[Tim Murphy]

This is a poet known only by name to me. Our Mike Slippkauskas has been translating him. It strikes me that this very young Hungarian who died in 1937, the year before Heaney's or Mezey's birth, belongs in our hearts, our memories. I am only going to quote one of Mike's translations, but there are a great many more. Here is Attila Jozsef's deceptively simple poem in Mike's elegant translation. Mike protests that nothing his hand is in belongs on this forum. Jozsef however belongs here, and we owe a debt to Mike for bringing us to him. More to follow.

I Wander


Where is that little house, which so few ever see?

Where each one loves us all and waits there just for me,

And waits there just for me.


In going, should I choose the left path or the right?

Should there be stars above I’ll face the starry night,

The shining, starry night.


Wherever no star shines is where I’m sure to go

And there will be the place they’ll love me even so,

They’ll love me even so.



[This message has been edited by Tim Murphy (edited June 29, 2006).]

[Janet Kenny]

Tim and Michael,
Many thanks for this and other poems Michael has translated. Hungarian is land locked by all the other languages from which it is excluded. The Magyar beat is in the speech and Michael has caught something of it I think. And since the poet died in 1937 he meant the words from his heart.
Janet

[Gregory Dowling]

Tim,

I've been greatly enjoying the translations of Jozsef that Mike has posted over the last year or so and hope he's working towards a book-length collection of them. It is very clear from his translations that Jozsef belongs on this board. Mike's version of "Terror" is still on the Translation Board - and a wonderfully grim poem it is.

Gregory

[Mike Slippkauskas]

Thank you Janet and Gregory, my loyal readers on Translation, and especially Tim.

To All,
I'm somewhat abashed by this thread, but the chance to introduce Jozsef to the fine readers and writers here overwhelmed my modesty. I am merely a translator, and an inadequate one. I will allow Tim to lead this thread, i.e. as to whether further poems will be posted. I'll offer some comments from the late Martin Seymour-Smith, from his The New Guide to Modern World Literature.

"The doomed hero of modern Hungarian poetry, regarded by some as a greater poet than Ady, is Attila Jozsef (1905-1937). He was born in Budapest, and grew up in atrocious poverty. He is justly called a proletarian poet; but, influenced by Ady, he surpassed the older man both in his understanding of foreign influences and in his assimilation of them to an astonishingly original, and yet absolutely Hungarian, style. The strain of life, and chronic poverty, eventually became too much for him; he became mentally ill, and committed suicide by jumping in front of a train. His assimilation of folk poetry, and transformation of it into something new and his own, has rightly been compared to what the composer Bartok did with folk music. He became a member of the communist party -- illegal under Horthy's regime -- but, unable to live with any set of dogmas, was soon expelled. The authorities also persecuted him. He was an urban poet; but the rural world, which he intuitively understood and responded to, exists in his poetry like a dream.

"It is usually glibly asserted that Jozsef was 'schizophrenic' , and so he might have been diagnosed -- in which case the diagnosis was wrong. He was suffering from an affective disorder (a less misleading and more comprehensive term for what was and sometimes still is called manic-depression): there is no psychiatric evidence of schizophrenia, whose victims more often produce word-salads than poems. Most important: there is no evidence of behavior other than mood-congruent in Jozsef. Clearly his suicide in late 1937 was the result of acute-depression, and the feelings of guilt which usually accompany it (he thought he would be a burden on his sisters). His poems, like those of Bacovia and Campana, are often the product of 'mixed states' , in which mania and depression blend (in countless ways, often granting terrible insight but always causing terrible pain). But Jozsef was fairly robust and sardonic for a man so badly buffeted -- as his letter to Babits asking for money, after he had attacked his poems in a fit of boastful mania, demonstrates. Toward the end he wrote: 'Thirty-two years ago - to be more exact, at 9 pm on 11 April 1905, according to the prison records - after a judicial detention of nine months, I was sentenced to lifelong correction in a workhouse, on counts of treason, spying, abusing confidences, indecent exposure, inexcusable laziness, perpetual creation of scandals, and psychopathic tergiversation. My appeal against sentence having been turned down, I was moved to the world of the recidivists. The authorities hid the ineffectual nature of their investigations by putting in evidence obtained under torture - turtue which, I can testify, lasted for an eternity. I swore my innocence vainly; the court accepted the findings of the investigations and the confession under duress as the basis of their decision'. Anyone who takes this ironic and comic statement as evidence of schizophrenia is a dolt. In schizophrenia the personality fragments and withdraws; Jozsef's did not.

