The Least by János Lackfi

A poem by János Lackfi in the time of quarantine, translated by Anna Bentley.

The Least 

by János Lackfi

Translated by Anna Bentley

 

I was feeling lonely,
and you called me for a video chat.
My food ran out;
you brought me some and left it by my door.
While a pandemic was on
I was ’vulnerable’
and you didn’t visit.
I was furious,
but to no avail; you were doing it for me.
My income dried up,
and you made an instant cash transfer.
I had no work,
and you gave me online jobs.
I had no medicines,
and you filled my prescriptions.
I was out of sorts
and you sang out on your balconies
with varying degrees of musicality
but with an endearing enthusiasm.
I wasn’t my usual self
and you sent me memes.
I became withdrawn
and you got me to read.
My ideas had dried up,
but seeing your nostalgic posts
I took the old albums down off the shelf,
put up a few photos,
then just took my memory on a trip
down the lane and out of the town.
A howling silence grew inside me,
but you recommended some music,
and I basked, then, in the most wonderful
concerts.
I couldn’t go out,
but you dug out your old holiday snaps,
and I went travelling in my head.
Whatever you’ve done for the least of my brothers,
you have done the same for me.

 

 

Translated by Anna Bentley

 

 

KICSINYEK

 

Magányos voltam,
és videóchaten hívtatok.
Elfogyott az ennivalóm,
hoztatok, és letettétek az ajtóm elé.
Járvány idején
veszélyeztetett voltam,
és nem látogattatok meg,
én meg dühös voltam,
hiába, hogy miattam teszitek.
Forrásaim kiapadtak,
és azonnali utalással pénzt küldtetek.
Nem volt munkám,
és távmunkát adtatok.
Nem volt gyógyszerem,
és kiváltottátok.
Nem volt jókedvem,
és az erkélyre kiállva énekeltetek,
váltakozó hamissággal,
de aranyos kedéllyel.
Nem voltam humoromnál,
és mémeket küldtetek.
Magamba zuhantam,
és kedvet csináltatok az olvasáshoz.
Elszáradtam,
és a múltbanéző posztjaitok nyomán
levettem a polcról a régi albumokat,
befotóztam párat,
aztán csak túráztattam,
túráztattam az emlékezetemet.
Süvítő csend lett bennem,
de zenéket javasoltatok,
én meg fürdöttem a jobbnál jobb
koncertekben.
Nem tudtam kimozdulni,
de feldobáltátok régi utazós képeiteket,
s én fejben utaztam.
Amit eggyel is tettetek e kicsinyek közül,
énvelem tettétek.

 

 

János Lackfi (Budapest, 1971) is a Hungarian poet, writer, and translator. He has several poetry collections; his latest is Élő hal which includes selected poetry, 2004-2010. Lackfi is well-known for his storybooks and poems for children, too, and his recent 'travel book' Milyenek a magyarok?, a humorous, illustrated description of the Hungarian people.

Anna Bentley has been translating Hungarian literature since 2015. She graduated from the Balassi Institute, Budapest’s Literary Translation Programme in 2018. Her translation of Ervin Lázár’s well-loved children’s book Arnica, the Duck Princess was published by Pushkin Children’s Press in 2019. Bentley translated Anna Menyhért's Women’s Literary Tradition and Twentieth-Century Hungarian Writers (Brill, 2020).

HLO LU

Numero III by Attila Balogh

Photo by Martins Krastins  

Numero III by Attila Balogh

Translation by Gabor G. Gyukics and Michael Castro

You've left me

to argue with my mother's poverty,

so I'll open the wall of her face

and cajole youth out of her eyes.

I still feel

the mass of red flesh

in my hollow tooth,

because she fed me,

she nicknamed carcasses food

for me to eat,

she hid me from my father's cursing

she covered me with her chubby palm.

You've left

kicking the pebbles of the night,

I kick your breathing footprints,

the rhythm of your distancing footsteps

rolls on my eardrum.

You've left me

to make friends with the cigarette butt I've inherited from my father

to hush the clatter of my crutch.

You are a liar,

you said

you'd give me the throbbing wall of your belly

above the fence of your thighs

because it's like

my mother's panting

when she lost the borrowed money.

You said

we'd built a crown on my head

from diamond

and mud,

because there will be a wedding dance,

you lied,

for my lovers are porn pictures

who came alive in my dreams,

my mother is the witness.

I take a step towards you with my left foot:

I tear your hair out,

I slap both of your faces,

I pluck the nicely combed fringes of your eyes.

I came to demand a home,

a two by two home,

I got up,

I attached the machine to my legs

I had to wash up

I had to wrinkle the water up to my face,

you heartened me,

but poverty is my first cousin,

you couldn't bring down

the pyramids of penury,

you didn't search for the outline

of my bare foot in the dust.

