László Bertók passed away – 444

Jelenkor reported that the late Kossuth Prize-winning poet László Bertók, an honorary citizen of the city of Pécs, was the magazine’s top colleague.

László Bertók was born in 1935 in Vés, Somogy county, into a peasant family. According to his biography, as he was not admitted to the university, in 1955 he became a postal official in Marcali. In August 1955, he was jailed for his poems on charges of anti-state agitation. Prius (1994) c. published in his prose work. In 1959-1963 she graduated from the Pécs Teacher Training School with a degree in Hungarian history, and from 1970 to 1973 with a degree from Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. He has lived in Pécs since 1965, since 1977 he was director of the Pécs Municipal Library, later he was principal investigator, since 1998 he was a member of the Széchenyi Academy of Literature and Art.

His first poems appeared in 1953 in the magazine Transdanubia in Pécs. As a young poet, he had an intellectual relationship with András Fodor, Gyula Takáts and Győző Csorba. Due to “prius”, his first volume of independent poetry, a Tree parade. Previously, the Oscillating light bridges (1964) was published in an anthology by three authors, along with Ida Makay and László Galambosi. For its second independent volume, the Election memoriesra (1978) also had to wait a long time. Meanwhile, he wrote a literary biography of Mihály Csokonai Vitéz and Mihály Vörösmarty, and since 1984 he published useful bibliographic works.

As the biography available on the Petőfi Literary Museum website underlines, there is a rich literature on the poetry of László Bertók. István Ágh, Dezső Tandori, Mátyás Domokos, István Margócsy wrote memorable essays about him; published a volume analysis by Klára Széles and Miklós Csűrös; Imre Nagy published a “talk and study” volume worthy of a monograph. In 2005, Perhaps the questioning … was published in the selection and prologue of Zoltán Ágoston.

János Szegő, editor of the Magvet publishing house, wrote in memory of László Bertók:

In this strange year, when everything has to be redesigned, we at Magvető Publishing were sure of one thing: in October we will publish Laci Rotating Together’s volume of poems, which celebrates her upcoming 85th birthday. The book is a continuation at the same time: on the one hand, it is the second piece of the epigrammatic-grotesque Scribbles on straw, and on the other, it is one more element of the constant formal rotation of Bertók’s poetry; and also a kind of closure, a lyrical will. If the time comes, it will be worth considering how important László Bertók is and a part of today’s Hungarian lyric, how he created a living connection between, for example, Győző Csorba and Lajos Parti Nagy, how he shaped and built the common language of the poetry, how modestly he created novel-experimental poetic forms, how he enriched the rich tradition of Hungarian thought lyricism and the tradition of haiku and epigram poetry at the end of his career, how Bertók de Somogyland rewrote and rewrote Pécs on the map of literature; and it is important to reread Prius, Bertók’s prose work, from which we simultaneously know the hinterland, the engraving and its countryside, family ancestors and customs, and from which the cruel operation of the dictatorship of the fifties arises. It will also be the time for all this, but now I will repeat for myself one of the two verses of the last volume, due out in October, the poem The Survivor. “The program was to survive a lifetime, I don’t think you survived death.”