"Jozsef's father, a soap-factory worker, left his family and went to Rumania; his mother was a washer-woman. By enormous effort he was able to enter thwe University of Szeged, but he did not complete his education: he was expelled because a fascist professor, Antal Horger, took exception to his poems; such names should be remembered - but one forgets rhem. His youthful poems, full of promise, appeared in Nyugat (West). The rest of the story is one of increasing difficulty, punctuated by bursts of poetic activity and attempts to rescue himself from his wilful narcissism and nihilism. But the poetry he created was entirely his own. Influenced by surrealism, it was no more surrealist than that of Lorca, a poet with whom he is sometimes compared - not for his musical qualities, but for the idiosyncratic nature of his poetic world. His strength is that he succeeded in creating an absolutely self-sufficient poetic world: a perfect expression of his inner state, which itself reflects his country's helplessness between 1920 and 1925. His poetry resembles Magyar folk poetry in form and rhythm, but its content frequently reflects his reading of Marx and Freud. Existing translations of Jozsef are not altogether adequate, for they give little idea of his achievement in the realm of language. It has been said that he is not translatable."

Best,
Michael Slipp



[This message has been edited by Mike Slippkauskas (edited July 04, 2006).]

[Tim Murphy]

I now have all of Michael Slippkauskas' translations of Joszef. I shall be reading through them slowly and painfully, particularly after reading the above prose. Here are two more of Joszef's very early poems.

A Tired Man

Some solemn peasants in the fields
face home and silently depart.
We’ve laid us down, the stream and I.
Soft grasses slumber near my heart.

The hushed stream rolls us to our rest.
Within, dews rinse me free of care.
Not youth, Magyar, brother nor child,
he’s just a tired man, lolling there.

The falling night distributes peace
and I’m a warm slice of its bread.
The sky winds down. The stars sit out
on Maros and on my bare head.


Pure Of Heart

I have no father, have no mother,
have not your god, nor any other,
no homeland, cradle, burial-shroud,
no lover, not one kiss allowed.

For three days now I’ve had no food,
not scant amounts, nor plenitude.
I have the strength of twenty years.
I’d sell them all. I have no fears.

And if the twenty go unsold
the devil then might make so bold.
Still pure of heart, I have a plan
to break in, maybe kill a man.

They’ll catch me, hang me from a tree.
With blessed earth they’ll cover me.
And deadly grass will prick and start
to grow above my lovely heart.

[Mark Allinson]

Wonderful stuff!

Thank you, Michael and Tim for the poems and the education.

[Golias]

Either Michael or Jozef is a marvellous poet; perhaps both are fine poets. Add a little to these lines, to account for untranslatable connotations peculiar to the Hungaian language and culture, and they become poignant to a splendid degree. They make me wish I were Hungarian born and bred so as to read them in their original words and context. But as I cannot be Hungarian, I am grateful to Michael for these glimpses and to Tim for posting them here.

More, please.

G/W

[Tim Murphy]

Michael, you will have to correct me here, for my knowledge of Hungarian is wanting. I think the only thing I've read is John the Valiant, the Hungarian national epic, by Sandor Petofi. I have only read that in John Ridland's galloping translation. I have given a box of those Hesperus Classics to my ninety-year-old tailor, and the box is being devoured by his grandchildren and great-g's, who lack Tibor's language, much as do I. John the Valiant is one of those children's poems which is an adult poem. The poems of Jozsef are entirely adult, for who would read them to a child? Nims taught us first to make a poem in English and be as loyal to the poet as you can. I can't judge the second half of John's commandment, but it seems to me that Slipp is obeying that first injunction.

Unfortunately, although I can read Mike's attachment, I cannot cut and paste from it. Michael, would you please post Terror? Tim

[Mike Slippkauskas]

Mark and Golias,

Thanks for appreciating these. Golias, the genius is all Jozsef's. I have only to say what he said in meter and rhyme. The aforementioned Martin Seymour-Smith puts him in the top 20 poets of his century in any language, with Vallejo, Hagiwara, Rilke, Laura Riding (I know, he's a bit eccentric), Lorca, Guillen, Machado, Valery, Pessoa, Quasimodo, Kavafis, Hardy and others and far above Auden, Yeats, Eliot, Stevens and others. The poems Tim has posted so far are very early, when the folk-element had not yet been fully assimilated.

