George Szirtes

Superb Poems Superbly Translated

Attila József: Sixty Poems. Translated by Edwin Morgan. Mariscat. 2001, 75 pp.

 

It is a great pity that Morgan's twentyfive renderings of József never made a book in themselves, because, for all the splendour of the mixed bag offered by his collected work, they are simply another item there, and get a little lost. Nevertheless, Morgan is one of the most gifted translators of the last forty years and I would certainly recommend any English language reader to consult his version beside the others."
This passage comes from an article I wrote for HQ reviewing three volumes of translations out of Attila József by various hands. Broadly speaking my argument was, and remains, that there is no point in hoping for the "right" translation of any poem though there may be much that is good, and most of it helpful, because the nature of interpretation, and especially poetic interpretation, is necessarily and, in the best cases, brilliantly and subtly, coloured by the interpreter. To expand this a little, the "real" Attila József will always be elsewhere, but the doors the best translations provide would be those the poet would have been happy to talk through.
In life, of course, most doors were closed to Attila József. Born in abject poverty in 1905 as the last of five children to a factory worker and a peasant-born servant girl, deserted by his father Áron when he was two, he was brought up by his mother, Borbála, who earned a living as a washerwoman, seamstress and cleaner. Sometimes she could not cope, so quite early on Attila was sent to the country to spend time with foster parents. They beat him. His first schooling was disastrous and the family reunited and were constantly on the move. His oldest sister married a white collar worker from whom she separated during the war. The war was in some way a period of recovery for Attila, because on resuming school in Budapest he began to perform and excel in his studies. To supplement the family income, he sold newspapers in the street, then fell ill. The remarriage of Jolán to a liberal lawyer in 1920 provided Attila with some support and encouragement, but his life was never stable in either the material or intellectual sense. He studied and worked at a series of jobs. And he read and wrote poetry.
He never finished higher education. Not surprisingly he identified with the poor and oppressed. His first volume of poetry was published in the provinces in 1922, by subscription.

As a poet József springs directly from Endre Ady, but his reading was international from the start. Baudelaire and Whitman play a part in his development, and I think it is possible to detect in his later work touches of Keats, D.H. Lawrence, Aragon and even Hart Crane, not possibly as influences but as kindred spirits. Petőfi, Kosztolányi and Kassák are geographically closer to home, but József's poems are unmistakenly different, individual and somehow more comprehensive than the work of his own immediate predecessors or contemporaries. His life ran its tragic course of unhappiness, misunderstanding and neglect, through a series of suicide attempts, through active adherence to Marxism and Freudianism, through his own periods in psychoanalysis, to the moment when he died under the weels of a freight train in 1937, but by the time it ended, he had become, in many people's estimation, the greatest Hungarian poet, and indeed one of the greatest European poets, of the twentieth century, a poet of enormous energy, pathos, vision and restlessness, who will always be associated with the passion and experience of urban life. Between the love poems of 1922 and the late autobiographical work of 1937 his work develops a tragic momentum that finds its natural symbols in streets, embank-ments, tenements, apartments, railway stations and factories. It is, inevitably, as a poet of the city, and of the place of the poor in the city, that József enters the consciousness of the foreign reader through translation. It is the most convenient, and probably the most fitting, door for him.
And here, in these sixty translations by Edwin Morgan, the door seems finer, more complete and more convincing than seemed possible. It is a door for a whole poet, not for individual poems, in that Morgan's ear and intelligence have created a language and technique flexible enough to accommodate a wider range of József's poetry than anyone else has managed so far. This is certainly not to argue that Morgan's József is, in fact, József, but that Morgan's József has a coherent and convincing poetic identity that partakes of Morgan's but is not simply a version of Morgan. The most notable characteristic of great art is not that you think it actually is a picture of the world, but that, while you are in its presence, you are willing to believe it is the overwhelmingly most important aspect of your experience of the world. It is that kind of belief one has in the Attila József presented to us by Edwin Morgan.
Morgan himself, of course, exists in several versions, within a large, single coherence. He is a vastly protean poet, somewhat like Sándor Weöres (whom he has translated, again with substantial success). Morgan's excursions into concrete poetry, experimentalist anecdote, science fiction, wordplay, reportage (I mean the excellent "instamatic" poems of the seventies, "dialect" poetry, strictly formal and wildly informal verse), and into remarkably energetic translations from Russian, Italian, French, German, Spanish and Hungarian (his "Scots" Mayakovsky is brilliant, striking and ludic) are part of a constantly invigorating and humane endeavour that is courageous and coherent. The only crucial element in Weöres missing from Morgan is visionary mysticism. Morgan is a more intellectual poet and a very important major figure in his own right, one of the most exhilarating writers of the last fifty years.
Morgan shares József's sense of the social predicament: he understands and can give voice to József's rage against poverty and can pitch that tone accurately in its English language context. When confronted by József's haunting "Night in the Suburbs" he can see the poor industrial suburbs, convincingly, in terms of Glasgow tenements: "The light smoothly withdraws / its net from the yard, and as water / gathers in the hollow of the ditch / darkness has filled our kitchen" sounds right because the place has actually been seen. Technically the broken rhyme of ditch / kitch(en) acts on the reader in a manner comparable to but different from József's fuller rhymes: more importantly though, it has already done its powerful work as evocation and image. The translation, in other words, has reached down deep roots into an experience familiar, and available, through the imagination, to the receiving language. I make this point early because I want to avoid the sterile debate between pedantic formal correctness on the one hand, and free adaptation without regard to any formal imperative on the other. True, formal imperatives spring from deep roots: they are not mere convention or decoration but the essential means whereby experience can be articulated. The imitation of formal ends is inadequate in itself without a deeper comprehension of the experience of the poem, especially as it chimes with the experience of the users of the receiving language. Morgan being a virtuosic writer himself, indeed among the the most virtuosic poets of our time, has no problem with formal ends and means, but first he seeks a bedrock of experience; the experience he shares with József.

