Gergely Ágnes: Biography

Ágnes Gergely (Endrőd, 5 October 1933 –)

Kossuth Prize-winning Hungarian poet, prose writer, essayist, translator. Member of the Digital Literature Academy since 2000.

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Born on 5 October 1933 in Endrőd. Her father was a journalist, her mother a clerk.

Although she has lived in Budapest since her school days, her rural roots have remained strong. Zala county, and its seat Zalaegerszeg, were the stage on which her childhood played out, while her father’s intellectual legacy and her family of intellectuals link her to Transdanubia. She always spent her summers and holidays „at home”, in her home village at her maternal grandmother’s house, which is why the landscape of the lowlands and the village world remain close to her. It was here that she stored family memories of her farming, industrial, and trading ancestors, and where she learned the traditions of a life built on hard work and a respect for simplicity.

The peace and security of her childhood was shattered by the Second World War. Their home in Budapest was looted, and her father was deported at the end of 1944, never to return home. After the war, her mother began to rebuild their life on her own, first in Endrőd, then in Szeged, and finally in Budapest.

By profession, Ágnes Gergely was originally a teacher. On the threshold of her university years, however, there were two marked departures from the typical years of a student. Before completing her secondary school studies, she passed her entrance exams to the University of Theatre and Film Arts at the age of 17, but her murdered father’s journalistic past – his ties to the „right-wing” branch of the Social Democrats – and her intellectual and bourgeois family soon led to her be excluded from further studies at the college. In defiance, she enrolled as an industrial apprentice and obtained a vocational certificate as an iron-steel worker in 1952. She then completed secondary school with intensive language studies, and in 1953 she obtained her diploma. In the same year, she was admitted to Eötvös Loránd University, and in 1957 she received a degree in Hungarian and English Studies from the Faculty of Humanities.

She began her career first as a primary, and then secondary school teacher. Since her student days, she has been interested in literature, ancient classical culture, and modern languages, and as a university student she also attended seminars on literary translation. It was during these years that she started translating and writing. Her first volumes of literary translations were published in 1958–59 (works by James Joyce and Dylan Thomas), and her first book of poetry, You Are a Sign on My Doorpost (Ajtófélfámon jel vagy), was published in 1963. In the 1960s, she also began to write prose with Glogovácz and the Somnambulists (Glogovácz és a holdkórosok).

She married in 1961, but divorced the following year. In 1963 she made another difficult decision: she left teaching because her educational principles were severely limited by the educational environment of the time. She went on to work as a journalist in the editorial department of the foreign broadcasts of Hungarian Radio, and then as a columnist for Élet és Irodalom until 1973. In 1973–74, she spent a year in the USA on a scholarship as a participant in the international writing programme at the University of Iowa. After returning home, she became the editor of Szépirodalmi Publishing House, and between 1977–88 she was a columnist for the world literature magazine Nagyvilág.

Since 1988, she has made a living off of her writing. She has been an honorary fellow of the University of Iowa since 1974. In 1975 she taught English and American poetry at the Attila József University of Szeged. In 1979, she received her doctorate in English-American-African literature from the Faculty of Humanities of ELTE, and was awarded a PhD. in 1997. Her work as a translator and researcher led to her literary analyses and her collections of essays. In 1992, she was invited to the Department of English Literature at ELTE, where she taught a seminar on W. B. Yeats and the history of Hungarian literary translation as part of her doctoral studies until 2003.

Lyric poetry is the richest branch of her literary oeuvre. By 2005 she had published thirteen books of poetry, including five collections, always with new works and cycles: Selected Lovers, Shadow City, Land of Kings, From the Years of Barbarism, and Carmen Lugubre (Válogatott szerelmeim, Árnyékváros, Királyok földje, A barbárság éveiből, Carmen lugubre).

Her intellectual sovereignty not only encouraged her to find her own tone, poetic voice, aesthetic vision, and individual compositional forms – all to create a poetic world of her own – but also prevented her from being categorized into any particular poetic school or trend. According to her recollections, the most powerful poetic experience she had as a reader was through the work of the Irish Nobel Prize-winning writer William Butler Yeats, the „Hungarian of the West”. More generally, her poetic tastes and inner outlook were noticeably shaped by the Anglo-Saxon and Celtic traditions, but from the outset she was also strongly attracted to antiquity and to the poetic-grammatical sophistication honed in Latin.

She learned from many, but followed none. Her oeuvre therefore defies classification. But because such labels cannot be entirely avoided, we see her most of all as a figure of twentieth-century Hungarian classical modernism, a pursuer of the traditions of Nyugat and Újhold, and their ethos of literary responsibility and quality in the latter third of the century. Her poetry shows a formal culture both polished and rich. The composition of her volumes and cycles is statuesque, often taut in a manner reminiscent of musical forms, and the structure of the texts is characterised by the Latin clarity of verse grammar. In her writing, an intellectual approach is combined with a surreal vision, the tension of her complex images is fuelled by the distant fusion of dreamlike, evocative associations of images and sharply contoured abstractions, and the emotional, affective charge is often contrasted with a stark objectivity. From the late 1970s onwards, her poetry has moved towards a highly individual, ironic symbolism.

Her novels – with the exception of the first – form a coherent unit, and can be seen as pieces of a loose tetralogy, autobiographical in conception but with fictional elements. The first of these, The Interpreter (A tolmács) was published in 1973, and the most recent, The Unguarded (Őrizetlenek), in 2000. The arc of the tetralogy runs from grief to desire, from desire back to grief, and at the centre of the stories, which are themselves circular, is the „conciliation of desire and vice”. The works see the endurance through various experiences of loss as a fundamental moral question of human existence, and their plots present the clash of emotions with moral commitment and destiny in the intermediate zone between passion and suffering. All the novels are characterised by a consistent central character perspective and, with the exception of one work – Stations (Stációk) – have a first-person narrator. All four protagonists are strongly drawn female characters. In their lives, twentieth-century history and individual existence are intertwined, and they are confronted with war, with dictatorships both drastic or refined – and in the background of their stories, in a roughly sketched out or translucent way, there is the „hopeless love, Hungary”, the Jewish–Hungarian–European drama of fate. They all struggle with the challenges of being a lonely woman as a creative intellectual, and in their rigorous self-examination and interpretation of existence they have two supports: inner freedom and work that matures into a vocation. The composition of the novels has the concise discipline of a poet’s practice, and their style has the linguistic invention and the artistic thought of a lyric poet. The epic style is characterised by dramatic cuts, irony, and a silence of personality between the lines.

The four novels and the poet’s oeuvre are unified, the poetry volumes and novels are superimposed to give an authentic picture of Ágnes Gergely’s literary world. This is complemented by the writer’s unique, essayistic memoirs: a diary of reportage, a diary of essays, and a diary of feuilletons.

Literary translation is a distinctive area of her work. She translates mostly poetry, but also dramas, novels, and short stories. She has translated about half of Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology, as well as works by Sylvia Plath, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Christopher Okigbo. She has published several independent volumes of poetry translations and is included in several poetry anthologies. In addition to English, she has translated poems from French, German, Russian, and Bulgarian into Hungarian.

The biography was written by Mária Honti, translated by Benedek Totth and Austin Wagner.