It happened yesterday. An award ceremony for a national literary prize in Hungary, for which I was a finalist. The event was in a distant city, so I turned the whole trip into a romantic surprise for my wife: a day of sightseeing, a visit to a beautiful royal palace, a wonderful day that would culminate in what I hoped would be a moment of professional recognition. The signs had been encouraging, my hopes were high.
Then came the landing, and it was brutal. I won nothing. Not even an honorable mention. I threw the nameless commemorative sheet for the finalists into a trash can in front of the library. The feeling of being used as “filler,” invited only to pad out the numbers, was humiliating. And listening to the winning entries, I didn’t feel respect, but a growing sense of confusion and anger. It felt like medals were being awarded in a completely different sport than the one I had trained for.
So what do you do with an evening like that, with a gut punch of that magnitude? Especially when it’s just the latest in a series of setbacks, coming at the end of a difficult period of job loss and family conflicts?
The answer, it turned out, was simple: you write. Or, at least, you share what you’ve written. The rest of the evening and the following day became a kind of feverish, cathartic inventory. The poems I had written over the past year came pouring out—love poems, theological hymns, historical elegies, angry invectives, and the purest poems of all, those written with my young son. A dialogue began, where the answer to external rejection was the complete unveiling of my inner world.
And in the midst of processing it all, an African proverb surfaced that put everything into perspective: “No matter how fast a horse is, it cannot overtake a chameleon on a tree.”
In that moment, I understood. I wasn’t on my own turf. I was a chameleon trying to compete in a horse race. My poetry is about deep emotion, metaphysical sincerity, a fidelity to lived experience. The judges, it seemed, were on a different track: one that valued fashionable cynicism, deconstruction, and provocation. My poems weren’t bad. The terrain was wrong.
But what is my tree? What is my true terrain, where the horse cannot even compete?
The last 24 hours answered that question as well. My tree is my family. My wife, to whom I still write love poems after 15 years. My son, from whose single, brilliant sentence (“Sometimes our life explodes, just not the cola.”) an entire poem is born. My terrain is the quiet legacy of my grandfather, the “needle-prick on the time beneath the skin.”
And my tree is the literary tradition I choose for myself. Not the one defined by today’s trends, but my own artistic lineage. For me, as a Hungarian writer, that means the intellectual gravity and formal mastery of Mihály Babits; the stark, metaphysical faith of János Pilinszky, who found grace in suffering; and the raw, vulnerable honesty of Attila József. This is my home, my frame of reference.
Yesterday taught me something. External recognition, the prizes, the official literary scene—that’s a horse race. You can enter, you can run, but victory depends on more than just speed. And if you don’t win, it doesn’t mean you’re slow. It might just mean you were running on the wrong ground.
So what’s the lesson for any writer who has ever felt this sting?
Find your own tree. Learn its every branch, every leaf, every hidden hollow. This is your world, your language, your truth. Write about what is there. And if one day, on a different track, the horses win the race, remember this: on your terrain, among your branches, you cannot be overtaken.
And that is the only thing that matters.
To show you what I’m talking about, here’s a raw English version of my Hungarian poem. It’s a direct translation, so some of the rhythm and imagery might still feel very Hungarian. The original has a tricky rhyme scheme, which I’ve skipped in this ‘sense-and-logic’ draft (I could have spent another week just on the rhymes, so… my bad!).
Adam Porkolab: Imprint of Love (on my skin)
Fifteen years, and you are still on the storm-trains of my emotions.
Though I left my thoughts strewn about, in crumpled balls,
and even crumpled up time between the pillows,
drank coffee with your toothbrush when the little spoon grew cool
and shouted into the morning silence,
just to see you get, spellbound, annoyed.
Fifteen years, and you still tell me off – me, the shy giant teddy bear,
for leaving the door open,
but I always leave it open,
because I love the way I get your love in return,
the way you still look at me,
as if I were an unsolved mystery – a cyclone-shadow,
and not a man who forgets
in which drawer he keeps the dreams he gets lost in.
Fifteen years, and you are still the question
to which I want no answer: the raw homecoming.
The sentence I leave unfinished,
because I love to hear you: intricate kiss-tracings,
as you speak your words… and your face lights up.
Fifteen years, and you still steal my blanket,
as if pedaling in a bike show in your dream,
as if you want to possess my body in the night,
and I let you, plunder these moments in the poem of my body,
let you steal away my heat, my skin,
for the dawn brings it back to me anyway – on my goosebumps.
Fifteen years, and you still forget your kisses
under my collarbone, on my shoulder – the debtors of your lips.
You are there at the edge of breakfasts, on the doorknobs.
If you were to disappear, suddenly and for good,
your trace would surely remain on every object,
and I would follow your memory with my fingers on my mind's marshland,
as if learning love anew in Braille, in the grooves of sensation.
Fifteen years, and the confidence of your being is still visible,
the way you make it so that when you enter a room,
gravity changes around me.
How can it be that I still lean on you at the shaving mirror,
like a drunken star on the edge of the sky?
and you still catch my falls in the nest of your palms,
as if you don’t see through this fog of distraction?
If another fifteen years, another thirty, another hundred,
another lifetime teasing all the kisses that have rolled away:
with the stolen last bites, the way you live through life,
with your gaze, which sears me through—
then I say:
let it be.
Final version: Pécs, 08. 02. 2025.
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