Anna T. Szabó
Poetry in the Night
It happened in Kolozsvár (Cluj) when I was thirteen. Julcsa and I were monitors.
After lessons were over it was our task to tidy the old, high-vaulted classroom.
The class was gone and the only sound was the soft thud of the creaky benches
as we tipped them on their sides and brown apple-cores and forgotten pencils
rolled out of them. My friend happened to take a book out and suggested a deal:
she knew I liked poetry, so how would it be if she read some poems aloud while
I did her share of the tidying. Without waiting for an answer she sat on an
up-ended bench, leant back a little, threw open the brown-spined volume and
began immediately to read. What she read stopped me in my tracks: the broom
in my hand stopped moving. There was such elegiac suffering, such pure disenchanted
comprehension in those simple clear phrases that I started to tremble.
"Here is where all / life is manufactured. Here all is ruin." Julcsa finished the poem
and looked up in anticipation. Go on! I invited her and began furiously to sweep
so she could see I kept my side of the bargain. She chose another poem, and
that's how I heard Külvárosi éj (Night on City's Edge) for the first time. The classroom
was like a trench underwater, thick with the stench of the caustic powder
that tickled the throat as it mixed with the petroleum slopped across the floor,
the benches with their cracked and peeling paint strewn across it like wreckage.
I could hear the crawl of the scrubbing brush in the rustle of the broom as my
friend read the poem in her deep, firm, rather adult voice without a trace of declamation.
Suddenly she came to a substantial halt. I was all attention in the dampdense night that had settled round me. "A train whistles," Julcsa eventually pronounced,
then kept another silence before continuing. It was the first time in my
life that I understood the meaning of the pause in poetry; how a simple wellplaced
cadence can strike at the heart of silence and immobility like the sound of
a whistle. And that is when I began to understand something else too: that it
wasn't merely under the stresses of life in nineteen-eighties Kolozsvár, in the
Communist lies about heroic workers and victorious revolutions that had been
hammered into us with an embittering intensity, that the utter hopelessness of
their insignificance might be felt by people on their very pulses. Our disenfranchisement
was Communist disenfranchisement, not capitalist - but the stink of
nitre, alcohol and walls drenched in urine was the same under any system.
Oppressed people in an oppressed place. The factory floor of an empty, dusty,
godless night. The sound of vain prayer rises then falls to earth again. There's
nowhere for it to go. Heaven is untenanted, the revolution is hopeless, all that is
sure is the burden of the working week, the stifled fury of the drunk weeping and
sobbing in the pub.
Currently I too am living in one of the old suburbs of Budapest, on the edges of
Józsefváros, next to the bakery where workers lean against the factory wall opposite
the small store on payday, the pavement stained with piss, littered with piles
of dog droppings and glittering from dawn till dusk with the fool's gold of bottle
tops from beer bottles and other miscellaneous drinks. The delicious smell of
bread rises from the factory which is hissing with steam: in winter icicles the thickness
of an arm dangle from cracked gutters under which an increasingly decrepit
old woman, blind in one eye, totters along exercising her scrawny fox terrier.
I occasionally stop to talk to a retired assistant baker used to carrying heavy trays:
he still complains of his aching shoulders. At night the walls resound with screaming,
rumbling noises. I spend some time gazing out of the window at the street,
the lights of the greengrocer opposite, the orange streetlights, the procession of
car headlights. "O Night!" Everything and everyone may be seen from here. People
go about their business, sweating, carrying mobile phones, swearing, ducking
between trucks, coughing, humming. You can't not move. The most frightening
thing is that there is hardly any break in the constant movement. I have written an
entire book of poems about this district, about this spectacle.
I don't believe in the swift blade of the victorious struggle, in the rightness of
that victory, only in the melancholy that attends on life, in the oppressive night,
in the silence before and following the battle, when a dream TV glimmers like
neon, when workers believe that they are masters of their own destiny, when
gawky weaver-women fantasise about wearing famous designer labels, flouncing
down the catwalk, and the foundry-man.
