The beauty of selflessness

Imre Varga's initial "northern" verse speech was fragmented, left out, more suggestive than telling, but he was able to build and move huge blocks of words from cultural-historical and philosophical meanings, which spoke of something deeper than the "chatter and noise" of the south. In the "South", in Budapest, the poet discovered Eastern religions and philosophies, and in his more recent poems the questions of existence and non-existence are increasingly expressed in the language of Zen philosophy (willless contemplation), but mostly in the external form of Western European poetry. And sometimes, perhaps in the most adequate, most accessible way - in great little haikus. We must understand the poet's "diminishing existence" in the sense that existence, interpreted as will and timing in Western philosophies, diminishes in these poems, and we, the readers, can also be part of this specific (lyrical) nirvana to a certain degree. Árpád Tózsér