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| Szilard BORBÉLY | | ( 1964 ) | | | | 
1964 born in Fehérgyarmat
1979-1983 lives in Füzesgyarmat
1984-1989 graduates in Hungarian Language and Literature from Kossuth Lajos University (KLTE), Debrecen
1989-92 assistant, then senior lecturer of Classical Literature Department, KLTE
1992–95 scholarship from the Hungarian Academy of Science
1995-present lectures at KLTE, Debrecen
1998 obtains PhD in Literary Studies
2000 reader at KLTE
His prizes include:
IRAT Quality Prize (1989); Pro Culture Prize from the City of Debrecen (1993); Alföld Prize (1995); Tibor Déry Award (1996); Ernő Szép Award (1998); Csokonai Prize (1999); Vilmos Prize (1999); Zoltán Zelk Prize (2000); János Barta Prize (2001); Attila József Prize (2002); Vackor Prize (2003); Milán Füst Prize (2004); Palládium Prize (2005)
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1995 Occasion. Like. Anything
1999 Place Of What
2004 Funeral Pomp
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1988 Adatok (Data, poems)
1992 A bábu arca - Vázlatkönyv (The Puppet’s Face, A Sketchbook, essays)
1993 Hosszú nap el (A Long Day, Away, blank verse)
1995 A Vanitatum vanitas szövegvilágáról (Study On the Texture of Kölcsey’s poem, Vanitatum Vanitas)
1995 Mint. minden. alkalom. (Occasion. Like. Anything, poems)
1999 Ami helyet (Place Of What, poems)
2002 A Gólem (The Golem, Jew’s operetta, with András Almási Tóth and Gergő Vajda)
2002 Az ólomkatona története (The Story of the Tin Soldier, children’s opera, music by Kristóf Weber)
2003 Berlin - Hamlet (poems)
2004 Halotti pompa (Funeral Pomp, poems)
2004 Göcseji Misztérium (Göcsej Mystery, Bethlehem mystery play)
| | 1995 Occasion. Like. Anything (.)
Mint. minden. alkalom. (Occasion. Like. Anything) 1995 Szilárd Borbély’s fourth book of poems has created a grammatical system of relations, has twisted words, word classes, suffixes, the boundaries of words and sentences, punctuation and the elements of the simile, etc., in such a way that the linguistic substance thus created can emblematically embody the breaking up of the personality (the first person singular narrator, the “I”) and make possible its external examination. The persona of the poems lingers in places like the street, the park, the cinema or the theatre; the poet is walking, musing and is reflected from different surfaces. In the prismatic fractions of the “I” there are ‘life’, ‘occasion’, ‘roles’, ‘appearance’, ‘existence’, ‘identity’, ‘similarity’, ‘imitation’, ‘scenery’, ‘poster’; there are speech and silence, sign and reference and the meaning of things; his world is peopled by the tumble-over supple-jack, the chess-piece, the blackbird, the man, the woman and the angel. The text alludes to literary works and there is a mock ars poetica, claiming in one and the same poem contrary things about poetry: “Without rules I think there is no art” and “art just like language is irregularity“(without rules). This fragmentariness creates a space for emotionally grave half-sentences, but it withholds all through the book “what still can be talked about”. | | 1999 Place Of What (.)
Ami helyet (Place Of What) 1999 “Szilárd Borbély’s poetry is the existential poetry of a state of life that is for some reason reduced, eroded. His circumspect way of speaking, his vague punctuality, his meandering lines, and even his emotions and tenderness seeping through objectivity, renders his poetry akin to the French nouveau roman, distantly to turn-of-the-century German naturalism, or, more closely, to the hyper-realism of modern painting. It is inherent in Borbély’s approach that he does not write specific poems as much as one whole book that can be divided into musical moments that in fact, despite its diverging elements of style, creates a homogeneous, musically structured whole. It is not the world he depicts but a stream of consciousness, the constant modifications of his own mind.” “To be able to approach these texts, one must accept that the poem itself is a space-like entity, created by the elements of language or, more precisely, of utterance handled materially, and (even more importantly) by their relations. The texts thus literally become textures, tissues, but at the same time gain a representative force as well. The space-experience in Szilárd Borbély’s poems has always appeared in the form of repetition and fragmentation. The pattern of fractions draws the contours of the intimate presence of one person and, at the same time, the picture of linguistic thinking, which involves ignorance and oblivion just as well as knowledge and memory. And thinking, in Szilárd Borbély’s poems, following the way of sensation, and not at all independent of it, strives to know the object of sensation. So in his case, language is the medium of sensation, and this way the metaphoric movement of language becomes slow and full of obstacles.” | | 2004 Funeral Pomp (.)
Halotti pompa (Funeral Pomp) 2004 The book revives the medieval genre of the Sequence, together with allegories and (folklorized) language. In the appendix, a dryly told piece of news relates the story of an elderly couple, robbed, the wife left dead. From the initials and from certain textual references, the victims turn out to be the poet’s own parents. Szilárd Borbély recreates the language of Baroque poetry such that he is able to mix (and so rebuke) the holy with the profane, the solemn with the everyday, the spiritual with the shockingly physical, the lamentation with the brutality of the facts. The tone remains fully impersonal and yet speaks for all humankind. The first cycle of the book, Sequences for the Holy Week, correlates the mystery of Jesus’ birth and death yet, as László Márton observes, “Easter ‘cannot fit into’ this tracing together of Christmas and the Holy Friday; the poems constantly underline that the bloody ’substituting sacrifice’ was worthless, salvation is cancelled, there will be no resurrection. This is not simple blasphemy, it is much more; Funeral Pomp, if I understand it correctly, announces the revocation of the Gospel.” The second part, Amor and Psyche, after Angelus Silesius, applies and turns out the allegory of (pagan) love sacrifice as it was transported into Christian mythology, depicting the separation of the Body and the Soul, or the abuse and destruction of the Soul by the Body. With this book, Szilárd Borbély has gained the unanimous appreciation of critics. | | |
