Open air poetry with passion

Many people might envisage poetry readings as over-romanced and slightly boring affairs in crowded, smoke-filled auditoriums. Last Tuesday’s outdoor reading in front of more than a handful of people at Kertem, a new pub on Városliget, definitely disproved the stereotype.
The event, organized by Pilvax – an irregular English-language literary publication printed in Hungary and focusing on Central and Eastern European contemporary poetry and prose – was as deep and serious as it was entertaining and full of humor, and later turned into a regular garden party. Three up-and-coming authors, of American and Hungarian origins, read their works aloud. They were all in English, but written in different genres and style.Writing in English came naturally to the American Chad Faries, but the other two authors, Péter Péli and Gábor Gyukics, who were both raised in Hungary, had a long way to come to write with ease in their adopted language. “Switching to English in my poetry was a challenge for me,” said the 37-year-old Péli (pictured), who started writing his avant-garde poems in Hungarian at the age of 16. A year later, leaving the country for an American scholarship as the winner of the most prestigious Hungarian mathematics competition for students, he decided to use the language of this new land. “It was much easier to express, and eventually find myself, in a language that was not my mother tongue. It wasn’t my father’s voice speaking in my head anymore, but mine.”

Gábor Gyukics

Gyukics also launched his poetry career beyond the Hungarian borders in the middle of the 1980s. “I started writing poems after escaping to Amsterdam, where most of my friends became drug addicts,” says the 50-year-old, yet apparently ageless, Gyukics. With his waist-long hair and quite rude manner, he embodies the centuries-old stereotype of the bards.
“Poetry became a good excuse for me not to take heroin or cocaine, and the English language seemed most obvious, since I knew that I wouldn’t want to come back to Hungary.
“Returning would have been a failure. I wanted to do something different and find myself. And if you start something, you have to carry on with it. You can’t just give it up.”
Gyukics’s determination to pick up the pen instead of the dope, and also moving to the United States after a short stay in Holland, soon made him an admired poet and translator. “I came back to Hungary in 2002, knowing that I had accomplished certain things that I wanted to do,” explains Gyukics.
By now, English-speaking readers had come across famous Hungarian authors such as Attila József and Kriszta Tóth in Gyukics’s interpretation, while Hungarian literature lovers should remember his name as the translator of the works of Ira Cohen or Paul Auster.
The 37-year-old Faries, Assistant Professor in English and creative writing at Savannah State University, also has a story to tell.
He was born in Michigan in 1971, but had lived in more than 11 different houses around the country by the time he was 14.
In his memoir, entitled Some Houses: A Faries Tale he chronicled his early adventures of sweeping around the States like a tornado, with his sexually overheated mother and young aunts. The fragments of his tale, which he read out at Kertem, delivered the funniest but also the most touching moments of the evening.
“I am overwhelmed with emotions when reading these lines. Last time I made a reading for Pilvax, I even had a couple of tears. It may look a bit self-absorbed to be moved so much by my own writing, but it is not because I find myself so good; it is the recall I am having when reading it.”
Faries’s reasons for choosing Hungary as his secondary home were work and, then, somehow unsurprisingly, women.


Well-balanced

Chad Faries

Pilvax is available in Budapest at Treehugger Dan’s bookstore on Csengery utca and at Írók Boltja on Andrássy út.