Szilárd Borbély

Poems

Translated by Daniel Hoffman

Psyché, If She Returned
Psziché, ha visszatérne

Whenever a dream is not fulfilled, at waking a cell dies in the brain. Its memories then disappear. The one who wakens can no longer remember it. At such times in computer-enhanced exposures, tiny ultramarine blue dots appear, which, like the stars of a distant galaxy already dead, flare up from time to time. In the beginning these were thought to be imperfections of the monitor. With time the flare-ups' radiation darkens, darkens. They send a coded, undeciphered message. The darkest one researchers have named Psyché.

 

The Bodyless Birth
Az anyagtalan magzat

By mimicking, the human face is capable of expressing two hundred emotional states. Of sounds, the infant can produce an equal number. But for speech, however, he needs only a few dozen. He forgets the rest. It's not rules of the language the child learns, but inaccurate examples. From inaccuracies he deduces the correct rules. Then personality, too, is shaped through language. That's why, in the crematorium, the ego is not consumed by fire, where, before cremation, laid out on a marble slab, the large tendons are cut through, the skull trepanned lest it explode. The knees and hips still, in the end, have to be ground.

 

The Music of Patterns
Mintázatok zenéje

When someone suffers deep pain, researchers' observations have confirmed, certain cells in the brain commit mass suicide. The death of a single cell does not cause tragedy. At such a time, however, several hundred or even several thousand cells destroy themselves. These flare-ups, their frequency and spatial location, were modelled by computer. It was shown, with regularity, certain details repeat themselves. After the pattern thus revealed was transmuted into sound, its organization was recognised to be composed like music.

 

To Be Living in a Body
Testben élni

In the course of human evolution, language became the instrument of isolation. Namely, parallelling the objects of the actual world, consciousness is capable of depicting virtual things through mental representation. When brought up in consciousness, language is the third plane of representation. Its help makes it possible to make the picture of the object be present in another consciousness. On that level of representation, the experience of metaphors will be transferable through conversation. And when lovers meet at night, it's their souls communicating in the dark. Existence inhabits a higher plane. Because to be living in a body itself is death.

Szilárd Borbély
a poet and essayist, studied at Kossuth Lajos University in his native Debrecen, a city on the edge of the Great Plain, where he still lives. He has published eight volumes. These poems appeared in Halotti pompa (Funeral Pomp), 2nd edition, 2006.