I Looked into the Well


I looked into the well, and nothing did I see:
I knew long ago—nothing in its depths.
A madman once jumped into its water,
even then, in the well there was no air.

And yet still, how vertiginous the edge,
beyond desire, before danger’s advent.
Below, the green-edged moon-sliver trembles,
flies and spiders swing upon it to and fro.

You stay here though you feel afraid,
splashing sounds as if rising from below;
holding on good and tight above the abyss,
while furtively you lean down low, low, low.

 

 

Nine Haikus


He says that in verse
nothing on culture –
what, then? just laughter?

Tam-ta-ta-tam-tam
plum tree leans into the well.
Beethoven, Sappho.

Leaf-dance on water.
Cold veranda beginnings.
Infinite window.

Birds circling above.
A building lot, bricks’ lowness.
Where is the train smoke?

Where’s that smoke gone to?
The Scriptures, where are they now?
What they’d give for them?

All the frogs are fine.
A chorus, marsh-bog foreign.
Heroic pest control.

Honey-coloured clouds.
On arms and legs—skin-shackles.
“Would be good to die.”

Once, a betrothal.
looking back from the well’s depths.
Never into verse—

Beethoven, Sappho,
A man’s face in the well-depths
I will die for you.

 

 

Cosmopolitan


Because death can pounce on you anywhere.
The deceitful love the cloak
of foreignness. Then a familiar light will fall
upon your lost steps. And perhaps 
even your mother tongue will not prove 
any kind of handhold. Hades will be more
then even your country was at one time.
What is needed is the darkness of mythology,
so you can encounter the incomprehensible
fog-thicket of whom you believe
that beyond the grave you can nestle 
close together, two flower stalks.
But the cries for help of wickedness, 
the stubborn dictates will be enfolded
into prayers, the roaring of the sea. Romeo’s ladder
hangs there above the charred 
depths. You offer oblivion,
the task of the Other,
to the pursuers. Yet the mistaken and their delusions
will be charred as one. Look at your wound.
The genuine wound. Always at the wound.
You can build your temple anywhere.

 

 

Translated by Ottilie Mulzet

 

Ágnes Gergely is a poet, novelist, essayist, and literary translator from Endrőd, in south-eastern Hungary. She has published six novels, sixteen poetry collections, several collections of translations, essays, and reports, and a three-part memoir.

Ottilie Mulzet is a translator of poetry and prose, as well as a literary critic. She was awarded the Tibor Déry Prize in 2020 and the National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2019 for her translation of László Krasznahorkai’s Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming. In addition to In a Bucolic Land, she has translated Borbély’s novel The Dispossessed and his verse collections Berlin-Hamlet (NYRB Poets) and Final Matters: Selected Poems, 2004–2010. She is based in Prague.

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