440 ENDRE SzKAROSt VI. VocAL SPACE IN KATALIN Lapik’s SOUND POETRY Another early and widely known representative of Hungarian sound poetry is the poet- artist-performer Katalin Ladik, born in Novi Sad in 1942. She should be given credit for the fact that since the 1970s, no comprehensive overview of worldwide sound poetry may leave Hungarian verse uncited. The career of Katalin Ladik began in the late 1960s, and at the beginning of the 1980s she is considered as an equivalent to Hungarian sound poetry for the worldwide avant-garde. Her first volumes, Ballada az eziistbiciklirél (Ballad of the Silver Bicycle, 1969), and Elindultak a kis piros buldézerek (The Little Red Bulldosers Have Started Off, 1971), and later, Mesek a hetfejti varrégéprél (Stories of the Seven-Headed Sewing Machine, 1978), Ikarosz a metrén (Icarus on the Subway, 1981), and A pardzna séprit (The Promiscuous Broomstick, 1984) enriched Hungarian litera- ture with an incomparable voice and sensibilities. As evident in the titles themselves, Ladik’s poetry is characterized by the encoun- ter of modern civilization with the fantasy world of Hungarian folk poetry, and, in a wider sense, of archaic mythology. With her vocal and physical actions, Ladik com- bines the expression of the neurotic, sometimes hysterical quality of modern reality with the ancestral expressions of human existence. This duality is evident in her poems and poetic texts right from the beginning of her career, which earned her the label of “ethno-surrealism’” by appreciative critics. As an example of this, we may cite her sound poem entitled Siraté (Lament, 1978), in which she combines ritual archetypes with exalted or neurotic vocal elements.'* Ladik’s creative use of vocality goes so far that it frequently makes the textual-linguistic bases of her vocal works (a single sentence in the case of Sirat6) disappear, or at least bring them to the very borderline of perception. Hence, it is difficult to say up to which point her sound poetry may be considered to be poetry, and when it crosses the line toward the realm of music. Ladik’s procedure of sound poetry activates the primeval terrain of poetry—imagination; and on these grounds, we may consider it to be music. Phonopoetica, one of her internationally recognized works, was released in 1976.'° As its subtitle says (“phonetic interpretation of visual poetry”; see Figure 20.6), the work contains voice interpretations of visual poets’ works. Ladik transformed works by representatives of the new, evolving Hungarian avant-garde visual poetry (such as Gabor Toth and Balint Szombathy) into an organized voice poem, using the tools of vocality and an audio background compiled from several abstract musical fragments. We know of numerous examples of visual experience being transferred through sounds (e.g., Mussorgsky and Ravel), but here it happens through the human voice, rather than musical instruments, In the case of Phonopoetica, the visual poems of Gabor Toth and Balint Szombathy are rarely available to the audience, and should probably be con sidered no more than the starting points in the frame of reference of vocal interpre- tation. The visual aspect of Ladik’ sound poetry itself is less crucial as well. Unlike442 ENDRE SZKAROSI ) FIGURE 20.6. Continued terms of its individuality and identifiability—can never be is ated from the body that emitted it, In addition to the polyphonic background vocals, the texture of Phonopoetica is completed by the cutting waste of occasionally spotted jazz recordings. In the studio where Ladik and her collaborators prepared their recording, a jazz band was working on their own record. Ladik and her collaborators simply took out from the wastepaper basket some pieces of tape thrown out during cutting, of which they prepared circular loops, according to the practice evolving at the time. The vocal richness of the approxi mately fifteen-minute work, the imaginativeness of the phonic inventions, and Ladik’s outstanding vocal skills are combined with creative intelligence and confident compo- sition, which ensure that the richness of her voice never distracts her toward lart pour Tart virtuosity. As the Er ich sound poet Henri Chopin describes Ladik’s sound poetry, Acoustically speaking, it is as Ladik directed a verbophonic orchestra: her voice is now crisp and then dark, she uses unexpected variations, plays with tones, intro- dcocnee endless! tare: bared weed444 ENDRE SZKAROSt The quasi-definite basic experience and conclusion of Ladik’s rich and moving poetry is the existential effort of man, secluded from the world as its home, to pre- serve its life in space, in the void of the cosmos. The universal character of folk fantasy once more provides a good basis for man to cope with this drama day by day: this quasi-surrealism reflects the overall conscience and instincts of existence. Nevertheless, this poetic idiosyncrasy may not be traced back to the so-called folk surrealism. In Ladik’s sound poetry, these memories are built in the language of the modern era and civilization, and are enriched even with the brutality of punk and new wave trends, for the images of their textual parts are drastic and absurd. The characteristics of this poetry—also determinative in their extent—shine through Ladik’s performance and audio works, in which conscious space formation and time organization adjust the above-mentioned experience into perceptible shapes and intellectually interpretable contexts. VII. A ToTAL VIEW oF LANGUAGE AND EXPRESSION IN HUNGARIAN “ART Music” ‘The rapid evolution of happening, performance, and concert culture at the end of the 1970s opened up a new space for Hungarian sound poetry. But not only poets were