Hervay Gizella – költő vagy költőnő?
Gizella Hervay: Poet or Poetess?

Summary/Abstract: In a roundtable discussion that took pace in 2010, in a series called Pink Sunglasses, exploring women’s literary tradition in Hungarian literature, the participants, all of them writers and critics, discussed Gizella Hervay’s works in a personal but also contextual re-reading attempt. The title of the discussion was derived from a claim of Hervay’s contemporaries that her most valuable works were those where from a poetess she allegedly became a poet. This remark summarizes the horizon of expectations of mainstream critics concerning Hervay’s activity during the 1960s and 1970s, the current question being how this perspective can be challenged. Integrating Hervay’s works into the cultural traditions may be carried out according to different strategies in the participants’ view. Understanding how trauma literature contexts work in her case, how comparative analyses themselves should challenge the existing canon, how different groups of critics and artists shaped the Hungarian literary tradition during the past decades are essential when reconsidering Hervay’s place.

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