Ádám Nádasdy

Poems

Translated by David Hill

 

The Toy Train
A villanyvonat

The toy train kept on jumping off the tracks,
gave fierce electric shocks, and you could
never properly change its switch-points over.
My daddy brought it from the Soviet Union.
My folks explained, with sadness, that's as much
as one could buy there-plus the floor-polisher.
The wooden box it came in seemed quite promising,
such a big box, a smaller child might fit
inside it; but when I attempted this,
it proved in vain. Its booklet had Cyrillic script,
all smudged, and really hideously printed.
The family just looked and shrugged their shoulders,
repeating: "plenty of material there."
The cast-iron locomotive was hellishly heavy,
and, naturally, derailed on every curve.
A violent thing, a Soviet Union thing, it knew
no small gradations. It stood still or raced;
smashed things, or rolled over like a dying bug.
I couldn't find a brake, of course. Even my
big brothers' German train-set didn't have that.
Unnerved, I chose to just push it around by hand,
pondering all the while on global politics.

 

Ádám Nádasdy
is a poet and linguist who has been teaching linguistics at the School of English and American Studies of Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest since 1972. He has published four volumes of poems and a collection of essays on language. He has also retranslated several plays by Shakespeare known in classical translations, because he believes modern audiences should have access to more readable texts.