The PEN Club and the awakening duck

On 14 July, the Hungarian PEN Club launched a music and literature event series entitled Pendrive. What is the aim of the event series?

To understand the purpose of the event series, we need to go back in time. For nearly a century, the Hungarian PEN Club, both as an initiator and from a creative perspective, has continuously integrated into the domestic and international literary circulation of Hungarian literature and acts as a kind of breathing hole to foreign literature. It was presided over by extraordinary people such as Dezső Kosztolányi and Jenő Heltai.

However, since Géza Szőcs and I took over the leadership of the institution, a new era has begun. Ten years ago, we established Géza’s great dream, the Janus Pannonius Poetry Grand Prize, and we have been awarding literary translation prizes in the framework of the foundation, which aim to promote foreign literature in Hungary and Hungarian poetry abroad. We help Hungarian poets and writers to become known abroad by translating their works, and we support young poets and writers with debut prizes. We are trying to use our own means to influence and shape Hungarian literary thinking, to provide opportunities for young people and to recognise those who have contributed to the promotion of Hungarian and international literature. We have been in a kind of constant internal movement over the past decade, broken by the pandemic and the death of Géza Szőcs in early November last year. It was very difficult to recover from this unexpected and tragic event. Géza’s death is still a painful loss, not only for me, but also for the Hungarian PEN Club and all those who worked with him and were his friends. Anyone who knew him knew that besides his indisputable poetic greatness, he was also an important figure of Hungarian culture. It was difficult to recover from this tragedy and the paralysis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, although as secretary general and poet I was constantly participating in international festivals and conferences online. When I saw the end of the pandemic coming, I felt that we had to do something, we had to shake Hungarian literature out of its lame duck state.

The idea came up to organise musical readings, where literature and music would be present together, at the same time. The staff of the Petőfi Literary Museum was an absolute partner in the implementation of the initiative. I have invited ten to twelve poets to an event, each of whom will give a five to six-minute introductory reading of their poetry, with music between readings. We have planned four independent evenings, the first of which took place on 14 July with the participation of the Fonogram Award-winning orchestra Lóci Játszik and exclusively young poets – Dávid Csornyij, Ferenc André, Veronika Bán-Horváth, Dorottya Bánkövi, Timur Bék, Nikolett Kopriva, Gergely Marcsák, Lea Nagy, Mátyás Regős and Fanni Szabó. Some of them hadn’t read in a year and a half or two years, so they were very happy for the opportunity, as well as for the chance to meet each other in person again. Such occasions are important because the history of literature is a history of handshakes and attitudes. It’s about getting to know each other’s achievements, knowing about each other, listening to each other and appreciating each other’s work.

The second musical literary event was held on 28 July, with music by two excellent frontmen of the Elefánt band. This time the readers were from a different generation. Among them were Mari Falcsik, Katalin Ladik, István Kemény, Endre Kukorelly, Attila Jász, Tibor Zalán and István Vörös.

On 18 August, the main focus will be on women writers and poets, with readings by Zita Izsó, Mónika Ferencz, Melinda Varga, Gabriella Lőrincz P., Ágota Hegedűs, Zsuzsa Csobánka, László Kürti, Vince Fekete and Zoltán Böszörményi, and others. The music will be by one of the young generation’s favourite bands, Ricsárdgír.

The last reading of the season, on 30 August, will be attended by the current middle generation, who started working around the same time as the journal Parnassus was founded. Therefore, I asked artists who have been with us from the beginning and are now established poets, such as András Bajtai, Szabolcs Székely, Zoltán Tolvaj, Zsuka Nagy, Levente Pál Dániel, Zsolt Székelyhidi, Farkas Király, Gábor Zsille or Csaba Hartay.

What efforts is the Hungarian PEN Club making to keep the memory of Géza Szőcs and his poetic work in the public consciousness?

We would like to preserve his memory in several ways. The first one has already been realized: the Department of Modern Hungarian Literature of ELTE announced a professional conference, one whole day of which was dedicated to the work of Géza Szőcs, and two members of the PEN Club’s management team gave speaches. The conference proceedings will soon be published in a form of a book. In addition, we are working with rights holders to publish volumes that are part of his oeuvre, and we are planning to republish some of his works. It is important that his works and ideas are not only present in the book market, but also in people’s minds.