What, after all, when we come to it, is the entire endeavour of language directed to but communication of experience? It is just that experience is complex and elusive and demands all the resources of language. These resources are best concentrated in poetry with its range of echoes and devices. Morgan understands the nature of a very wide range of poetic rhetoric-his feeling and perception operate through such channels-and he takes us down the passages of József's poem to arrive, convincingly, at: "Grave night, heavy night. / My brothers, I too must turn out the light. / May misery be a brief lodger in our soul. / May the lice leave our body whole." This is not easy to carry off and he does so with passionate ingenuity. The word "grave" for József's "komoly" is remarkable and simple: there is in the word "grave" a suggestion of seriousness, solemnity, physical heaviness, and of course, death. This is picked up and amplified in the idea of "turning out the light", a nice physicalisation of József's equally dark, but more abstract "alszom" (I sleep) which, in its turn carries a suggestion of sleeping power. Morgan then returns to the image of the tenement in his "brief lodger" for József's more rhetorical "Ne üljön lelkünkre szenvedés", which is part of the antithesis, with the body ("Ne csípje testünket féreg"). Morgan echoes the anti-thesis, so it resonates back down its earlier ambiguities. It is pointless claiming that the Hungarian and English versions are or are not the same. There is every point in remarking how the two poems resonate with and depend on each other. Both understand, in their respective contexts, the roots from which they spring. Their songs are shared. And the source is József.
Throughout the entire sixty poems, it seems to me, Morgan works at maximum power in the poems with the strongest physical setting, and the most pervasive sense of social despair. The poems of the last two years of József's life are particularly powerful. The volume is arranged roughly chronologically, with some allowance for thematic development, so József's poems about his mother-beautifully translated-appear in fairly close proximity at the beginning, with other poems that establish the poet's origins. A series of panoramic poems, such as "Night in the Suburbs" constitutes the middle of the book and include "A Drunk Man on the Rail" (Részeg a síneken), "Freight Trains Shunt..." (Tehervonatok tolatnak) and "It is a Fine Summer Evening" (Szép nyári este van) before moving on to love poems and poems of loss. But the end of the book from "Elegy" (Elégia) on to "In Light White Clothes" (Könnyű fehér ruhában) and the various Fragments constitute the most sustained achievement. They are superb tragic poems superbly translated.
Of course, we can see how this or that line or this or that poem might be otherwise rendered. No translation will ever have the sense of absolute, unique and permanent rightness the original poem may possess. Many times, in reading through this book, I have wondered how it might be if, instead of this line or this word, I could substitute another, and, as a poet and translator, it is unavoidable that I should instinctively ponder the possibility of a slightly different accent, perhaps even a slightly different voice. Like any other poet, I can feel the flimsiness of the poetic mask fluttering before him (but, at the same time, its terrible weight too) and can feel some other song rising in the throat in response to József's. That is to József's credit, and, in some respects, to Morgan's too.
This book is a magnificent, moving and exciting piece of work. A whole voice is echoing through a foreign body. I believe in it and it will remain in my head. I cannot recommend it strongly enough.