthology of poems, You Are a Poem Too (Vers vagy te is), and a drama, The Shepherds of Mount Ida (Idahegyi pásztorok), in 1929.

In 1929 Áprily decided to move to Budapest for the sake of his children’s future. His emigration shocked his peers. Áprily first got a teaching post at a reformed secondary school, then worked as the director of the Baár-Madas Reformed School from 1934 until his retirement in 1943. During a trip in the late 1930s, he found a hillside near Visegrád that reminded him so much of Transylvania that he decided to buy land and build a house there.

After the Second Vienna Award, when Northern Transylvania became part of Hungary, his son Zoltán and his daughter Márta moved back to Cluj-Napoca. Áprily himself seriously considered moving back as well, but this plan was not to be realized. After the US Army bombing raids in June 1944 and the Romanian capitulation in August, the situation in Transylvania became hopeless; the family resettled, and those who had stayed in Hungary became isolated for a long time.

In 1943, when he would have been forced to reject pupils of Jewish origin to his school, he retired from Baár-Madas and moved to Visegrád-Szentgyörgypuszta, the valley which now bears his name. Here he survived the last years of the war with his wife, daughter, and grandchildren. In 1946, his three-year-old granddaughter Anna Mikecs died of dysentery. This was the greatest trauma of his life. From then on, his life in Szentgyörgypuszta was increasingly secluded, and after the publication of his two books of poetry in the 1930s, The Ballad of the Gold Washer (Az aranymosó balladája) in 1934 and The Invisible Writing (A láthatatlan írás) in 1939, he did not publish any volumes for almost twenty years, at first for personal reasons and later for political ones.

In the 1950s, his literary translations from German, English, Latin, French, Romanian, and Russian were his only activity in the literary sphere. In 1957, he published selected and new poems under the title Abel’s Smoke (Ábel füstje), followed in 1964 by The Golden Stag (Az aranyszarvas), a book of his work as a translator, and in 1965 by his new poems, Report from the Valley (Jelentés a völgyből). In the same year he published his fables under the title Swallows, Deer, Wolves (Fecskék, őzek, farkasok).

The most complete selection of his poetry to date, For the Wall of The Age (A kor falára), was published shortly before his death in 1967. He died on 6 August 1967 in the Hárshegy sanatorium and was laid to rest in the cemetery at Visegrád.

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Áprily’s date of birth would place him as a contemporary of the first generation of Nyugat (Hungary’s most important literary journal of progressive works, established in 1908), but due to his late start as a poet, he was more of a disciple of them. The beginning of his career also coincides with the year of the Treaty of Trianon and the annexation of Transylvania to Romania, so the early years of his poetic career run parallel to the search for identity in Hungarian literature, which had become a minority literature, and the development of its institutional system and the unfolding of the ideals of Transylvanianism.

The material of his early volumes shows the signs of unity, and in Village Elegy, the poems of which were in fact written years before publication, as well as in the second volume of Evening Dialogue, most of his later major themes and the main features of his poetry (nature symbolism, Greek mythology, fear of and longing for death, elegiac-melancholic undertones, humanism, strong musicality, polished classical verse forms, closed composition) are already present.

In his third volume, the sound of alienation and loneliness becomes more pronounced, with the titular poem „On Rasmussen’s Boat” as a symbol of a lonely, hopeless life. But at the same time, the ars poetic final poem of the volume, „Confession” („Vallomás”), one of the most open self-portraits of the shy, reclusive poet, takes a stand for his faith in man. His 1929 one-act drama in verse, „The Shepherds of Mount Ida”, is built around similar ideas, and gives voice to his humanist convictions in the setting of a Greek saga.

Although his settlement in Hungary in 1929 brought major changes to his life, it did not bring about a radical change in the themes, motifs, and language of his poetry. In his 1934 volume The Ballad of the Gold Washer, the cycle Log on the River Tisza (Rönk a Tiszán) contains some 30 new poems, most of which are inspired by old memories and nostalgia for the homeland. The most significant piece in the volume, For the Wall of The Age, is one of the key poems of his oeuvre, fleshing out the motifs that were ever present in his poetry.

During the Second World War, his poetry is primarily a reckoning of personal pain and loss, expressed first in the Taganrog-cycle which mourns the death of his son-in-law, and then in the 40 poems of the cycle Her Name was Anna (Annának hívták), born out of the shock of the death of his granddaughter Anna Mikecs.

It was also during the years of the war that he found a new mode of expression that would become the primary voice of his later poetry: the quatrains. This new form of expression is not an aphorism, it does not convey lessons, but captures the impressions of the lyric self with incredible conciseness, emotional fervour, and musicality, and alludes to eternal human situations by means of simple motifs (mostly inspired by nature). These poems, however, did not appear until 1957 in a volume entitled Abel’s Smoke. This volume, which sold out in bookshops immediately after its publication, once again brought Áprily to the attention of readers and critics.

In 1965, his new collection Report from the Valley was published, in which he turns his most popular form of his time, the quatrains, into a genuine lyrical diary. The tone of the volume is determined by awareness of the nearness and inevitability of death and the hope of a „good death” and reconciliation. His poems can be considered one of the most beautiful old-age lyrics in Hungarian literature.

Although he did not create a school of poetry and has no poetic disciples, many of the symbols of Áprily’s poetry are still present in Hungarian literature today. „Áprily is the poet who has a sect”, said Ágnes Nagy Nemes, his pupil in Baár-Madas. His compositions, perfect in form and music, his powerful images of nature writing, and his deep humanism still appeal to his readers.

The biography was written by Sarolt Péterfy, translated by Benedek Totth and Austin Wagner.