Szabolcs Várady

In his ‘serious’ poetry, Várady is anything but prolific – his collected works take up less than a hundred pages. The poems look as if they are the result of a long process of planing and polishing. He is firmly rooted in the poetic tradition; in many poems he adopts a fixed form and he makes frequent use of rhyme – making use of the great wealth of possibilities that happen to be available in the Hungarian language. The speaker is an uncertain, eternally doubting lyrical I-figure who, in his casual observations and reflections, formulates more questions than he does answers.

Várady likes to make use of small, absurd situations in life and to exploit the poetic potential of language, as in ‘Cistern Villanelle’. More than once, the situation in the poem is based on a dream. The poet likes to present himself as part of a circle of friends, of which one of the central figures is his friend and colleague György Petri (1943-2000). Even the so-called ‘serious’ poems are full of (self-reflexive) irony and here too, creative linguistic inventions and unexpected rhymes form a source of humour. Selected Bibliography

Ha már itt vagy (Now that you’re here), Kosmosz, Budapest, 1981
Hátha nem úgy van (Perhaps it isn’t like that), Magvető, Budapest, 1987
A rejtett kijárat (The hidden exit), Europá, Budapest, 2003

Links
Szabolcs Váradyon Lyrikline