DogBlog

Aki helyemre áll
(Ady Endre)

Lehet-e, lehet-e,
Hogy jön még ájult tűz-nyár,
Bukó-csillagos éjek
S hogy én, Én, már ne éljek?

És majd szűrik a bort
Pompás, aranyos őszben
S ittasan, tarka lombok
Hulltán nem én borongok.

S meleg asszony-szalon
Integet ki a télbe,
Lágy pamlag, égő illat
S ide nem engem hívnak.

S akkor is lesz tavasz,
Virág, dicsőség, mámor,
Tavasz-heroldok szállnak
S engem már nem találnak.

Lehet-e, lehet-e,
Hiszen ez mind enyém volt.
Én vágytam, én daloltam,
Minden, minden én voltam.

Soha még, soha még
Így még senki se vágyott,
Hajszolt, siratott, képzelt
Tündér ezeregy éjjelt.

Átkozott legyen az,
Aki helyemre áll majd,
Innyére méreg hulljon,
Két szeme megvakuljon.

Álljon el a szíve,
Süketen tétovázzon,
S ha tud majd asszonyt lelni,
Ne tudja megölelni.

He who takes my place
(Ady Endre)

Can it be? Can it be
Sultry Summer nights will come,
Shooting stars will light the sky,
Yet I shall be no longer — I?

There will be wine to pour
In the glowing, golden Fall;
Drunk among the falling leaves,
It will not be I who grieves.

Welcoming warm boudoirs
Beckon in the Winter-time;
Soft divans, incense burning –
Not for me their wordless yearning.

Spring will come, flower-strewn,
In its splendor dizzying.
Though its heralds fill the air,
Yet they will not find me there.

Can it be? Can it be?
Once this all belonged to me;
Mine to desire, and mine to sing,
I was all and everything.

Never yet, never yet
Has a man desired, or wept,
Or dreamed such wonders as have I –
I who someday soon must die.

Cursed be he, cursed be he
Who will follow after me.
Both his lips with poison bind;
Both his eyes be stricken blind;

Stop his heart in his breast,
Let him stagger; let him fall.
And should a woman please him much,
May she shudder at his touch.

NOTES: I like this poem, but I can understand why other translators may not be immediately attracted to it. I think we’ve all had similar thoughts at some time in our lives, as we contemplate our own mortality; but it’s a little discomforting to have someone come out and say such things directly.

I think I am finally getting a good understanding of Ady’s bitter humor in the face of death. As he did in Parizsban járt az Ősz, in which Autumn itself laughs at him for being so obsessed with his own mortality, here he takes his (and our) genuine anguish and shows it for what it is at its root: selfishness; petty jealousy. Yet he still manages to make something beautiful out of it.

There is a typically Hungarian rhythm to this verse, and I’ve tried to imitate it as best I could… though I’ve had to stretch it in places to make up for the fact that English has a tendency to waltz more than it marches.

I had make some compromises in order to fit the sense of the first stanza into the requisite number of syllables. I also understand that “szűrik” in the second stanza doesn’t mean “pour”; but I felt “pour” not only made sense in context, but also suggested the sound of the word “bort” which ends the line.

But the big problem I had with this translation came in my understanding (or lack of understanding) of the sixth stanza. I may have completely mis-read what Ady is referring to with this stanza; and in any case, I couldn’t come to terms with it well enough to adapt it closely. Once again, I had to editorialize a little based on the tone of the verse in order to complete the thought (that is, get myself out of the problems I’d made for myself).

I made some changes in the curse he places in the last two stanzas — though even making changes for my own convenience, I was still unable to come up with a satisfactory version of the final blast: “And if (ahem, being blind, deaf, near-dead and having poison dripping from his mouth) he’s somehow able to find a woman, may he be unable to hold her”. “May she shrink from his embrace” seemed a more appropriate final line, but nothing I came up with for the previous line seemed to fit with it.

Párizsban járt az Ősz
(Ady Endre)

Párisba tegnap beszökött az Ősz.
Szent Mihály útján suhant nesztelen,
Kánikulában, halk lombok alatt
S találkozott velem.

Ballagtam éppen a Szajna felé
S égtek lelkemben kis rőzse-dalok:
Füstösek, furcsák, búsak, bíborak,
Arról, hogy meghalok.

Elért az Ősz és súgott valamit,
Szent Mihály útja beleremegett,
Züm, züm: röpködtek végig az uton
Tréfás falevelek.

Egy perc: a Nyár meg sem hőkölt belé
S Párisból az Ősz kacagva szaladt.
Itt járt, s hogy itt járt, én tudom csupán
Nyögő lombok alatt.

Autumn passed into Paris
(Ady Endre)

Autumn slipped into Paris yesterday.
Through the Place St Michel on silent feet
it crept, under silent trees, and found me
there in the summer heat.

Up to the bank of the Seine I’d wandered,
lighting within me songs like cigarettes.
Smoky, and strange they were; sad, shadowy
songs on the theme of death.

Up sidled Autumn and whispered something.
Boulevard St Michel gave a shiver;
“Hush, hush,” rustled the leaves as they tumbled
at play by the river.

