Elek Tibor - Párbeszédben a kortárs "erdélyi" Hungarian irodalommal

Seventeen conversations with nineteen poets and writers over thirty years is, if you like, no great achievement. Not even if we know that these conversations were with "Transylvanian" writers: with Attila Mózes, István Szilágyi, Aladar Lászlóffy, István Ferenczes, János Dénes Orbán, László Bogdán, Géza Szőcs, Zoltán Banner, Ádám Bodor, Béla Markó, László Király , with Ferenc András Kovács, Vince Fekete, László Potozky, György Gálfalvi, Attila Bartis, Lóránd Ármos, Tamás Bálint, Éva Farkas Wellmann. Perhaps they only reflect my unbroken interest that has persisted for three decades, my search for a connection with Transylvanian literature, my never-ending desire to understand Transylvanian writers and to understand them with others. And we can immediately think about the reason and meaning of the quotation mark used in the title this time as well. Who is considered a Transylvanian poet or writer these days? Does his "Transylvanianness" matter? For him and others, his readers? Are there aesthetic and poetic characteristics of Transylvania in our time? How far does Transylvania extend in space and time?

Among other things, I was also concerned with such and similar questions when I interrogated my interlocutors. But not primarily these, but rather the development history of individual creative careers, the poetic nature of their main works, and the artistic creed of the authors. I hope that the group of conversations will not only offer some insight into the portraits and journeys of individual writers, but also into the whole of Transylvanian literature today and its development over the past decades.