The Conscience of Trees

Zoltán Böszörményi (1951-), Romanian-Hungarian poet and novelist, was born and educated in the Transylvanian-Hungarian area of Romania. He had literary ambitions, but as a young poet he was harassed by the communist authorities of that time. He had no choice but to escape, eventually finding a new home in Canada, where he graduated from York University in philosophy and got a job with an advertising agency. After the fall of communism, he went back to Romania to start a publishing firm, Irodalmi Jelen Könyvek (Literature Today) and to resume his literary career. In addition to several volumes of poetry, he published three novels in Hungary, two of which also found print in Sohar's English translation: Far from Nothing (Exile Editions, Canada, 2006) and The Club at Eddie's Bar (Phaeton Press, Ireland, 2013). His third novel, The Refugee (2018), came out in Berlin in German translation. Presently he divides his time between Transylvania, and Barbados, between the business of running the publishing house (which includes the influential Hungarian literary magazine Irodalmi Jelen, online and in print) and work on his own novels and poetry. This poetry is quite current in approach and content but also reflects that special Eastern European angst that has accumulated in the collective consciousness of the region over its turbulent history. However, the alternation between free verse and formal style is entirely due to the fact that Hungarian language allows for an infinite variety of rhyme pairs and any form of meter, and much of contemporary Hungarian poetry is still produced in conventional form. For this book the selected poems were grouped not by style but by theme; the first part containing meditative poems, the second part devoted to personal/lyrical poems, and the third to poems inspired by or dedicated to other poets and writers. Various styles and forms are represented in each cycle; only outstanding quality and significant content were considered for inclusion.