A hundred faces and two

A hundred faces and two

by Sándor Dudás and István Iván Bor

STILLNESS CHIMES

TIn broken and careless times only teardrops are unbreakable. A single teardrop, in which the whole world is reflected, is unbreakable, and shines strangly when is heavy with pity.

Sándor Dudás’s new ‘picture’ book, a tribute to painter and graphic artist István Bor, pictures a hundred faces in haikus and on drawings indicating the original purpose of the Japanese poetic form mixing poetry, painting and music. Poetry and painting are the visible images of the three, music being the invisible part. For the latter lives in one’s inner self, like the cricket in his song – a metaphor by Macuo Baso.

The haikus are composed mostly in avare style, picturing the painful image of mortality. A hundred fading images of a pale face put in words and tamed into rhymes.

And what the poet is silent about has a silence that is almost tinkling. This ” chiming” silence shows the current state of the world itself. ‘ Victoria’ is a rare sign in the present world of cruel survival,

Sándor Dudás’s V –signs are used in the context of ” unbeatable victory” (Sándor Puszta) : The lines : ” What have you done to me? / I am laying my head / into my V-shape arm,/ since it senses the turning of times.” ” The world is out of joint / it is winter time / hence the wild geese / flying in a V towards the north.” – are reinforced by artistic drawings.

These lamented lines, gathered into a volume of book, is a string of ancient and present poems, characteristic of the age. The poems are like teardrops : they may seem the very same, but they all have different shades and different things to reflect. In a world in which only water- and teardrops are rounded.

Midsummer Day of 2009.

Károly Cseh

The book is available in Hungarian!