dublinka

I picked up a collection of Hungarian writing this morning, and was taken by some lines from Ottó Orbán's Ginsberg in Budapest (translated by Eric Mottram.)

mister ginsberg what's the poet's task
must we be New York buddhists or aggressive fags
ride our broomstick obsessions
to a sabbath of angelic dreamspeech
or the opposite
keep our finger on the pulse of events
know more or less what the ordinary man thinks
under specific conditions
do minor repair jobs around the house

It's an interesting dilemma presented to all poets: To take the high road or the low road. The bacchanale or the banal. The choice seems like something that is well worth thinking through, because it appears largely irreversible - unless you are capable of radically restructuring your mind and what you perceive of as freedoms. Otherwise the transition from one to the other is interpretated by dilgent observers as, nothing other than, a belated and desperate attempt to flee chosen paths, to refashion constraints, to fake a self. Nothing wrong with this in principal I suppose, but a step backward for those pressing on with conviction.

You can catch the rest of the poem in Today An anthology of Contemporary Hungarian Literature, to see how Otto resolves the question.