Summer had scarcely noticed, when laughing,
Autumn tripped out of Paris. Like a breeze
it passed; and that it passed, only I know
under the soughing trees.

NOTES: There was no way I could duplicate the strange, flexible rhythms of this verse in English. Duplicate, no; but I could approximate it… which is why I kept the rigid syllabic pattern of the original, but varied the stress patterns so much. I’m not sure I can get away with this sort of thing in English — but at any rate, for better or worse, let me assure you the uneven rhythm of my translation was intentional.

You can see why Ady chose to use the Hungarian form of “Boulevard St Michel” (Szent Mihály útja), since the French version doesn’t fit as easily into the rhythm of the verse… anywhere. This is why I felt I had to replace the street with the square in line 2. I admit, the Place St. Michel has a different atmosphere than the Boulevard, and had even in the early 1900’s when this verse was written; however, I think it’s valid to suggest that Autumn had to pass through the Place on its way to the Left Bank.

The opening stanza is much too uneven in my version, and needs to be re-thought. I believe the rest of it works a bit better; in fact, I think I might be getting the hang of this.

I’ve made a somewhat substantial change in the second stanza: in the original, Ady says he’s igniting within his soul little rőzse-dalok… twig-songs; kindling songs. I decided against a literal translation, because of the image I had of the whole verse. I pictured Ady, walking alone by the bank of the Seine in the stillness of the summer heat, smoking a cigarette — he’s Hungarian; of course he’s smoking a cigarette — and feeling sorry for himself. Suddenly, there is a momentary breeze that chills for a moment the sweat on the back of his neck; he hears the sound of a few dry leaves blowing down the street and thinks for a moment of Autumn. That’s when the image occurs to him, of Autumn passing by unnoticed by the crowd; of Autumn, sneaking up behind him coquettishly and teasing him for being preoccupied with her good friend, Death.

So that’s essentially why I changed the twigs into cigarettes. I tell myself that’s also why I compare Autumn’s passing to a breeze in the last stanza… though I suspect the real reason was to find a workable rhyme.

Oh — and “purple”. I almost forgot about that. The songs are supposed to be purple (bíborak), but it seemed to me that “purple” didn’t sound right in English. I toyed with substitutions in the sense of “extravagant”, which may be the intended sense in the original; however, it struck me that cigarettes aren’t usually purple — nor for that matter is kindling — so I ended up going with “shadowy”, whether anybody finds it excusable or not.

“Züm” is not hush, I know, but I thought it was an adequate substitute. The emphasis on stillness in the opening stanza, followed by the reference to the leaves scattering and finally the image of the mournful sound of the leaves seemed to support my reading of the poem as a haiku-like medititation on a passing breeze — complete with the requisite seasonal reference and nature imagery. So, thinking of haiku, “hush” seemed like a good kakekotoba, or “pivot word”, guiding the poem Japanese-style from silence to soft sounds, from Summer to Autumn: its meaning suggests stillness and quiet, but its sound suggests the leaves breaking the stillness.

(This is, of course, utter bullshit. But, for a moment, it did make me sound as though I knew what I was doing!)

I admit I’m probably being disingenuous including Faludy sonnets, since there are plenty of English translations of Faludy that have been done and continue to be done. Faludy lived in the United States as an exile for many years, until the fall of the Communist government enabled him to return to a hero’s welcome in Hungary. While he was here, he met, taught and influenced a good many people; so of contemporary Hungarian poets, he is perhaps one of the few whose work does command continued attention in the U.S.

So maybe I lack a compelling reason to tackle more Faludy. Certainly I lack permission. But this particular poem was one I needed to try to work with. I think it’s less of a balanced artistic statement than a diatribe — and since I spent many years working on behalf of composers and musicians, I have to admit I ran into a lot of artists who inspired a similar reaction in me.

Sonnet CXLVIII: “To Certain American Poets”
(Faludy Győrgy)

“The first and most important rule of writing
is to have something to say.” — Schopenhauer

The first thing that you threw out of your verse
was beauty, and the music was the second.
You took from Whitman his barbarian
long-windedness, but left his strength unreckoned.
The words you write we cannot take to heart,
or whisper to ourselves, or shout, or sing;
For eighty years, you fools have farted dust
and never said a creditable thing.

You vomit up your false associations,
all equally devoid of soul or body;
You walk with no one on the road of life,
as do Verlaine, Catullus, Heine, Ady.
Your priests, for lack of vision or of true
emotion, crank out theories in their place;
So out into the academic dung-heap
go all your works, to sink without a trace.

Can you not see that everybody runs
away from you, their fingers in their ears?
Experimenters, where are the results
for which you’ve wasted sweat these eighty years?
You anti-poets at our culture’s funeral,
whose valedictions drool from puling rears —

Collagists, what is it your pastings say?
Dadaists, what’s the meaning of your babble?
Are you the ones to tell us verse is dead,
you unread crowd? You unreadable rabble?
You abstract poets, do you understand
what you abstract — or do you merely dabble?

NOTES

Does the end of the poem seem inconclusive, as though perhaps the thrust of the argument was being lost? As though, maybe, the order of the lines was somehow off? Yes? Well, that means I’ve been faithful to the original, which also feels to me as though it ends without a real climax.

