Orsolya Karafiáth
Poems
Translated by David Hill

[...]

Potted History
Cserepek

The gossip spread around like wildfire:
tongues wagged about back-of-the-shop-based screwing;
people mentioned a child, a sobbing wife abandoned.
They cursed the vandal who had torn asunder
these strong and holy bonds. (That's me.) A good day
would see me classed as stinking whore, but there was worse.
From telephone calls late at night I learned
just what a wicked bitch I was.

That's the last time I ever go out with a florist.
For such a pairing there's no fertile soil.
No one will coo to me that I'm a rose, a dahlia:
my love will sprout in someone else's heart henceforth.

Why was I taken in by flowery words?!
My good name, such as it was, has gone to pot.

 

our rooms in november
szobáink novemberben

where could you withdraw to when
there's no meaning even in
shadows any longer
these rooms here just novembery
lacking heating system
are no warmer than nothingness
radiator noises and long-since-
tired-of music fills them up
widening the narrow space
of the summers of your memory

i know these minutes are hard
to give up the re-evokings
like the last cigarettes you smoked
again and again keep returning
it turns into a scent which
you can recognize anywhere then
it will remain inside us like stale air
in a closed room at start of day

early-winter collage: everywhere
november just as if the whole
coldness had been cut up with scissors pasted
into one frozen picture
which perhaps seems a bit monotonous
if you don't look with due attention
at its beautiful settled hues

the poems we know are also now
returning to life gradually comes
the time to relearn the winter trees
amongst the grove's denuded bushes
while their colours might just mingle
it'll be a fine enough spectacle
when our room's window totally transforms
into glassy chilly november
we'll spend a long time looking at the crows
happy the person who has a home

---

Orsolya Karafiáth
was born in 1976. These poems are from her first and so far only volume, Lotte Lenya titkos éneke (The Secret Song of Lotte Lenya), Noran, 1999.