Poems (review)

reviews 137 but fuUy poUtical as weU. But even T.'s most glittering aphoristic reflections ("We kept eliminating the parties until we ourselves dominated the extreme right" [p. 175]), his most radiant or pungent affirmations ("I was going to be ndther Communist nor bourgeois, but someone who is beaten for not joining forces with those who keep flogging people throughout the world, under motley emblems and banners" [p. 193]) become submerged in the logorrhdc babble that comes to seem an apt metaphor and analogue for the ceaseless wearying complications, eddies, erosions and reversals ofhistorical time itsdf in twentiethcentury Eastern Europe. So the aural image which doses T.'s decription of a Budapest hospital fiUed with the wounded ofall sides, shouting out thdr curses and proclamations in the wake of the abortive rebeUion of 1956, might be said to stand as an image for both that larger history and for the project of The Loser itself: "After a whUe the professions of poUtical credos merge into one inarticulate chorus of wails and moans" (p. 255). As a novel, The Loser too has its problems, chiefly insofar as T.'s relationships past and present with his parents, grandparents, brother and wife, while all described and developed at some length, remain murky both in themselves and in relation to the events and experiences of T.'s more pubUc historical/political Ufe. But as a chronicle/monologue of the long agony of Hungary in the twentieth century, up to and induding the softened, facelifted, consumerized Communist rule of the present day—and as a confession of impasse and exhaustion —it is nonethdess a most powerful work. The historical legacy of Eastern Europe in general we ignore (at least as marxists) at our own peril. Czeslaw Milosz, Christa Wolf, Rolf Schndder, George Konrád—such writers caU to us in the name of our own offidally shared dvilization, asking us to bear witness with them to the continuing possiblity that even now we all may be far nearer the bottom of the weU of History than we would like to admit, a place where [y]ou are not faced abruptly with an instant's choice on which to gamble, a choice in which you have to evaluate the alternatives in a flash and cannot postpone your dedaon . Here postponement is continual, and your dedsion has continually to be renewed . .. . There is not even the choice between living for a day as a lion, or a hundred years as a sheep. You don't Uve as a Uon even for a minute, far from it: you Uve Uke something far lower than a sheep for years and years and know you have to live like that. (Prison Notebooks [London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971], p. xdii) The words of course, bdong to Gramsd, writing from a prison in fasdst Italy some fifty years ago; yet Milosz and Konrád, by making clear the extent to which they belong to Eastern Europe today, force us to question the extent to which they apply to our own world as weU. FRED PFEIL Roque Dalton. Poems. Translated by Richard Schaaf. Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press, 1984. 88 pp. $7.50 (paper). Well you see there was this pod from here, this country who was no beauty he wasn't real bad dther like Satan (who he dreamt he was) just sort of ugly and chicken-chested and a real nice guy who found it rough finding time to write between studying bookkeeping and working in the Courts. That's the start of "History of a Podic," typical Dalton—the "podic" was his favorite genre—setting out the persona of the battered, loveable mug, half ChapUn, halffilm noir 138 the minnesota review tough, aesthde-turned-revolutionary, "national"—Salvadoran in his very imperfection, a bit like Cantinflas in Mexican popular culture. Behind the pose and the sdf-mocking humor though there is a deadly seriousness and a Ufe put on the Une: There have been good people in this country ready to die for the revolution. But the revolution everywhere needs people who are ready not only to die but also kill for it. ("Old Communists and Guerrillas") These translations are from Richard...