Lines 5 - 6 are exchanged with lines 9 - 10 in the original, for the sake of a more appropriate rhyme. The switch actually works without interrupting the flow of invective.

Line 7: lisztet fingó bohócok — “flour-farting clowns”. Oh, how I tried to come up with something in English that captured the essence of that image. Nothing I came up with approached it for sheer fluid venom. Someday, maybe, a suitable substitute will shock me awake in the middle of the night, but for now I’ve sort-of translated around it.

And yes, “theories”in the second stanza must be read as a triplet or a two-syllable word to fit the rhythm. Sorry.

This verse is from Ady’s 1907 collection Vér és Arany — “Blood and Gold” — in the section entitled A halál rokona, “The Kinsman of Death”, after another poem in the set. A halál rokona is another of my favorites, a deceptively simple verse which I will ruin at some later date.

I think the following is probably the least successful of all the translations I’ve done so far, but here it is anyway. The original comes first, as usual:

A fekete zongora
(Ady Endre)

Bolond hangszer: sír, nyerit és búg.
Fusson, akinek nincs bora,
Ez a fekete zongora.
Vak mestere tépi, cibálja,
Ez az élet melódiája.
Ez a fekete zongora.

Fejem zúgása, szemem könnye,
Tornázó vágyaim tora,
Ez mind, mind: ez a zongora.
Boros, bolond szívemnek vére
Kiömlik az ő ütemére.
Ez a fekete zongora.

Brace yourself for the disaster:

The Black Piano
(Ady Endre)

This monstrous instrument whines and drones;
Run for your lives, all you who lack
strong drink. It is the dreadful Black
Piano, whose blind maestro pounds
the melody Life’s discordant sounds
from keys that shriek at his attack.

The groaning board of my desires,
my throbbing head, my tears: all these,
these are its hammers, strings and keys.
My foolish heart and its wine-dark blood
spill out to the pounding, rhythmic thud
of the Black Piano’s agonies.

NOTES

Oh, God. Was there ever a verse so short and so apparently simple that posed so many problems for the translator*?

(* Yes, there is: everything else Ady ever wrote!)

The first and most overwhelming problem is this: there is no appropriate word in English that comes close to the meaning, sound and feeling of “zongora”. It’s “piano” in English — and that’s the only alternative, really. What could we say in place of “piano” that has the same sort of ringing menace as “zongora”… and yet doesn’t sound stilted and forced? Clavier? No. The closest thing I could find was “honky-tonk” — which, first of all, applies to the place in which you’d find a “bolond hangszer” and not the instrument itself; and, next, might apply to the music coming out of the instrument, but again not the instrument itself. And also, it’s the wrong style of music.

And we certainly can’t change the instrument itself to something that sounds a little more like the Hungarian original. The Black Piano is a suitably sinister image: it almost suggests a big black coffin. Also, the capabilities of the instrument to produce a range of sounds which is simultaneously wild and cacaphonous, yet at the same time oddly monochromatic, suit the image perfectly. “The Black Saxophone” is a totally different poem.

I felt I had to discard the pattern of the original, with its doom-laden repetitions of a single line: “This is the black piano”. You may have noticed: nothing in English rhymes conveniently with “piano”. What was I going to do? Write…

Run awa’, all ye Scots wha’ hae no
whiskey, frae yon Black Piano!

That’s just stupid.

And thinking of “stupid”, I changed the description of the instrument in the very first words of the very first line from “stupid” to “monstrous”, if only for the sound. “Monstrous instrument” seemed to me more in keeping with the sonic impact of “bolond hangszer” than “stupid” or “foolish instrument”.

And “instrument” is another word which makes a poor but necessary substitute for the Hungarian original. There are all sorts of similar words in Hungarian… “hangszer”, if you approach it quasi-etymologically, is literally something like “that which facilitates the production of sound”, in the way (unless my understanding is wrong, which it may well be) the word “illatszer”, “perfume”, is “that which facilitates scent”. We don’t have such an evocative word to put in its place (then there’s a word like “hangnem”, musical key or tonality, which seems to break down literally into “the gender of the sound”; “sound-sex”… how could I convey that incredible sense in an English word?).

All through the verse, I decided to adhere as closely as I could to the number of syllables in a line, without even trying to duplicate the prosody. There was no way I could think of to keep Ady’s rhythms and still make sense in English verse. This may be my failing more than an incompatibility between prosodic schemes.

Part of line 5 and all of line 6 are improvisation on my part. As I mentioned, it was difficult for me to adhere to the sense of the poem and keep the repetitions of that single line, “Ez a fekete zongora”, so I vamped on the imagined quality of the sounds the blind pianist makes. Ady doesn’t say much about the music that comes out, but I imagined some madman playing Ives sonatas badly from his failing memory, and spun a little.

I also altered the rhyme scheme. The original keeps coming back to the repeated line (lines 3, 6, 9 [altered] and 12). Since I didn’t repeat — thereby pretty much trashing the verse anyway — I made the poem fit a more conventional pattern, with the second, third and last lines of each stanza rhyming with themselves… making no attempt at establishing a pattern across the verse as a whole.

