Baka István: Biography

István Baka (Szekszárd, 25 July 1948 - Szeged, 20 September 1995) 

Hungarian poet and literary translator, winner of the Attila József Prize. He was elected a posthumous member of the Digital Literature Academy in 2015.

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István Baka was born in Szekszárd. His mother, Mária Stirsky, was born in Tolna County to a mixed Czech-Serbian-Austrian-Hungarian family, and his father, István Baka, was also born in Szekszárd. They lived in Bata. He started primary school in Tamási.

In March 1956 they moved from Bata to Szekszárd, where Baka wrote his first poems at the age of eight. He started secondary school and attended the Russian section of the local high school. It was there that he experienced one of the most significant events of his life: the unrequited love which is in many ways recalled in his poetry and prose. His adolescent poems are published under the pseudonym „érkező” („arriving person”) in a local newspaper.

He graduated from high school in 1966. In 1967, he began his studies at the Hungarian–Russian faculty of József Attila University in Szeged.

On 1 February 1969, he married his university classmate, Tünde Ökrös. They had two children, Ágnes (1973) and Tamás (1978).

In February 1969, Mihály Ilia published Baka’s poems in the literary journal Tiszatáj.

He spent his last academic year in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) in 1971–72. He became lifelong friends with Russian underground intellectuals and frequently read samizdat publications. He discovered the likes of Osip Mandelhtam, Victor Aleksandrovich Sosnora, and Joseph Brodsky. During his university years, he went from a young man who was almost exclusively focused on his own inner world, a lover of abstract literary and musical experiences, to a determined, conscious poet with a sense of responsibility for his people and nation.

In June 1972, he obtained his degree as a teacher of Russian and Hungarian. In September of that year, his poems were published in the journal Kortárs.

Between 1972 and 1974, he taught Hungarian and Russian in a secondary school.

In May 1974 he visited Bulgaria at the invitation of the Writers’ Union. A love affair lead him to learn Bulgarian, and he became friends with Kiril Kadiiski, whose poems he ended up translating. In the autumn, he returned to Szeged, where he became a staff member, and later editor-in-chief, of the children’s literary magazine Kincskereső. He was also frequently the head of the national Kincskereső-camp’s poetry school in Szeged, which was held every summer and was linked to the spirit of the journal.

His first book of poetry, Magdolna Downpour (Magdolna-zápor), was published in 1975. In 1976 he discovered the music of Gustav Mahler, and a year later he wrote the long poem Trauermarsch. In November 1977, the Reflex Stage in Zalaegerszeg presented his poetic play „A Wartime Winter Night” („Háborús téli éjszaka”).

In 1979, his poems were published in Abandoned Ships, an anthology for young poets without a standalone poetry volume of their own.

In 1981, his second volume, Tűzbe vetett evangélium (Gospel Cast into the Fire), is published.

In 1984, his first book of prose and drama, Szekszárd Mass (Szekszárdi mise), was published.

In 1985, he was awarded the Robert Graves Prize[1] for his poem „Ferenc Liszt’s Night in the House on Fish Square” („Liszt Ferenc éjszakája a Hal-téri házban”). His third book of poems, Döbling, was also published that year. He also translated the poems of Victor Sosnora, whom he hosted for an extended period during the summer.

In 1988, his second book of prose and drama, The Little Boy and the Vampires (A kisfiú és a vámpírok) was published.

In 1990, he published a volume of selected and new poems under the title In the Crosshairs of Cardinal Points (Égtájak célkeresztjén).

In 1992, The Hour of the Wolves (Farkasok órája) was published. He created his recurring „lyrical” alter-egos, Yorick and Stepan Pehotny. He listed himself in journal publications as the translator of the poems of his „Russian other”, whose name is derived from a mirror translation of his own name. He received the inaugural Tiszatáj Prize.

In 1993, his comedy revue „The Corinthian Bride” („A korinthoszi menyasszony”) was performed at the Szeged National Theatre. He began to suffer from a serious illness and underwent an operation in June. In the autumn semester, he gave a seminar on literary translation for the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Szeged.

In May 1994, he underwent another operation, became partly disabled, and retired from Kincskereső. The Testament of Styepan Pehotnij (Sztyepan Pehotnij testamentuma) won the Artisjus Book of the Year Award in 1994. The Szeged Studio of the Hungarian Radio presented the radio adaptation of „The Corinthian Bride.”

In 1995 the radio played „God in the City” („Isten a városban”), based on the short story „Sunday Afternoon” („Vasárnap délután”), which won the drama competition of Hungarian Radio and the Prix Italia festival prize in 1996.

In 1995, To November’s Angel (November angyalához) was published. He compiled a book of collected poems, Landscape with a Prayer (Tájkép fohásszal), and translated Russian poetry (Russian Symbolist Poets, Poems of Nikolai Gumilyov) for the Slavic Studies Department of Szeged University.

