Darvasi László: Biography

László Darvasi (Törökszentmiklós, 17 October 1962)

Attila József Prize-winning writer, poet, playwright, columnist. Member of the Digital Literature Academy since 2011.

*

Born on 17 October 1962 in Törökszentmiklós. Graduated from the Juhász Gyula Teacher Training College in Szeged in 1986, majoring in Hungarian Language and Literature and History. Between 1986-1989 he taught in primary schools in Hódmezővásárhely and Szeged. From 1989 he was a staff member of the Délmagyarország daily newspaper, and between 1992 and 1993 he was the cultural columnist for the paper. From 1990 to 1998 he was editor of the Szeged magazine Pompeji. He has been working as a senior editor of Élet és Irodalom since 1993.

*

László Darvasi’s writing is full of human missteps, failures and joys, and features a series of figures who are at once ordinary and strange. The beauty and pain of his sentences, and above all, their truthfulness, is expressed in his short stories, feuilletons, and novels. His elemental, artistic, existential narrative desire turns life into story, and story into life. His literary world is a finely woven, translucent tale.

The narrative need for a coherent, closed world that can be recreated in its story sequences is already transformed into words in the epic registers of his early poems (Horger Antal in Párisban – Antal Horger in Paris, 1991). The proliferating sentences of his poems, overstretched with sensitivity, at once evidential and banal, are torn from the obscurity of lost oracles and creation stories. This poetic self, however, soon sheds its dangerous and impetuous persona and gives way to a fairy-tale, ageless, and innocent male infant in the mixed-genre volume The Portuguese (A portugálok – 1992).

The real reimagining of the world, however, begins in the short stories of The Rose Bushes of Veenhagen (A veinhageni rózsabokrok – 1993). Consistent with detective stories and the genesis of fate, these novels create a world that is gory and brutal, but at the same time beautiful, in which human existence is stretched to the limit in a mythological-European and uncivilised-Balkan embeddedness.

The Borgognoni-type Sorrow (A Borgognoni-féle szomorúság – 1994) offers a playful continuation of the epic or lyricised epic of The Portuguese in the variable, grammatical space of kisses, tears and football. The cycle of Hungarian Short Stories (Magyar novellák) in the volume creates an autonomous genre designation, which also anticipates the surreal Hungarian reality of later volumes of short stories. With Under the line (A vonal alatt – 1994), published under the pseudonym Ernő Szív, the genre of the feuilleton is brought back into the public consciousness: in a charming, intimate tone, Darvasi creates a dialogue between the countryside and the capital from the point of view of a naive columnist working for a rural newspaper. The regular articles he wrote for Délmagyarország and Élet és Irodalom, like How to Seduce The Librarian? (Hogyan csábítsuk el a könyvtáros kisasszonyt? – 1997) and My Collected Loves (Összegyűjtött szerelmeim – 2003), would later become significant collections. The Kleofás-comics (A Kleofás képregény – 1995) is a rich continuation of the apocryphal story of sin and punishment, which began with the ‘rose bush’ stories and recalls the Crusades and the persecution of Jews, the years of peace that ended the Thirty Years’ War, and the city of Szeged, the most populated and vibrant settlement in the Southeastern part of Hungary, in the late 19th century. Behind the stories of fate devoid of all history, history is placed as a backdrop in this volume, anticipating the poetic time-space of the 20th century in My Love, Comrade Dumumba (Szerelmem, Dumumba elvtársnő – 1998). However, the tribulations of Hungarian reality, past and present, and the tragic causes of these situations are not dissected in a realistic way in the new ‘Hungarian short stories’: the existential threat and existential drama hidden in everyday life beyond history are presented in an ironic, comic tone. The volume also includes ‘Spanish’ and ‘American’ short stories that transcend their ‘Hungarian’ status: the transformation of the foreign into the domestic means an expansion of the range of sound imitation, and the universal character of linguistic world-making is thus given an increasingly prominent role – see the later ‘Southern’ Getting a Woman (Szerezni egy nőt – 2000) and ‘Chinese’ short stories, The Dog Hunters of Loyang (A lojangi kutyavadászok – 2002).

A rich selection of Darvasi’s narratives is contained in the representative volume The Happiest Orchestra in the World (A világ legboldogabb zenekara – 2005), while the short stories and co-authored novellas of The Mysterious World XI (A titokzatos világválogatott – 2006) reflect the author’s highly personal, affirmative relationship with football.

In addition to his numerous collections of short stories and magazines, as well as his YA novels Trapiti, or the Great Pumpkin Stew War (Trapiti avagy a nagy tökfőzelékháború – 2002) and Trapiti and the Terrible Rabbit (Trapiti és a borzasztó nyúl – 2004), Darvasi has also made significant contributions to the novel genre. His first novel, The Legend of the Tear-Jerkers, (A könnymutatványosok legendája – 1999), paints a 16th-17th century panorama of Eastern Europe and the Balkans, Hungary, Transylvania, Budapest and Szeged. In the moonlit courtyard of this magical realist novel, characters living and dead, real and fictional, alternate, walking the dusty and endless highway of history, while spinning and casting tears. The Legend of The Tear-Jerkers is an endless stream of short stories, at once an archaic tale and mediatised vision, a grand narrative and a fragment of history, bringing unenchanted heroes and heroic spells into a game both untamed and overheated. The Flower Eaters (Virágzabálók – 2009) takes the reader back to the 19th century, revisiting the familiar and accessible world of Szeged, Budapest, and Vienna as a panoramic view. But it also makes the legend of the Tisza just as familiar and common: with its plants, fish, rugged landscapes, destructive and constructive floods. The novel has a subtle, ironic framework, culminating in a visual, orgiastic moment: the novel’s protagonists barricade themselves up and love each other to death while the flood rages outside. The plot of Flower Eaters culminates in the extraordinary description of the great flood of Szeged, the intertwining and interconnecting story of many lives both large and small. And within this framework, the legend of the Flower Eaters unfolds in a cyclical repetition of story sequences and in a multiple chapter structure.

The biography was written by Attila Bombitz, translated by Benedek Totth and Austin Wagner.