Lines 7 and 8 are a failed attempt to cram in Ady’s literal words without regard for their associations or their music. I reversed the order of the lines for the sake of my English rhymes and rhythms. I thought for a while on how to adapt line 8, “the banquet(?) of my tumultuous desires”. I experimented a little with “torrent” and “torment” to reproduce the similarities between “tornázó” and “tora”, but that line of speculation came to nothing in the end. I chose to use “groaning board” for “tor” in that it not only suggests a feast (as I understand “tor” to mean, literally), but also refers to the groaning sounding board of the totured and torturous piano. Then, rather than repeat the rhythmic drone of the repeated line —

— ahem, where was I? Oh yes: rather than repeat the line about “a fekete zongora”, I end up deconstructing the piano and referring to it piecemeal. It’s a poor substitute, but at least it allows me to make an attempt at imitating the repeated “mind, mind” — “all, all”, which I make into “these, these” — even if it is split across lines.

And then, again, the final lines dissolve into more desperate improvisation.

I will come back to this poem later, and give it another try.

I am not posting the Hungarian version here, because Faludy’s work is definitely still under copyright, and the poet (though nearly a hundred years old) was still very much alive when last I checked. I don’t have any kind of permission to translate his work, but I figure until I get the Cease and Desist order, I can post my trivial English version. Once again, my emphasis is only on the basic sense of the poem and the rhyme scheme.

Sonnet XLV
Faludy Győrgy

Two books from France you often heard me praise,
two favorites from dim and distant days.
You read — and gave me such a smirking look
that, furious, I too snatched up a book.
And, true: I scanned the pages, shook my head,
then cast aside the second book unread.

And so it goes, a bitter cup to drain:
Out go Turgenyev, Swinburne and Racine,
DuGard, Lord Byron, Milton; and the lot
of Tóth’s “Eternal Flowers”, gone to rot.
And as for Mann or Móricz — when I take
their books in hand, my hand begins to shake.

I thought I was the same man in my youth
as in adulthood. Nor was that the truth;
and to my former tastes there’s no returning.

What tells me, though, that now I’m more discerning?
If this is fate — instead of paper, why
not write my verse on water flowing by?

NOTES:

Lines 1 - 2: “Dim and distant days” represents my poor attempt at reproducing the alliteration of the first two lines. It’s really more than alliteration: in the original, the consonant pattern repeats across both lines, each of which begins with the pattern “F… k… k…”: “France két könyvét” / “Fiatalkori két kedvencemet”.

Lines 3 - 4: In the original, she — and you may be sure it’s a “she” — reads all the way through both books, and gives him a look of false pity. I’d originally started it something like this: “Two books from France I recommended you,/two favorites of my youth. You read them through/and gave me such a condescending look…” which is more expansive, but is grammatically wrong ( “recommended to you…”, for crying out loud ) and syllabically messy.

Line 5: I’m spinning here to make up some extra syllables. And a rhyme. We might guess that the page-scanning and head-shaking may be going on, but they’re not actually mentioned in the text. Otherwise, though, most of this translation is faithful to the literal meaning of the words… or at least, more so than usual for me.

Line 7: “… to drain”, obviously, is a painful attempt to connect a rhyme to Racine. In the original, it’s simply “Bitter is the cup”. I had at first adapted it as “bitter is my medicine”, to fit with the more common English idiom, but that doesn’t really rhyme with Racine either; and besides, the Bitter Cup is an idiom all its own. I’m used to hearing it applied to the suffering of Jesus, but in this case, I think it’s a specific reference to a poem by Vörösmarty that I have never read.

Line 10: “Tóth”. I imagine practically everybody in Hungary would understand the reference to the Eternal Flowers, but for English-speaking audiences I thought it best to include the reference to the man who assembled the collection. And no, it doesn’t rhyme with “moth”.

Line 16: Though the translation preserves the meaning of the words, the play on “biztosít/biztosabb” is completely lost.

Here is a first attempt at translating a famous poem by Kosztolányi into English. My plan is to come back to the same poem later, and try it all over again… hopefully with better results.

This is not (as a certain horrendous Italian art-film suggests with venom) a poem that takes a naïve view of childhood innocence; rather, it’s a wistful meditation on growing up and growing old. I suspect it’s not the sort of thing we in the United States would expect our children to understand. However, the Hungarians put so much confidence in their children’s intelligence and perception that this poem and others like it are taught to them from a surprisingly early age.

OK, first the original:

Akarsz-e játszani?
(Kosztolányi Dezső)

A játszótársam, mondd, akarsz-e lenni,
akarsz-e mindig, mindig játszani,
akarsz-e együtt a sötétbe menni,
gyerekszívvel fontosnak látszani,
nagykomolyan az asztalfőre ülni,
borból-vízből mértékkel tölteni,
gyöngyöt dobálni, semminek örülni,
sóhajtva rossz ruhákat ölteni?
Akarsz-e játszani mindent, mi élet,
havas telet és hosszú-hosszú őszt,
lehet-e némán téát inni véled
rubin téát és sárga páragőzt?
Akarsz-e teljes, tiszta szívvel élni,
hallgatni hosszan, néha-néha félni,
hogy a körúton járkál a november,
ez utcaseprő, szegény, beteg ember,
ki fütyürész az ablakunk alatt?
Akarsz játszani kígyót, madarat,
hosszú utazást, vonatot, hajót,
karácsonyt, álmot, mindenféle jót?

