South Reviews
George Gõmõri and Toon Tellegen
Polishing October – George Gõmõri; Shoestring Press, £9.50
About Love and About Nothing Else – Toon Tellegen; Shoestring Press, £8.95
George Gõmõri: exiled from Hungary since the (failed) revolution in 1956, and deeply engrossed by love of wife and country; Toon Tellegen: a Dutch poet: caught up in the meshes of what love is and what it isn’t. Gõmõri passionate and upfront; Tellegen pecking at a worm, but destined to leave the crucial part buried. Gõmõri’s poems are more earthbound; struggling between what can be said in English and what must be said in Hungarian:
In my mother-tongue alone I can stammer out
The words that compose the sunset, make it glow.
His poems are politically acute, deeply personal and artistically ingrained. There are poems of regret, loss, yearning, pride, sadness, bitterness and acceptance, all interfused with his two sustaining, if troubled, loves, as well as homage to fellow writers from the east. Of his wife Mari he writes
Of what I am, then, be the better part
and in Sonata, dedicated to her, he asserts:
This, and no more, I promised at the outset,
this, and no more; we are both victorious.
Polishing October, the penultimate poem, concludes:
I need say no more than ’56 ‘and ‘Hungary’
and then our countless sins will be forgiven
and if nothing survives of us, this will, and
will forever
About Love and About Nothing Else is Toon Tellegen’s first book of poems to appear in this country. His work is more immediate and obscure than Gõmõri’s. His short poems dissolve into an after-taste where solutions may or not lie. They are love-in-themist that turn into cloudlets when picked. Or dandelion parachutes, if you like. Their language is insubstantial, deceptively nonchalant. They are as much about the ‘nothing else’ in the collection’s title as about love. Most of the poems are untitled; they are riddled with questions, even when the poems are untitled; they are riddled with questions, even whenapparently statements; they are sometimes dialogues that fade away, break off almost as soon as they’ve started. One poem begins:
“What’s your favourite word?”
“Almost.”
“Why?”
“It’s never entirely.”
And ends, after nine lines of (almost) straight poetical reminiscence:
“And your favourite word?”
But I am asleep
Both poets are highly accomplished practitioners. One is of the earth, the other of the air.
Gõmõri’s commitment, in language, as in reality, whatever his subject, is a ‘concrete’ one – the hard facts of exile, the sustenance of personal and patriotic feeling and the reconciliation of freedom with memory (God’s two trees in his The Garden of Exile).
Tellegen’s short discourses resemble a Buddhistic quest for the ‘nothing’ that is ‘every thing’ (the purest expression of love). Gõmõri speaks out, seeking an honest clarity; Tellegen mostly whispers, playing with words, however lightly, teasing them into an intriguing darkness. Gõmõri is maybe the more orthodox poet (in English terms), but the heartbeat of the poems is a strong one. Tellegen seems more devious; his poems one poem being explored over and over again. There’s a cheekier heartbeat at work.
Both books seem to have been well-translated, and I have greatly enjoyed the labour of reading them and appreciating their differences, without disparagement to either.
Page(s) 58
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