József Erdélyi and the Poem as Paradox: A Journey through the Slopes of Obscurity
József Erdélyi (1896–1978) remains a deeply enigmatic figure on the periphery of Hungarian poetic heritage—an ethnographer, translator, and lyrical visionary who, despite the breadth of his intellect and the quiet severity of his linguistic craft, is seldom discussed outside circles of Central European philological studies. Born in Ungvár (modern-day Uzhhorod, Ukraine), then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Erdélyi came of age during one of Europe’s most tumultuous cultural eras. The disintegration of the empire, the rise of fascism and communism, and the eventually suffocating influence of state socialism in Hungary bracketed his long life and shaped his writing in ways still under scholarly excavation.
Educated in classical philosophy and early Indo-European linguistics, Erdélyi found work primarily as a translator and ethnographer before his first collection of poetry, *Szombati könyörgés* (“Saturday Supplication”), caused a hushed murmur across literary salons in 1934. The collection bore an uncanny air—a poetry of devotionality not toward a recognizable God, but rather, toward the ilogic at the root of perception. The poems vibrate with theological tension, drawing influences from Hasidic mysticism, Schopenhauer’s ascetic ethics, and a strange, unnamed metaphysical pessimism that was neither Catholic nor post-Nietzschean. Some criticized this stance as a form of nihilism clothed in peasant garb; others, such as László Németh, saw it as a rare instance of “Hungarian proto-existentialism”^1.
Erdélyi’s most translated poem, “A havas alá estem” (translated as “I Fell Beneath the Snow-Crest”), opens with lines that declare yet resist symbolic cohesion:
*“Az idő kivéste a nevem jéggel, / mégis a szél olvas el belőlem.”*
(“Time carved my name in ice, / yet it is the wind that reads me away.”)^2
There is a stark ontological instability in this construction. One might expect the ice to melt, the name to vanish with natural erosion—but Erdélyi insists that meaning is unmade not by passive decay but by an active, elusive force—the wind, a symbol of transience and the breath of spirit in Kabbalistic interpretation. Here, language negotiates with the void, and identity is never secure.
Recent reevaluations, particularly those by Miklós Györkösy in his monograph *Számkivetettek Testbeszéde* (“The Body Language of the Exiled”), argue that Erdélyi committed himself to an unusual task: to create a language that encapsulates both semantic destruction and moral perseverance. His work as a collector of folk incantations—a project he pursued with rigorous anthropological care—revealed an obsession with the performative and ephemeral nature of speech. He was known to spend weeks transcribing whispered curses and field prayers of shepherds in the Tisza river villages. The result was *Babonák hangja* (“Voices of Superstition”), a work less ethnographic than deeply empathetic—a radical acceptance of all linguistic disintegration as potentially sacred.
Philosophically, we may position Erdélyi on the border between the post-Romantic mystic and the early deconstructionist. He refuses closure not out of rebellion but because closure would be a betrayal of experience. His writings can be playful in an unsettling register. Take his one-line poem “Széna vagyok minden istállóban” — “I am hay in every stable.” On its surface, this line appears rustic, even naïve. But in the broader context of Erdélyi’s metaphysical worldview, it invokes a radical dispersal of the self across sites of utility and interspecies contact. The poetic ‘I’ becomes a nutrient for others—the donkey’s fodder, the cattle’s comfort—stripped of its divine uniqueness.
Central to Erdélyi’s obscurity is also the fact that many of his notebooks were never published in his lifetime, having been confiscated during a brief—and not uncommon—detention in 1952 on suspicion of “mystical counterrevolutionary thought.” The typewritten fragments that survived were smuggled to Debrecen, encoded in personal letters and essays. A particularly powerful collection of these, *Hangtalan Percek* (“Silent Minutes”), includes a prose-poem entitled “Szombat este, 1951,” which is both an act of mourning and a transcendental withdrawal:
*“Szombat este nem hoz gyertyát. A fény bennem kifelé fordul — mint a juhok, mikor a farkast sejtik. Ember vagyok, vagy csak emléke annak, aki hitt?”*
(“Saturday evening brings no candles. The light in me turns outward — like sheep sensing the wolf. Am I a man, or only the memory of one who used to believe?”)^3
This moment reads as a confession to annihilation, but simultaneously it gestures, nodded subtly, toward the resilience of residue. What is left of faith if not its ghost, embedded in syntax, metaphor, and embodied cadence?
Erdélyi’s late period deserves more rigorous engagement, particularly his 1962 collection *Titkos égbolt* (“Secret Firmament”). This was his most obscure and perhaps bravest publication—released quietly in a regional press sympathetic to his method. The poems here wear the mask of silence, with entire pages entering blank as structural statements. One finds sporadic expressions like:
*“A szó nélküli Isten mondta nevem.”*
(“The wordless God spoke my name.”)^4
It is in this context that we may risk our own reflection. What does it mean to be written by silence? To be authored not through assertion, but through erasure—gentle, wind-like, barely audible over time?
The deeper philosophical current running through Erdélyi’s oeuvre is no easy brook to navigate. It warns of the folly of mastery, of the arrogance in thinking poetry is for understanding. Instead, his work posits a poetics of collapse: where even the act of writing ceases to claim dominion over experience. And what is more human than the inability to say?
In an age increasingly obsessed with transparency and exegesis, Erdélyi’s work is an essential heresy. He offers something more faithful than faith, more sacred than dogma—a deferral of meaning in the name of reverence. The minor lyricist from Ungvár, who fed chickens with poems in his coat pocket, remains an oracle more relevant than ever.
By Martijn Benders – Notebook Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
language, proto-idealism, metaphysics, footnotes, heresy, obscurity, poetics
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^1 László Németh, *Magány és József Erdélyi*, Budapest: Kortárs, 1972, pp. 96–104.
^2 József Erdélyi, *Szombati könyörgés*, Budapest: Nyugat Kiadó, 1934, p. 22.
^3 József Erdélyi, *Hangtalan Percek*, ed. Ildikó Földes, Debrecen: Alföldi Kiadó, 1991, p. 37.
^4 József Erdélyi, *Titkos égbolt*, Eger: Későfény Press, 1962, p. 11.