I listened astonished as Julcsa carried on reading, her voice a little hoarse on
account of the powder: "The foundry is an iron barge. / Its worker dreams the
molds have forged / a smolten baby, red and hot.". My intellect has long grasped
this but the image I see is still the same, that in the place of the immensely hot
ore, in the light of the glowing foundry, a helpless naked baby is desperately kicking
its legs in the casting trough. You cannot cast human beings: flesh is softer
than iron. That is what those two lines say to me. It is not tender: it is ruthlessly
objective. This then is adulthood: the recognition that no sooner are we born
than we are placed in a cast and that the burning liquid ore of eternal loss is
poured over us.
Julcsa's family had a maid, or rather a home help, a nervous Moldavian girl
constantly batting her eyelids. I don't think Julcsa read to her while she was doing
the cleaning: the dust in her mouth was not helped down with a dose of Attila
József. But my life changed there and then as we stood the benches up again.
I no longer saw night and poetry through the eyes of romance or revolution. My
mouth was bitter and my heart darkened. Attila József taught me gravity once and
for all: the sheer beauty of it.
Translated by George Szirtes
Anna T. Szabó
This Day
A minap
"Wherever I lie is your bed"
(Attila József: Ode)
Imagine this. It was early afternoon
and I was on the road seeking a new apartment
wondering as I went, what next to do,
while staring vacantly at January stores
their worn-out goods, their seasonal display
and thought of many things along the way -
suddenly everything vanished:
the tram clattered between the houses, over
the bridge, and instead of the broad
vistas of river and road
dense fog hung over invisible water -
I stood astonished.
Fog everywhere: anxiety was a tight
cold sleepless night;
that's my life I thought and felt it glide
swiftly away but I wasn't part of the ride;
my life went on without me inside.
I felt it all but saw nothing anywhere
of the rails I was speeding safely on
across the bridge, on water, ground or air,
in the clouds or a plane high above land
with all assurance of reality gone
but for the cold metal barrier in my hand.
Nothing new then for two long minutes, no less.
And anything might happen now I guess.
2
How my tears flowed! I couldn't tell why they flowed
I simply lay beneath you, bearing my load
Of happiness. Another apartment. Another town, then
Nothing after it, nothing ever again.
I lost that but found you. I lost no more
than what remains. It wasn't heaven's door
that opened but my body. So we meet.
You come and we make our way along the street.
3
I sweep up the waste cuttings of your hair.
Sixteen years together, everywhere.
Squares and apartments. I note a few grey strands.
My life lies there.
Into the pan with them. Can they be for disposal?
I'd sooner collect them all, however fine.
Yes, yes I know, I don't throw things away.
But, well, they're mine.
Some pine needles among them. In summer
light sunflower petals. How things drift and fall.
The earth continues spinning. Does it matter?
No, not at all.
4
Who cares what happens: your neck and shoulder alone
interest me as we cross the bridge in the snow
clutching each other. I will expect you home.
Only tramps take their houses with them wherever they go.
I don't care where we are as long as we are together.
A bare floor, a few chairs and a single table.
There's only one thing I desire, no other,
but that one thing is indispensable.
5
Imagine this. I feel myself getting older.
Our home is a fortress: that's the way I am,
Though the edifice is not founded on rock.
Instead we're travelling in each other's warmth
Across the fogbound bridge with its tram.
And anything might happen now, I suppose,
the way it did that first night there, back then.
Though there are only rails and fog. Who knows.
Wherever you go now, come with me again.
Translated by George Szirtes
Anna T. Szabó
is a Transylvanian-born poet and translator, author of four volumes of poems,
an outstanding representative of the upcoming middle generation. Some of her poems
appeared in our previous issue (HQ 177), translated by Clive Wilmer and George Gömöri.
Her essay and two poems published here, all inspired by Attila József, show the many ways
the poetry of Attila József fertilises and permeates the work of younger generations.
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