the New Pantagruel

Perfect Clumsiness: An Interview with András Visky

by J. Clayton Johnsonwith András Visky

Edited by Ailisha O’Sullivan

ndrás Visky spent his early childhood in a Communist gulag along with his mother and six brothers and sisters, while his father, a minister in the Hungarian Reformed Church, was in prison elsewhere, sentenced by the Romanian Communist government to 22 years for alleged crimes and subversion. As an adult, he became a political dissident and incurred the attention of the Securitate, the Romanian secret police.

Now in his forties, András is a published poet, playwright, and essayist, and is the founder of the Koinónia publishing house. He is the dramaturg of the State Hungarian Theatre in Cluj, Romania, and an associate professor in aesthetics at the University of Babeş-Bolyai, also in Cluj. His play Juliet has been playing in Budapest since fall of 2002 at the Thália Theatre. Two newer plays, The Escape and The Alcoholics are premiering later this year in the Romanian cities of Târgu Mureş and Sepsiszent György respectively. His most recent play, The Unborn, is a stage adaptation of Kaddish for an Unborn Child by Imre Kertész (winner of the Nobel prize for literature, 2002). He lives in Cluj with his wife and four children.

Recently, András sat down with Clay Johnson from The New Pantagruel and was kind enough to answer a few questions.

The New Pantagruel:

I know that your father is a minister in the Hungarian Reformed Church and your entire family suffered for religious reasons under the Communist regime in Romania. How were you led from this background to the theatre?

ANDRÁS VISKY:

It was the Church which led me to the theatre and then from the theatre I got back to the Church. My father’s sermons became the theatre for me, in the holiest sense of the word, for I couldn’t find an explanation for what was going on in the church during his sermons. I heard great sermons from him, many that I can remember, even now, and I still feel the great joy of hearing his voice and of seeing him. It is something that keeps me near faith.

I only got to know my father when I was seven years old and he was released from prison where he had spent exactly seven years. He knew me but I didn’t know him. As a child, I was also a prisoner and I was released about the same time. I spent five years in a Romanian gulag, a village which had been built by the prisoners and which – I know this from the older prisoners – was built in the shape of a hammer and sickle right on the eastern side of the Romanian desert and next to the Danube Delta. Our relationship was not a traditional father and son relationship. I would say it resembled that relationship which we all have with God. He knows us but we don’t know Him, yet after a while an encounter happens and we come to know Him. My father stepped out of the “there is” into the “I am.” Our getting to know each other is equivalent for me with the event of the liberation, of being set free.

The New Pantagruel:

So you grew up listening to your father preach.