Tim,

You are correct. The poem is Janos Vitez in Hungarian and has been sometimes translated "Johnny Kernelcorn". The stupendously brave, arrogant, clever, handsome, yellow-haired hero is nicknamed "Kukorica" Janos, Johnny of the Corn-ear. It is for children, but much more than that, as all great children's literature is. But even Jozsef is loved by children -- Tim, you'll find a few children's poems in that file. And the Hungarians prepare their children with some very adult material! As a translator I do try to be faithful to my source. My firmest admirers so far are my Hungarian friends, who say I do the impossible. This is more humble of me than it sounds. I seek never to "improve" or embellish. I know that music -- meter, rhythm, rhyme -- is the meaning. Dick Davis has pointed out that the translators who give themselves all license in form often go farthest afield lexically. A paradox, but one that metrists should understand.

Tim, thanks again for starting this thread. Here is "Terror" at your request.

Terror


A one-room flat in semi-dark.
Behind the alcove, slumbering,
with pursed mouth, in worn blankets, mark
this weepy, little thing.

As though in autumn wind, gray water
wrinkles the frigid pavingstone.
In reverie, the older daughter
sits awkward and alone.

Both share the alcove where a host
of hatreds and desires was born.
A stuffed dog frays and, there, the ghost
of Rákóczi hangs torn.

The girl is seven. Here inside
she cannot run about or leap.
The mother to the girl has tied
this babe, this stinking heap.

How she’d run! . . . Now, insensible,
and almost drowsing off, spellbound,
she feels such strength that she could pull
a city to the ground.

He opens swollen eyelids. Storms
of wailing rack the imbecile.
The girl takes stock of him and warms
the milk. Then all is still.

Taciturn, stiff, she turns to stare
upon the boy-child’s purpling face.
Like a dead moth in wan, lank hair,
her ribbon of soiled lace.

And now, into his howling round
she shoves the bottle’s milky pap.
He coughs. His cries and chokings sound
like dry sticks when they snap.

His frame convulses like the sea.
This leaky tap, this nipple, drips.
She presses, while in agony,
he swallows, howls and grips.

And now, she forces knowledge in:
should any comfort come, a shard,
she grasps the bottle at his chin
and yanks it from him, hard.

The child can’t know, should he delight
or go on weeping without end?
His anger quakes him. Frothy-white,
his tummy’s lees ascend.

He’s crimson as though newly-born.
His skull’s veins seem to writhe and cling
like maggots on an ear of corn.
His toes are stiffening.

He howls while sucking empty space;
he champs at twilight. Deadly errors.
When Titans birthed the Olympian race
they did not know such terrors.

The child is damp for fear of her.
Why does she tease and torture so?
The girl’s cold as a murderer.
A blind man sings below.

She plays thus half an hour or more.
She does not say a word, nor smile.
A neighbor woman taps the door.
She leaps, all wheedling guile,

and calls out softly through the chink,
“The poor, sweet thing is teething, see?”
The alcove waits. Thin fingers link
and unlink, absently.

Evenings, the mother takes her son
upon her lap. Some weeks she’s spent
in worry that he seems to shun
the sweet milk’s nourishment.

He sees the bottle; squalls begin.
Into her lap’s strong warmth he shies.
As though an old man, creaking, thin,
he trembles, shuts his eyes.

His mother doesn’t know what’s wrong,
(she drops her kerchief on the bed).
The little girl rings out, sing-song,
“I fed him when you said!

“Let me cook dinner, mama, please!”
She rings out, gaily chattering.
Mama is wilting, tired. What ease
a little sleep would bring!

At night, no constellation burns.
They weep, the seasons and the skies.
In dreams, the mother weeps and turns;
she thinks her baby cries.

A silent whimper’s frozen there.
His mother rises from the bed.
He seems to smile. She’d stare and stare
but lies back down instead.

It’s off to work as morning breaks.
She packs herself a morsel now
and leaves. The older daughter wakes,
gets dressed, repeats a vow.

But solitude comes pressing in.
The pain is sharp – she wants to play!
the child cries. Thus these three begin
the cycle one more day.

Attila Jozsef (1905-1937)
November 1934



[This message has been edited by Mike Slippkauskas (edited July 05, 2006).]