Akarsz-e játszani boldog szeretőt,
színlelni sírást, cifra temetőt?
Akarsz-e élni, élni mindörökkön,
játékban élni, mely valóra vált?
Virágok közt feküdni lenn a földön
s akarsz, akarsz-e játszani halált?

And now, my English version:

Come play with me
(Kosztolányi Dezső)

Will you not come, my friend, and play with me,
Be my companion, play a game forever?
Put on false faces for the world to see,
join hands and step into the dark together;
Sit at the table’s head; solemnly measure
the water and the wine with practiced eye;
cast away pearls; in small things take our pleasure;
mend ruined clothing with a weary sigh?
Come play with me: make all of life a toy —
the long, long autumn; snowy winter days,;
when we could sit in silence and enjoy
Could we not sit in silence and enjoy
ruby-red tea, that steams with yellow haze;
And in the silence, fear sometimes to meet
threadbare November on the busy street –
that poor street-sweeper, old and pale and ill,
who whistles underneath our window sill.?
Come play with me: do you not want to live,
pure-hearted, playing games of Christmas eve;
long journeys, ships and trains; of snakes, and wings;
of dreams, of happy loves; of all good things?
Or play at sorrow, and pretend to rave
before the shoddy splendor of the grave?
Come play with me at immortality,
Until our game’s a game no more, but truth –
Then lie among the flowers here with me
upon the ground, and play the game of death.

NOTES

Title: Trouble already. The title should be “Do you want to play?” And that’s what it would be, if those words appeared in the body of the translation the way they appear in the original. But I chose to translate the phrase a little less directly — it seemed like a good idea at the time — and as a result, I felt I had to use this sillier title.

Lines 1 - 4: In the words of the old cartoon:

Did I really just attempt to rhyme forever with together? That’s certainly more “Captain and Tenille” than Kosztolányi.

The first line means, literally (and in Yoda-speak): “My playmate, tell me, do you want to be?” Immediately we have a problem, in that “playmate” has unfortunate connotations in the post-Hefner world. I wanted to use the words “my friend”, both to imitate the sound of mondd (”tell me”) and to demonstrate the familiarity between the poet and the person he’s addressing, which is conveyed by the Hungarian verb in a way that’s impossible to duplicate in English. I compromised on “companion” for “playmate”, and put it rather redundantly on the second line.

All through the verse, I originally use the phrase “would you not” to try to imitate the constantly-recurring “akarsz-e”, “do you want.” It didn’t work; it’s not the same thing at all. So I next changed the plaintive, questioning, highly-doubtful “will you, won’t you…” to the more exhortative “come and play”.

Of course, in translating “akarsz-e?”, I also have to fight against memories of the infamous Hungarian Phrasebook sketch from Monty Python: “Do you wa-a-a-ant… Do you wa-a-a-a-ant to come back to my place, bouncy-bouncy?”

I’ve reversed the order of lines 2 and 3, mostly to preserve the rhyme. I have completely sacrificed the inner sounds of the poem, here and throughout the verse, to maintain both the overall sense of the poem and the literal rhyme scheme. I found it just about impossible to come up with a good, workable, literal translation of line 3, which literally means, “with a child’s heart, to appear important”. I thought that most combinations I came up with involving the words “child’s” or “children’s” were too awkward, so I decided to wing it.

Strange how words as seemingly simple as “always, always play” should prove so difficult to state convincingly in English. “Mindig, mindig játszani” seems a perfectly reasonable thing to say in Hungarian, or any other language in which infinitives don’t split. I decided to go for rhythm over beauty.

Lines 4 - 8: My Hungarian isn’t good enough to resolve the ambiguity of “semminek örülni”; whether it meant “not take much pleasure in anything” — which fit the sense of the lines, but which I think would usually have been expressed with more negatives — or “take pleasure in trivial things”. For good or ill, I went with option 2… to fit better with my use of the word “enjoy” a few lines later.

Lines 9 - 12: Of course, “enjoy” is a desperate addition of my own, for the sake of the rhyme. The original simply says to drink tea together, and remains mute (néma) about the emotional state. The description of the steaming cups of tea is a game of sounds that I was completely unable to reproduce.

Lines 13 - 16: At this point, the rhyme scheme of the original changes. I postponed translation of the first bit of Line 13 in the original until later, since I couldn’t come up with a convincing way to convey everything in lines 13 - 14 without doing serious violence to the rhyme scheme. So I gave rather short shrift to the whole idea of “living with a full and pure heart”, adding it as a throwaway reference in the middle of lines 17 - 18. To make up for the break, I attempted to connect “némán téát inni” (”drink tea in silence”) with “hallgatni hosszan” (”fall silent and/or listen and/or possibly even sit looking at each other for a long time”).

