Göttlicher Gestank

“A country Orpheus”, is how Otto Tolnai often describes himself in his poems. He loudly sings the melody of his home country in Vojvodina, the bareness of its landscape, its village inhabitants. Tolnai stumbles along its pictures, words and sentences, traces the logic of its language and images, its unexpected twists and turns, until the memories, realisations and dreams are displayed in their full absurdity and precision as their own closely-knit world .

A simple broom-handle becomes the glowing axis of the universe, a lost glove becomes the sexual organ of an angel. Zsuzsanna Gahse’s selection, agreed with the author, mixes short and long poems from different points in time, which are linked by shared motifs, themes and words and translate into a penetrating composition in their own right. The collection is rounded off by an afterword by the translator.