“FROM MULTIPLE ROOTS, I GREW INTO ONE”

Abstract

In the art of the poet, artist, and prose writer Anna Lesznai, her hometown, Körtvélyes, which became part of Czechoslovakia after the Treaty of Trianon (today’s Nižný Hrušov, Slovakia), plays an important role. She would regularly go back to her birthplace from Vienna and Hungary during the time of her first emigration between the two world wars, but never returned to it after 1939 (her second, final emigration). The castle and garden in Körtvélyes were gradually mythicized by the temporal and spatial distance. The questions of identity in the poetry of Anna Lesznai often appear embedded in vegetative metaphors related to the garden, or related to mythical figures such as Meluzina who we also encounter in Lesznai’s fairytale sketches. For Anna Lesznai, tales, as well as poetry, present a means of self-expression, a space to manifest questions of identity. The main characteristics of her identity is the in-betweenness, the hybridity which she writes about laced with self-irony in her poem Napló [Diary],: „Száz batyuból szedelődtem, [I was picked from a hundred bundles] / szász lány tején nevelődtem, [I was raised on the milk of a Saxon girl] / zsidó vérrel magyar lettem, [with Jewish blood I became Hungarian] / tótok közé keveredtem… [I ended up among the Slovaks] / Sok gyökérből eggyé nőttem [From multiple roots, I grew into one]”. The presentation analyses the poetic expressions of this multi-rooted conception of identity in the poems and tales of Anna Lesznai.