 

I'm not a poet

I toll in the tongue of the bells,

about fates stuck in hovels

with the impulse of a Nativity play,

below the gates,

an eternal rebel

against poverty.

I have no nice clothes;

I don't go to gatherings

because it's required to dress nicely

there.

I decorate myself inside,

my uniform is beautiful:

I wear human skin.

 

 

Attila Balogh's poetry collection The Heart Attacks of the Soul was published by Singing Bone Press.

 

Attila Balogh is a Gypsy-Hungarian poet, writer and journalist. He has published several volumes of poetry in Hungarian since 1980. A collection of his poetry entitled The Heart Attacks of the Soul was published in English by Singing Bone Press in Michael Castro's and Gabor G. Gyukics's translation.

Michael Castro (1945-2018) was a poet and translator. In 2015 Castro was named the first Poet Laureate of St. Louis. He was a founder of the literary journal River Styx.

Gabor G. Gyukics is a Budapest born Hungarian-American poet, translator, and author of 11 books of poetry in five languages, 1 book of prose and 16 books of translations including A Transparent Lion, selected poetry of Attila József and Swimming in the Ground: Contemporary Hungarian Poetry in English, and an anthology of North American Indigenous poets in Hungarian. He was honoured with the Hungarian Beat Poet Laureate Lifetime award in September 2020 by the National Beat Poetry Foundation, Inc. based in Connecticut. After spending 2 years in Amsterdam, Holland, and 14 years in different cities in America, now he is living in the city of Szeged in Hungary.

HLO HU

 

Poem of the week: Phoenician by Angela Leighton

A chilling double sonnet finds the echo of ancient ritual sacrifice in modern ‘collateral damage’

Carol Rumens

Monday 19 July 2024

Phoenician

by Angela Leighton

They build and spoil, raise and raze, sandgrain

castles to edge the shore — an advancing standstill.
Nothing of them will remain to meet the new day.

We who are old gaze seawards, where black sails make
moveable As on the horizon, calling a name:

Alpha, Aleph, an ox head, letters that spell
our dimly literate past in a Phoenician place.

But all I remember’s a mask, its grimace or smile

like an old man’s wrinkled face — ironic, set

in the crazed rictus of a grin at something hidden.

Hard to relate if they burned their children alive

all smiling, smiling in masks to pleasure a god
who’d thus not see their terror or hear their cries

but accept the sacrifice: the life’s soft parts
disguised by that hard laughter baked to last.

We dream and stare — drowsy, late historians,

wise, after our years. In the day’s museum

çsuch gleeful trophies wink. Keepsakes, you’d think?

each terracotta, twice fired to save its face.

These Tophet memorials haunt within our walls,
sardonic casts recording no name or age,

a comic strip we cannot conceive or face
outfacing us. (Their alphabet is ours).

Collateral. (Think — a smokescreen.) Are we blind, by half?
The drones we make explode elsewhere in fires.

So many children … their lives. Earthenware survives —
and these mad masks. Is theirs (listen) the last laugh?

+++

A new unpublished poem by Angela Leighton, poet, critic and author of the recent Carcanet collection Something, I Forget, Phoenician discovers the fusion between ritual child sacrifice in a distant culture and its practice, differently named, in the present.

In a note describing the significance of the “grinning mask”, Leighton writes: “The museum on the Phoenician island of Motya (off Sicily) contains a curious mask from the Tophet – the burial site where children and animals were probably sacrificed, by fire, to the god Baal. Numbers are uncertain and the whole issue has been much debated among archaeologists, but some have suggested that parents or victims wore these masks to hide their anguish from the god. Whatever the facts, the poem figures the mask as a cover of a more contemporary kind.”

Before it reveals the mask, the poem weaves other timelines, moving from a view of the children to be sacrificed building their last sandcastles, to the present day where “we who are old” watch from the shore the “black sails” out at sea. Itself a time-travelling image, “black sails” are associated with the legend of Theseus. Currently, they’re favoured by the owners of luxury yachts: the blackness protects the carbon fibre sails against UV damage, and extends their durability.

Introduced in the fifth stanza, the mask is shown to be disturbingly ambiguous. Its “grimace or smile” seems to reflect the true horror of the situation. What’s described as “the crazed rictus of a grin at something hidden”, designed “to pleasure a god”, rearranges the contorted anguish on the living face beneath. The mask ultimately extends far into time “that hard laughter, baked to last”. A potent idea for the poem, longevity is signalled again in the reference to “each terracotta, twice fired to save its face”. This idea of literal face-saving reforms into the metaphorical kind. It floats us closer to the present, where children’s death in the fires of war is too often face-savingly presented as “collateral”.