Lines 17 - 22: Here I’ve made up not only for excluding the reference to “pure hearts” above, but also for extending the references to poor old November by a whole extra line (again for the sake of the rhyme). I admit that the repetition of “street” is unfortunate.

Kosztolányi’s list of things to play is sort-of complete, though I’ve shifted the order… and brought the reference to “happy lovers” from its very own line (line 23) in the original to an ignominious place among the snakes and boats. I probably should have worded line 20 like this: “of happy lovers, dreams, and all good things”, but I decided at the last minute, for euphony’s sake and to keep the proper emphasis on the flow of ideas, to drop “lovers” and substitute “loves”. I’ve also reduced his “birds” to mere “wings” for the sake of convenience. Poor birds. Oh, what the hell… it was a highly allusive list to begin with…

Lines 23 - 24: And here is one line extended into two, rather unconvincingly, to make up for the reference to love that’s been moved up a line. One of the many problems here is that these lines now bring too much attention to the idea of death. Admittedly, we have a literal reference to lamentations and cemeteries in Line 24 of the original, but bringing death into the poem even one line earlier makes a surprising amount of difference to its tone as a whole.

Lines 25 - 28: “Death” must be the very last word of the poem, just as it is in the original. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any convincing rhymes for “death” that fit in this context. Putting “truth” and “dooth”… er, excuse me, “death” together makes me squirm even more than “together” and “forever” in Lines 1 - 4.

I wish I could have found a way to reproduce the hesitant, heartbreaking stammer in the last line: “akarsz, akarsz-e…”; “Do you want, dare I hope that you might want…” (to come back to my place, bouncy-bouncy?) But for the expression to have its full impact, I would have had to find a way to reproduce the effect of the repeated “akarsz-e”-s at the beginnings of so many lines, all the way through the poem. So far, I have found no way to do this effectively in English.

I organize my references to things Hungarian under the title Szeretném, ha szeretnének, which is the title of a poem by the great Hungarian poet Ady. Literally translated, it means (more or less) “I would like for them to love me”; words that could probably be quoted on the masthead of every blog ever written. The poem refers to the impossible distances between all people, let alone between the poet and his readers (and translators). I can think of an odd but appropriate companion poem: Ogden Nash’s atypically urgent and despairing verse, Listen…

Ady’s poem at one point reads roughly like this, if you’ll pardon the barbarity of the translation: “I can’t remain like this; I wish I could show myself so that those who look would truly see me.” Which is, of course, a paradox… if the poet could actually do this, would he still be the person he wants others to see?

Now, thinking of not being seen… of foreignness… of even those closest to us being barely more than flickering will-o’-the-wisps in the distance ( Lidérces, messze fény)… here’s the crowning irony: go to Amazon.com and search for books by Ady Endre. I did, hoping I’d be able to locate a few decent translations. What did I find? An assortment of books in Hungarian, almost all unavailable. A handful of translations, usually mixed up with other things… and all unavailable. Oh, yes: there is one volume still available, rare and expensive though it is. It’s currently ranked at 1,310,701st in sales on Amazon.

Something has to be done about this, and I suppose I’m going to have to do that something myself.

I want to point out in advance that I am absolutely not a poet. I have no talent for genuine poetry. I have neither the power of observation nor the power of expression that I would need to write poetry.

I do, however, have a good deal of skill in writing verse. I don’t mean to suggest that there’s anything wrong with being a good versifier, nor do I want to give the impression that the ability to write light, trivial rhymes is itself a light, trivial skill. For those who may not understand the difference, let me put it this way: I am a juggler who has always wanted to be a dancer. I am a yodeller who has always wanted to sing Schubert lieder. What I do may be entertaining, even amazing to some; and it may require a good deal of technical skill… but in the end, it is the skill itself which leaves an impression on the audience, not the content of my performance.

As unhappy as this situation sometimes makes me, I feel I am in good company. That hero of my youth, James Thurber, was a first-rate essayist and humorist, and his cartoons, however primitive in execution, are still reprinted, loved and admired. Yet the man was bitter: however gifted he may have been in other areas, his first love was for music; and for music he had no talent at all. So it goes. And perhaps it is this terrible frustration that fuels our other efforts, making us better at doing the things we discredit, or disdain, or loathe… those things we’re really good at.

Still, I feel I need to venture way the hell out of my comfort zone and attempt some more translations of Hungarian poetry. You read that correctly: I want to take real poems by real poets, in a language of which I have only the most rudimentary understanding, and use my poor skills to make English-language versions. Yes. Then, for an encore, I shall whistle Don Giovanni.

You see, there may be an awful lot of Hungarian translation going on… and since writing and reading poetry is pretty much a national pastime in Hungary, I’m sure there is… but I’m having a horrible time finding any of it. Sure, there are specialist journals and occasional anthologies in the print world; but in this Information Age, when even people in rural villages in Tibet or the Kalahari find it difficult to escape from American Idol, it seems absurd that I can’t find any freely-accessible, English-language resources for Ady, or Kosztolányi, or Weöres. I’m not even addressing issues of quality here: for the most part, I can’t find anything.

