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PSALM: A Holocaust Poem by Eva Lang - Poem - Critical Essay
Contemporary Review, March, 2003
Translated from the Hungarian by Thomas Land
EVA Lang a Hungarian Holocaust survivor aged 77 years, has unleashed a fury of verse of stunning beauty and intensity. Her relentless output is reminiscent of the chanting of the ancient prophets. The work breaks the embarrassed and almost complete silence that has been the response of the world's poets to the organized, racist murder of six million Jews in the heart of Europe. And it has been largely ignored by literary editors.
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She has been writing all her life, but has chosen to publish only during the past 15 years. Her four slim books have sold out almost at once; the fifth is about to be released after being suppressed by a provincial publishing house for some years. Her writing has attracted little notice in the established literary journals of Hungary, and none abroad. Yet her verse is destined, in my view, to take its place in the bookshops and libraries alongside the testimony of that other immortal recorder of the Holocaust, Anne Frank. Unlike Anne the child who comes to terms with the reality of her routine existence in hiding, Eva the great-grandmother never loses her dismay in the face of the mystery of evil. She displays all the skills of her craft with discipline controlled by passion. Sensuous delight in her choice of words radiates through the rage that fires her poetry. It is this combination of her unceasing innocence and mature lust for life that has enabled the poet to give voice to the numbing horror of the Holo caust.
There are sound reasons for the dearth of good Holocaust poetry, particularly in English. The deed was done outside the English-speaking world. Its perpetrators destroyed the poems as well as their authors. The few survivors were concerned at the time mostly with survival, not poetry. Those who did write and survived to publish wrote mostly in foreign languages. And those who translate such works into English today tend to be academics rather than poets. The post-Holocaust poets also tend to be silent on the subject quite simply because it is too big. How do you express appropriate disapproval, without sounding absurdly pretentious or obvious, at the premeditated murder of an entire people attempted in a manner quite well researched yet entirely beyond your own modest comprehension?
Eva Lang does not weigh her task in such terms. She mourns her dead and regards her own broken life with an uncomprehending pain appropriate to the very moment of injury. She lacks a thirst for revenge. She recalls with gratitude the acts of generosity and courage to which she owes her life. She relives anew the loss, the hunger, the fear, the humiliation which she once endured, shares her experience and turns it through poetry into the common treasure of humanity.
I met Eva Lang while researching for an anthology of the Hungarian Holocaust. The other major contributors to the collection will be Miklos Radnoti, a writer murdered at the close of the war whose best poems were found on his corpse exhumed from a mass grave, and Andras Mezei who, like Eva Lang, has released a significant body of Holocaust literature only in old age. Both these poets are now familiar to readers of English poetry. There may well be a lot more unpublished Holocaust poetry of real literary merit demanding public exposure. New work is being generated all the time as Holocaust survivors are putting pen to paper in old age to record who did what to whom. Their authors must depart shortly. It would be a pity if they took their literary wealth with them.
There is hope. The confines of Hungary's command culture have been lifted since the collapse of communist administration although many marketing professionals of the book trade now genuinely believe that free enterprise has no need for poets. Yet the stubborn poetry loving public does sometimes get the best books. Small grants go a long way. Mezei runs a successful publishing house on a shoestring. One of Eva Lang's books has been produced by a public spirited printer for free.
