Literárium // Balla Zsófia-est

An overview of the half-century career of Zsófia Balla and her work at the forefront of contemporary Hungarian lyric poetry promises to be a true celebration of the art. Born in Cluj-Napoca (Kolozsvár) and originally trained as a violinist, she became one of the central figures in Transylvania's Hungarian literary and intellectual scene before moving to Hungary in 1993. In this country, her art blossomed spectacularly: in addition to the memory of the oppressive existence of a minority ethnic group and her poems attacking the dictatorship, she found herself increasingly focused on the fundamental questions of life. The love of life exuded by her poems, along with the tragic tone found in quite a few of them, her metaphorical style of speaking, and her original poetic world all appeal to readers responsive to poetry in an elemental fashion.