Sure, I’ve heard the obvious response: these poets are untranslatable. So what? At a certain level, every poet is untranslatable! Take Poe, for example (an example I know intimately): is any English-language poet as unique and inimitable as Poe? I say this as someone whose parody of The Raven I consider one of the more successful attempts to come to terms with the original. But in spite of Poe’s distinct voice and spirit, The Raven remains one of the most frequently translated poems in the world… and one which has probably been tackled more by Hungarian poets, and by more Hungarian poets (if you see the distinction), than any other poem. The Hungarians value poetry, and so they try.

So what’s stopping us? Why is the name “Ady” almost completely unknown in the United States? Why, when I look on Amazon.com, must I scroll through page after page after page of out-of-print Hungarian books before I find one, yes, one volume of English translations — in a hideously-expensive volume from about thirty years ago? Hmmm?

Well, actually, I can think of several reasons, and while all of them are valid, none of them are any good. I think that all I can do to remedy this situation is to try translating Hungarian poetry myself — knowing in advance that I’m going to fail, yet trying and failing in as confident and public a manner as I possibly can. And something about this task description screams “BLOG!”, so here we go…

Better to bring to the world’s attention a bad translation, which (however awful it may be) at least brings some of the meaning, or the music, or the most trivial details of the poem to a wider audience, than to allow this ridiculous neglect to continue. After all, if someone doesn’t try and fail, how will we ever be able to bring Hungarian poetry to the attention of those people who really can do it justice in translated form?

Pardon the long, long silence, but the demands of the Real World have cut into my ability to keep up with the things I want to do.

There’s no better way to get nothing done at all than to have a lot to do in the first place: just when you think you can devote yourself fully to one project, the others will rise up en masse and demand your attention. With their teeth. The only hope is to ignore the least urgent things, and there are few things in life less urgent than a personal web-log. Especially this one.

I started this blog at a time when I thought I’d be spending at least a month on the road, doing work-related stuff; I figured this would give me a chance to keep writing, though not the full-length posts I put on the Main Braineater site. I didn’t count on having any time to watch horror films, let alone write coherently on them; plus I felt I needed an outlet for things that didn’t fit into the horror theme of my main site.

In fact, the travel got postponed until the Spring of 2006, so I was left with yet another dangling project on my agenda… and a blog to fill. Two things have made the situation even worse: first, work has become ridiculously busy, with deadlines pushing each other out of the way in their efforts to trample me; and second, I overcommitted on the latest B-Masters’ Roundtable… the Video Nasties retrospective. So many of my favorites were on that list that I had trouble deciding which one or ones to write about. I eventually narrowed the list down to 3, but writing three reviews at once was a bigger job than I could do, or at least do well, in such a limited amount of time (although I do want to point out that the Dante parody at the beginning of my review of Inferno dei Morti Viventi succeeded better than I’d imagined).

But it’s the current work situation that’s contributing most to my extended silence. And there are plenty of things keeping the work itself from going smoothly. For example, it’s very difficult to put in a lot of overtime when something has died in the walls of your office. For nearly two weeks, our building was thick with the stench of decay. It wasn’t in the vents… I know, because I stuck my nose deep into them and sniffed, and the smell definitely wasn’t coming from them. No: the critter had found its way to someplace completely inaccessible to humans, short of tearing open the walls (and don’t think I wasn’t tempted).

Thinking of foul smells: when I haven’t been at my office, I’ve been putting in lots of time doing complex installations in a chemical warehouse. After a few hours with the drums of chemicals, non-toxic though they may be, I come out smelling just awful. The chemical miasma lingers on my clothes and my skin, even though I throw the clothes in the wash and jump in the shower as soon as I get home. Even this would be bearable, except for the fact that the warehouse sound system has been playing the same Herb Alpert CD over and over and over again. I don’t know how long it’s been playing, but it’s been there, looping continuously, since the first time I visited in November of 2005. When I call them from my office to discuss things, and they put me on hold, I get to hear it again. I have nothing against Herb Alpert per se; but a little Spanish Flea goes a very long way.

Then there are the gremlins. Somebody said that the classic definition of “insanity” was doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result. If this is true, then what happens when you do the same thing repeatedly, and you actually get different results? That means you’ve moved up the scale from “insanity” to “systems analysis”.

I’m currently trying to figure out why a certain file tends to rewrite itself on nearly every computer it’s copied to. There seems to be nothing physically wrong with it, nor with the disk it’s sitting on; but every time we go to copy it, it changes. It looks exactly the same, and it’s exactly the same size, but its contents have become randomly re-arranged along one of three basic patterns. But it doesn’t obey any consistent set of behaviors about which transformation it will assume, or when or if it will change at all. I swear it seems to be improvising. It’s got to be a gremlin disguised as a data file. It’s alive, and like all data, it hates me. But whatever the real reason may be, the clients think it’s my fault, and nothing I can say to them or show to them seems to be changing their minds…

Sometimes I wonder which is stranger: the weird little details the world is full of, or the ways those details are called to our attention?

