With a Pure Heart
Fatherless and motherless,
godless and countryless,
I’m without a crib or coffin,
without a lover to possess.
For the third day I have gone
without a meal of any kind.
My twenty years are worth a soup,
it’s a buyer I must find.
If no one else will purchase them,
I’ll accept the devil’s bid.
With a pure heart I will break in,
or even do a hired hit.
So what if I get caught and hanged,
Buried under blessed dirt;
from my pure and gorgeous heart
poisonous grass will surely spurt.
The Song of a Grieving Hungarian
A song is flying far afield, on raven wings of evening breeze,
a frayed-faced little man is singing, about the things he sees
around him in a silenced land, a Hungary in a daze,
and about summer slipping off, early fall, love and craze.
Toward the heart and eye sockets, his body suffers, pain-possessed;
can he ever rise again, or is he ready for eternal rest?
In the mist of distance his Hungarian song seeks out god,
it can’t help but mourn his old home, brothers, his wasted sod.
In Transylvania his rose mood got mired in cold mud,
In the Northern Highlands, his once-green hope is now a dud.
Toward the heart and eye sockets, his body suffers, pain-possessed;
can he ever rise again, or is he ready for eternal rest?
He’s got a zither with strings reaching to the stars’ high tiers.
On it he’s playing ballads of tearful blood and bloody tears.
Delirious evenings have fled and frozen in the Dolomites,
his bride, a broken lily, unknown she faded from the lights.
Toward the heart and eye sockets, his body suffers, pain-possessed;
can he ever rise again, or is he ready for eternal rest?
He’s well past watching for mirages, lets them sail on with their beams,
his eyes are shut and no longer tempted by vain and fickle dreams.
On the graves of pals he spills forget-me-nots out of his hand
and keeps praying: Oh Lord, please, do not forget this land!
Toward the heart and eye sockets, his body suffers, pain-possessed;
but if it helped his land, he’d live forever and never rest.
Attila Jozsef (11 April 1905–3 December 1937) was not the first one to shake
up Hungarian poetry, to wake it up from the sweet slumber it had enjoyed in the
gently rocking cradle of folk-song-like strophes in the 19th century. Enre Ady burst
on the scene right at the beginning of the 20th, diverting the familiar flow of
poetic lines into new horizons with the kinky concerns of the French Symbolists
and the more rugged features of the nomadic Hungarian spirit. He did not shy away
from the more disturbing problems of society, but he examined them through the exotic
images of a perfumed secessionist world and absinthe-scented fin-de-siecle decadence.
His ground-breaking style though was uniquely his own and didn’t work for
anyone else; nevertheless, it was a detour that opened the door to new ideas and
influences, new styles, thus expanding the freedom of poetry. On top of that came
the Great War that swept away the hothouse of aestheticism.
Attila Jozsef was right on the spot, and he had the talent to step through that
door and claim the newly won artistic freedoms. Bypassing Ady he grafted the new,
plain Language on the old forms first before plunging into free verse, but his passion
and sincerity always dictated very original imagery, also taken from everyday life.
Instead of the phantasmagoria of splendid isolation he reveled in metaphors taken
from the world around him, a world populated by real people, all the more real because
poor.
Jozsef lived all his life in abject poverty, from its auspicious beginning to its
tragic End. He was one of three children born in Budapest to a poor working-class
family that was soon shattered when the father deserted it. The mother had no choice
but farm out the four-year-old Attila to foster homes in the country so that she
could care for the two girls, making a living by taking in wealthier people’s
laundry. The boy kept in touch with the family, visiting them often in a seamy
neighborhood in the outskirts of Budapest, an environment whose images later
animated his poetry with the same fluidity as scenes from nature used to inspire
earlier generations.
His mother died before he reached adulthood, and his elder sister’s husband
became his guardian. By the age of twenty his poems were appearing in the press
and one of them (“With a Pure Heart”) catapulted him into instant
fame—and infamy, as far as the professors of his university were concerned.
They claimed the nihilist tone of the poem disqualified the poet from ever being
in a position to teach young, impressionable minds and kicked him out.
Nowadays this is something every student of fine arts or creative writing programs
dreams about, to be able to create something that would outrage the powers-that-be
and earn notoriety as the victim of the establishment, subjected to censorship.
But what would be a stroke of good fortune to today’s spoiled youth was a
serious blow to Jozsef; it cut short his career as a teacher, depriving him from
ever having a regular job, and for the rest of his life he had to make do on little
allowances, day wages from odd jobs, and meager honoraria from his writings. By
necessity, he stayed very close to his working-class origins, a self-proclaimed
proletarian, even while educating himself in the latest intellectual currents of
the day, such as Marxism and Freudian psychology, first in Vienna and then in Paris.
Back home again he resumed his existential fight for survival and his struggle for
social justice. He joined the Communist Party that was officially banned at that
time as a result of the brief but bloody Soviet-style Communist regime in 1919.
The injustices of a highly stratified society and the ills of the Depression seemed
to cry out for a new world order, the scientifically designed blueprint offered
by communism—which was, in any case, supposed to conquer the world by “the
iron laws of history.”
Jozsef was too much of a non-conformist, too much of an individualist (a dirty word
to Communists) to fit in with the closely controlled and regulated life of the Party,
and he was kicked out again, this time by the proletariat.
Ironically, the Communist regime after WWII made of him an iconic figure of
proletarian literature, all leading up to the dictatorship of the proletariat, as
prescribed by Marx. But Atilla Jozsef was, first and foremost, a human being with
great understanding of and respect for Human emotions and with a spirit large enough
to accommodate the proletarian, the ardent and/or wounded lover, the patriot, and
even the religious believer.
Perhaps this complex mixture was too much for him to contain, and he suffered from
nervous breakdowns, spending some time in psychiatric clinics. It was only a few
months after such a stay in 1937 that he met his tragic end when he was run over
by a non-stop express train at a provincial railroad station. It was considered
suicide at the time, but some believe it was an accident, early death being the
fate of the best Hungarian lyric poets.
—Poems and commentary previously published at outlawpoetry.com
(21 November 2009); republished here by translator’s permission
Bio:
Paul Sohar
