Ottó Orbán

The Witching Time

Az éjszaka rémjáró szaka
Translated by George Szirtes

 

From Fifteen Songs
Tizenöt dal

"Tis now the very witching time of night [...]
now could I drink hot blood"                        
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
William Shakespeare

Song of the Divan and the Ocean
Dal a heverőről és az óceánról

The divan on which I spend the best part of my time,
Serves as both table and sea-worthy appendage:
My head spins verses, dizzy from rhyme to rhyme.
I patch my head with words like strips of bandage.

It's slower now than it was, the intellect creaks and groans-
Ideas lumber forth in leaden-footed motion:
I notate the orchestral score of my seized-up bones
And sink beneath the waves of the icy ocean.

 

Song of the Green Leaf
Dal a zöld levélről

Humanity's wormkind wriggle on the bough:
The green leaf chunters: jewboy, tinker, sambo!
The lads are not subtle thinkers, and have trouble in seeing how
Words may anticipate bullets or outshoot Rambo.

Successful parasites rot in office once they reach the top,
Use show trial and base instinct, to keep their feet under the table
And should that fail they still have a secret multipurpose prop:
The club with which Cain crushed in the skull of Abel.

 

Song of the Taste of Bitterness
Dal a keserű ízről

Up and down the bomb-shelter all day
Robbed me of childhood, nor did it make me fitter.
They brought me food in hospital on a tray
But suffering made the taste of it seem bitter.

Bitter the water I drank then and bitter the law
That supports the usurper and the interloper,
Bitter the fact that everything sticks in the craw
Drowned in the bloody vortex of Mitteleuropa.

 

Song of the Body's Tiredness
Dal a test fáradtságáról

Sixty-five years, then sixty-six: now death and despair
Fill up my poems gradually, by inches.
You can't fight metal-fatigue with fervent prayer
Nor with a dissolute choir of tits and finches.

Spring with its grass hairdo arrives, but not for me,
It's winter I get with its bald and frozen graces,
My song is headed for the cemetery
Of the common wordhoard's great wide-open spaces