István Domonkos

István Domonkos, poet, prose writer and jazz musician, was born on 7 August 1940 in Ókér, in Vajdaság, Serbia. He came from a world that is barely visible on the map, and from which messages shaped with artistic ambition seldom emerge. His extraordinary talent, together with the education policy of the time, which supported social advancement, enabled him to complete teacher training in Szabadka and, in parallel, to qualify in trombone at the Szabadka music school (the “konzi”), and then to continue his studies in Hungarian language and literature at the Faculty of Arts in Újvidék.

It was in this secondary-school and university milieu that the literary circle took shape from which the legendary journal Új Symposion grew. While still a student, Domonkos played in the Big Band of Radio Újvidék and, in the summers, played music in seaside hotels. Meanwhile, he created poetry with a voice that was distinctive even among his contemporaries, and became a defining author of the best and most complex period of Hungarian literature in Vajdaság. He, too, favoured free verse, but his poetry has a strong musicality, its rhymes and rhythms seeming to resonate with his jazz practice. This poetry responded to his most personal experiences, to his surroundings and to the world he came from, while constantly questioning the poem itself, the possibilities and the meaning of poetry. “Why does the word sour cherry leave no stain / on my white shirt / glorious Magia Polla,” asks, seemingly lightly, the lyrical speaker of the poem Kuplé. Behind this lightness, however, there is always a doubt about the poetic word, and the danger of falling silent. His only novel, A kitömött madár (1969), also revolves around these problems. One of its narrator-protagonists is a Roma musician from Vajdaság, Skatulya Mihály, who supports his impoverished family by playing in seaside hotels in the summers; the other is a writer sitting over a blank page, paralysed by his responsibility for the written word. Meanwhile, both become entangled in a love and crime story that puts their lives at risk. A masterpiece of Hungarian beat literature, of “blue-jeans prose”, the novel stands in Hungarian literature without precedent or sequel. A language broken to pieces speaks, out of the depths of the experience of emigration, in his best-known poem, the great poem Kormányeltörésben. In the children’s poems of the aptly titled Tessék engem megdicsérni, one can detect a compassionate turning towards the situations and vulnerability of childhood, an identification with its special circumstances and its particular way of perceiving the world.

Complete lyrical silence followed after Domonkos and his family moved to Sweden, where he earned his living as a tennis coach, a musician and in other jobs that were by no means artistic. The poet fell silent, but it was as if he did this, too, as a form of poetic activity: his silence was an active poetic silence. In 2008, Yu-Hu-Rap appeared, in the new voice of a new era. In 2011, he received the József Attila Prize.

He died on 7 November 2024, surrounded by his family.

István Ladányi