Adam Wazyk

Qui tacent clamant

I stood beside you at General Bem's statue The day Hungarian and Polish flags were raised. I don't know which of you is dead or wounded Now the voices are silent and fires only blaze. It was your voice, Déry, in the hour of confusion That asked me on the phone if I was safe - And the same voice it was, from the Parliament building, That I heard like a last cry for help break off. We are silent who were history's conscience: now This mute speech serves the interests of the State. Where acrid smoke coils from insurgents' ashes There the last myth collapsed. Bem's statue stays. Translated from the Polish by Clive Wilmer and George Gömöri

 

Edwin Morgan

A Statue

The statue was manhandled down quite slowly
for safety's sake, being so huge and heavy,
and hundreds more than had been reckoned likely
came to stare and shout and spit and cheer those
businesslike demolishers. Then they were dancing
on fallen concrete epaulettes, a shoulder,
a block of rain-black cheek where the split face had
burst and spilt no blood or brain, no anything
apart from rusty rods that mocked each human
backbone with their undestroyed reminder
of iron laws and iron men; dance! tear them!
By nightfall, all had gone. The broken pieces
lay huddled under an uneasy moonlight.
Clouds trailed their gravecloths. Shots cracked, though faintly.
One by one, muffled scuttling figures gathered
among the ruins and began to pocket fragments,
melting off quickly into the dark. None gestured,
none spoke. A knuckle, an ear-lobe, a button
vanished to unknown cupboards and shoe-boxes,
not ikons for diehards but mere mementoes
of bad times those who took them hardly dreamed of
returning, except that they did dream it, later,
making their children finger a few ugly
shards of pain that never can be buried.

 

George Gömöri

Milltime

Malomidő

"The mills of God grind fast"
(Sándor Márai on October 23, 1956)

The mills of God grind fast
the mills of God grind slow
for who is able to tell
is it long or short
that half-life those 33 years
before stubbornly hoped-for justice was done
something that is both too much and too little -
at any rate in the meantime the flour
(ground exceedingly small by the mills already mentioned)
was sprinkled on our heads
by the time we could bury our dead
our hair has quietly turned to frost

Translated by Clive Wilmer and George Gömöri

 

Adam Wazyk (1905 - 1982),
was a Polish poet whose leftist leanings took him to Lwów, where he lived between 1938 - 1941. After the Second World War he returned to Poland as a political officer of the Communist-directed Kos´ciuszko Army. In 1955 he published "Poemat dla doroslych" (Poem for Adults), which made him an important player in the Polish Thaw. He witnessed the Hungarian Revolution on October 23, 1956. In 1957, in protest against censorship, he left the Polish United Worker's Party. Tibor Déry, mentioned in the poem, was a Hungarian Communist novelist who became an active member of the circle around Imre Nagy, the Revolution's prime minister, and for this was imprisoned under the Kádár government.

Edwin Morgan (1920),
the widely admired Scottish poet, has published many verse translations from numerous languages, including Hungarian. The poem, reprinted here by permission, first appeared in Sweeping out the Past, Carcanet, 1994.

George Gömöri
is a Hungarian poet, translator and essayist, Retired Lecturer in Polish Literature at the University of Cambridge, author of several books of poetry and essays. In collaboration with the English poet Clive Wilmer, he has published translations of the poetry of Miklós Radnóti, György Petri and others.