He died on 20 September 1995. At his request, he was laid to rest in the Alsóvárosi cemetery in Szekszárd.

His posthumous volumes include Landscape with a Prayer (Tájkép fohásszal) and Poems of Pushkin in translation in 1996, a translation of Brodsky’s New Life in 1997, and a selection of his essays, Map Symbols of Time (Az idő térképjelei) in 1999. His life’s work has been published in six volumes by Tiszatáj.

In 2015 he was posthumously elected to the Digital Academy of Literature.

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Sándor Olasz: Portrait of István Baka

István Baka, the most important poet associated with Szeged in the post-war period, completed his university studies in Szeged, where he lived from 1974 until his death and worked as a staff member and deputy editor-in-chief of Kincskereső. His first poems were published by Mihály Ilia in Tiszatáj. His early volumes – Magdolna Downpour (Magdolna-zápor, 1975) and Gospel Cast into the Fire (Tűzbe vet vetett evangélium, 1981) – show poetry inspired by Vörösmarty, Ady, and László Nagy. However, these early volumes are already characterised by his unique voice. In the 1980s, he also wrote prose: Szekszárd Mass (Szekszárdi mise, 1984) and The Little Boy and the Vampires (A kisfiú és a vámpírok, 1988). In his most significant prose work, Szekszárd Mass, he tells the story of the encounter between János Séner, a musician from Szekszárd who is immersed in a provincial environment, and the great Ferenc Liszt, and their battle of words reveals a question of existence which, although it is linked to the 19th century history of Hungary, retains its timeliness to this day. Péter Balassa writes: „This story is not about the search for identity and the fearful/compensating cult of identity, but about the search for the proportions of ascendancy, the possibilities and failures of measuring it, the compatibility of pettiness and stature.”

In the last decade of his life, István Baka’s poetry rose to the forefront of contemporary lyricism. He left behind a closed and complete oeuvre that combined almost all the major strands of Hungarian poetry, from folk to objective. His poetry is characterised just as much by the Herderian lyric, which is rooted in the national tradition, as it is by the existential, Heideggerian, or linguistic-critical Wittgensteinian. His early poems show a profound embrace of the tradition of national poetry that takes on a sense of destiny. But it wasn’t just the communist regime and its representatives that István Baka clashed with at this time. He also had problems with human existence. For him, the real reality was increasingly manifesting itself outside concrete space and time. This is the point where Baka left the inherited discourse of the Hungarian lyrical tradition with works such as In The Crosshairs of Cardinal Points (1990), The Hour of Wolves (1992), Testament of Stepan Pehotny (1994), To the Angel of November (1995), Landscape with a Prayer: Poems 1969–1995 (1996).

One of the most solid elements of Baka’s experience of existence is the recognition that everyday and historical time is nothing but a constant cycle. The role of the god motif, so common in Baka’s poetry, also becomes clear in this context. The God of the poem, the poet declares, is „the totality of the irrational forces that govern our lives and history. God is therefore a symbol of destiny, of the irrationality of existence, of forces against which the individual – and not only the individual – has no hope of resisting.”

István Baka, struggling with an incurable illness and enduring the tortures of physical suffering, transformed the tragedy of individual life into a universal complaint against the inexorability of time. As an earthly prisoner of the lyrical hero’s time, in the grip of his waning weeks and days, aware of the approaching nothingness, he relived the richness of the opportunities he had experienced. His poems dazzle the reader with their penchant for role-playing, their richness of self-stylisation. In his poetry, Baka often uses great figures and symbols of culture both universal and Hungarian. Among his most personal poems is the Book of Poems by Stepan Pehotny. The author invents a Russian samizdat poet – translating his own name into Russian – and writes his life’s work. To make the illusion perfect, he even gives the poems Russian titles. Of course, all this could hardly have been successful without a knowledge of Russian literature (including the part of it that was forced into illegality). Baka has left behind a vast oeuvre of translations, and more than two-thirds of this work consists of Russian translations, from Pushkin to the contemporary.

In István Baka’s poetry, a resolute and consistent attitude meets the ethics of the discipline of the craft. When in recent lyric poetry there is so much contingency, and the sentence fragments haphazardly thrown in frequently lose their validity at the moment of writing, that is when, in this great effort to relativize, Baka’s poems reaffirm that modern is not only what is fashionable. He contrasts linguistic fragmentation and decomposition with the rigor of linguistic shaping and the discipline of composition. His oeuvre was published by Tiszatáj Books in Szeged.

The biography was written by Attila Bombitz, the portrait by Sándor Olasz. Translated by Benedek Totth and Austin Wagner.