Ottó Orbán

Ágnes Nemes Nagy in the Sky

N.N.Á. az égben

Translated by Bruce Berlind

The space.
The flow, the flurry.
The wings.

And down below the scribble of some map maker,
the Rosetta stone's hieroglyphic landscape.

A rusty fence-wire slackens and tautens in the wind.
Tools and trash flung around on the ground:
blasting cap, heart-shaped shovel, Swedish chisel,
one boot. A shapeless shadow cast by a creaking door
on the bare stone. And as brick midst the crumbling mortar,
to see the pubic gash of the basalt hill
as redly convulsing it labours forth
a smoking monstrosity,
the drop of red-hot lava.

Can this be that house? She walked, lost in thought,
not up there nor down here, not
walked really, waddled rather,
and remembered every detail.
For instance, how much she'd feared childbirth.
She'd paced her room back and forth,
until finally she'd decided: NO!
Said it out loud: NO!
And now this infinity
—a smoking wreck, unpopulated, empty.

She stumbled on.

Someone had seized her by the waist.
The New Year's Eve crowd, and of course dancing.
She was sober as a stone statue,
and yet for the blasphemy of it she too was dancing,
arms raised to the sky, all alone.
Take a look at this, God! Her partner
glanced off her as a pebble off iron.
This is the way it always was, she was always
the more wretched, the more powerful.

She came to the foot of a knoll.

It was made of words, but frozen
in a single gigantic block of silence.

She found a pickaxe among the tools.
The iron clashed struck sparks on
some of the harder quartz crystals. Good,
she could come to terms with that again.

Even while she lived she'd made the choice of pain
to carve from the dark of nothing what she could in vain,
lines of verse alone can soar to heaven,
if it's this that blazes up there, not just the sky,
the unburstable bubble.