An Evening with Szilárd Borbély

Living in Debrecen and working as a university lecturer, Szilárd Borbély has emerged in the past decade at the very forefront of contemporary Hungarian lyric poetry. An evening with this poet, far from offering light and frothy entertainment, promises the kind of intellectual and emotional adventure we will remember for years. The author of Ami helyet (1999), Halotti Pompa (2004), A Testhez (2010) and a dozen other important and widely acclaimed volumes roams the eternal hinterlands of love, sol...itude, humility, anguish, devotion, solidarity, doubt and faith to describe the landscapes of the soul and the inner voices of the individual in an intimate poetic tone that is unique in the Hungarian lyric verse of today. To achieve this, he employs a lyrical language filtered through a universal historic cultural tradition, and whose sweeping power carries the reader along in its swirling current. Once submerged in Borbély’s poetry, readers will find it hard to escape the influence of his poetic “adventures” as they carry him to ever more profound depths with each successive volume, and it is an experience that can prove cathartic. In this way, no one attending this evening is likely to be disappointed once they allow themselves to enter the poet’s universe and his rich private world of hopes and pains. As an accompaniment to all this, the brilliant cimbalom player Rózsa Farkas will create a poignant and uplifting world of authentic musical sounds. All we can add in advance about this evening is that you’ll be sorry if you miss it. Our visitors are kindly informed that this performance will be presented in Hungarian. Presented by: Palace of Arts