The other week, I was browsing through a local Dollar Store. I usually take a look in the book section (even though the selection is generally horrible), and this time I noticed they had a stock of remaindered Hardy Boys paperbacks. I hadn’t given a thought to the Hardy Boys since Shaun Cassidy’s career imploded, and I was a little amazed to see they were still around. I was a little less amazed to see their recent books remaindered in a Dollar Store; but perhaps I’m being mean…

After all these years, it seems the Hardys have finally grown into their late teens… at least, if the book jacket illustrations are to be believed. It’s about time: the situations they seem to find themselves in have grown much uglier and even less realistic since the days of the House on the Cliff or even the Haunted Fort. Again, this is judging by the jacket notes: I had no interest in catching up with Frank and Joe’s latest adventures, which apparently involve international terrorists and illegal music downloaders.

Yet seeing these books put the Hardy Boys back into my thoughts, so that a little later, when I stopped by a yard sale, I noticed a beat-up copy of the “Hardy Boys’ Detective Manual” in the book bin. It was a copy of the revised edition from the 1980’s (the original dates from the late 50’s), in a reprint from 1998. Out of idle curiosity, I picked up the book and opened it to a random page.

What I saw there, on Page 77, made me run and buy the book immediately. Sure, I had been musing on how times have changed for the Hardy Boys, but it had never struck me more clearly than at that moment how much things have changed. Even though the original Hardy Boys series has been rewritten at times, to update the language and remove ethnic stereotypes, it seems there are still some things the editors have overlooked.

Here’s the actual page I opened to: remember, this is an edition from 1998. Read it for yourself, and see if there isn’t something you’d have phrased a little differently for a children’s book in the post-Clinton era:

On this, the 39th birthday of one of the most relentlessly original musicians I’ve ever even heard of, let alone nearly killed(*), I wanted to take a moment to mention that Chris Mandra has a new EP out. It’s under his nom de jam Katastatik… er, sorry: KatatstatiK. Er, maybe that’s katastatik. Or is that kataStatik, like it says on the album cover? Eh. In the words of the Lenny Bruce sketch, “Whatever your axe is, I know you swing.”

OK, that’s the important bit. Now here’s the blither: I had a strange… vision? dream? hallucination? after listening to a pre-release copy Chris gave me when I was down in Virginia on business. I was alone in my car, stuck in traffic, listening to Blow over and over and over and over again (voluntarily, of course… having finished listening to the complete Karl Amadeus Hartmann symphonies while stuck in traffic on the way down). It was during the third track, Ballsy Frank, that I got to thinking about one of Chris’s planned projects: it involves a large-scale structure, suitable for dancing in, that is equipped with motion sensors. The sensors react to the dancers’ movements in various sophicticated ways, and help generate the music the dancers are actually dancing to… so that the dancers influence the music as much as the music influences the dancers. And on and on, in a big interactive cycle that some might find as good a metaphor for God as any yet invented.

Or maybe it’s the other way around.

Where was I?

Oh, yes. Stuck in traffic. Listening again to a rhythmically insistent track from Chris’s new album. I had this very odd little movie play out in my head, and it weent something like this: picture an empty plain in some non-specific post-Apocalyptic landscape. There’s a band of soldiers out looking for The Enemy… though we have no idea who they are, or why they’re fighting, or even when: they’re men and women of all races or none, their “uniforms” are anything but, and their weapons are everything from sticks to swords to heavy artillery. Now, the interesting thing is this: to detect the presence of their enemies, they don’t use binoculars, or radar, or anything like that. Instead, they use motion sensors attached to music-generators. Already alert at the start of the music, these soldiers spring into action once the “enemy” (whoever they are; they look exactly the same as the first group) appears and triggers the heavy drumbeats.

And from there on, it’s a pitched (or rather, largely non-pitched) battle. But the twist is this: although both sides are trying to kill each other as usual, strategy plays no part in the struggle. Rather, the most important thing about winning the battle is to make the best moves and the best music while doing it. So, yeah, they’re killing each other, but they’re not going to let mere life or death interfere with their dancing. The purpose of the huge throbbing cannons (that fire and reload with improbable speed) isn’t to wipe out the opponent’s real estate: it’s to provide a good thumping bass. It’s difficult to tell who’s fighting whom, and there’s something even more erotically charged than usual in the physical struggle-to-the-death between the sides.

So you have it that in any lethal struggle between opponents, one may stay his/her hand if it means the dance and the music can go on making sense, or another may allow him- or herself to be killed if it helps the music and the choreography. And on it goes in a battlefield-cum-dancefloor, until suddenly everybody’s dead and the music simply stops.

Then, in the pause before the last track begins, this caption appears slowly over my mental image:

“Well… it’s a small improvement.”

Obviously I need some therapy. But don’t let that dissuade you from going out and ordering a copy of Blow.

 
 
 

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(*) Years ago I built a ghoulish life-sized mannequin and propped it up in the shadows at the top of our stairs. The I sat and waited patiently for my housemates to come home, and for one of them to venture upstairs and see it. Chris ended up the victim. He went up the stairs to his room… but came back down the stairs quickly and unexpectedly. He was a very good sport about it, but the experience taught me that no joke, however well-prepared, is worth potentially killing your friends.