Húsvéti bárány

It is difficult to give a representative sample of Sándor Kányádi's œuvre in just a few poems: he is a man—a man first, and then a poet—of contradictions. But the man and the poet are never at odds with each other; one never betrays the other.

A Hungarian born in a Romania dedicated to the suppression of the Hungarian minority, Kányádi's life was full of dichotomies from the start. He grew up in a village that did not even have a one-room school house, only chalk and a hand-held blackboard. Since then he has lived most of his life in large cities; yet the modern man never forgot the timeless images of village life and to this day the poet finds inspiration in them. His poetry, too, is divided; he has pursued both free verse and traditional forms throughout his career, filling both with a contemporary language free of excesses and sterile metaphors. It is easy for him to keep his style simple and direct because he always has something to say, whether about himself, the state of the world, or the human condition in general. He rarely writes mood or experimental pieces; he doesn't have that luxury. As a poet of a persecuted minority, he must stand up for his people, proclaiming their right to exist and preserving their cultural heritage. At the same time—and here comes another dichotomy—he often castigates his own people, trying to save them from the narcotic of nostalgia and from escape into dream. Kányádi is a realist who can dream and a dreamer who tries to turn dreams into reality.

One of his dreams is ethnic tolerance in his country as well as all over the world. He fights for the rights of ethnic minorities everywhere. He feels this is a fight for the survival of all humankind, since it is made up of diverse groups of people, and when any one group disappears or loses its language, the whole of humankind becomes poorer. In this respect, Kányádi is an internationalist nationalist.