Leighton also time-travels via the alphabet, from the movable A-shapes of the yacht sails, through the Greek “Alpha” to the Semitic “Aleph”, thought to be derived from the Egyptian hieroglyph for an ox head. The poem connects us to “our dimly literate past in a Phoenician place” and reminds us, through a further pun linked to the word “face”, that the masks, perhaps museum-shop mass-produced, are “a comic strip we cannot conceive or face / outfacing us” and that, in a gentle, parenthetic reminder, “(Their alphabet is ours)”.

The line that forms the vital hinge between the dimly lit, “dimly literate past” and current political responsibility asserts “the drones we make explode elsewhere in fires”. The “elsewhere” doesn’t signal western arms sales alone; it points to the fact that the technology its engineers may first intend for human benefit can be co-opted elsewhere.

That familiar sad irony that “things” so often live longer than the people with whom they were associated is heightened at the end of the poem in an elision, which, on the page, provides a typographical image of brevity: “So many children … their lives.” It’s chilling, then, to imagine hearing the children having “the last laugh” as the poem asks us to, again in parenthesis, but in the imperative voice, “(listen)”. Are we being asked to imagine the children resurrected, restored to what they were at the start of the poem? Or is it that now, somehow, inhabiting the “mad masks”, the children have become equally sardonic, laughing at us now because our sympathy remains so limited, our humanity so under-achieved, because “civilisation” resembles the “advancing standstill” of line three, still ready and able to sacrifice children to the national war gods?

Perhaps both kinds of laughter are indicated, another telling ambiguity in a poem whose only borders are those derived from the verbal patterning of line and stanza, the subtle 14-couplet, doubled-sonnet design.

THE GUARDIAN

Paul Muldoon / For me, Meeting the British blew away the very idea of certainty

For me, Meeting the British blew away the very idea of certainty

Paul Muldoon’s 1987 collection was a profound influence on me as a writer, not least in how it shows how fixed ideas are subject to slippage

• 
• • Giles Foden
  • The Guardian, Tuesday 2 September 2014 21.10 BST
  • 
    

‘All through Meeting the British, you can see Paul Muldoon giving himself over to the play of language.’ Photograph: Murdo Macleod

In 1986, fresh from Africa, I arrived at university with a sheaf of poems. Nothing unusual there, except in that year Paul Muldoon was the Judith E Wilson fellow at Cambridge, and by good fortune he was in residence at my own college, Fitzwilliam. There, once a week, at about six in the evening, he convened a writing group. It wasn’t a creative writing workshop, but something more fluid. People would read out poems or short pieces of prose. Once, I remember, Lee Hall, later the writer of Billy Elliot and The Pitmen Painters, brought along his guitar and sang a song. The group was a mixture of students and Cambridge residents, of varying ages. We all smoked, of course, and there was a fair bit of covert flirting.

Muldoon’s responses to the work were elliptical, like his own writing, which we were beginning to discover in collections such as Quoof (1983) and a slim Selected Poems (1986). Once he described one of my poems – I think it was about cycling – as “very regular”. It took me some time to realise he probably wasn’t just talking about the metre.

It was Muldoon’s next book, published just after he left Cambridge for the University of East Anglia and then Princeton, which had a big effect on me. From Meeting the British (1987) I learned many things that helped my own writing when I began to publish novels, a decade or so later.

The title poem dramatises the encounter between a group of native Americans and British colonial soldiers during the 1760s: “They gave us six fishhooks / and two blankets embroidered with smallpox.” Half-Irish, half-English, brought up in Africa, I began, after reading this, to see that I myself had emerged from a quasi-colonial situation: the last, half-embarrassed splutter of empire, which despite independence in the late 1960s continued coughing on for at least 15 years, determining political and social norms in many of the African countries in which I had lived.

I realised that I had been involved in a movement, a process from origin to destination, something spectral. I also came to see identity like this, understanding the distant past (my Kerry grandmother reminiscing about hiding under the bed when the Black and Tans raided the farm) and the near past (watching police attack rioting crowds in Nigeria) in a different way. I suppose I woke up from the idyll of politically neutral insulation that is, to this day, the bane of expatriate life.

This realisation coincided with a boom in postcolonial studies in an academic sense. People such as Homi Bhabha were beginning to theorise key concepts such as hybridity, boundary areas and ambivalence. And it seemed to me that Muldoon was putting these ideas into practice poetically, with his shape-shifting rabbits and badgers, lobsters and dolphins – even that “hacienda’s frump / of pampas-grass, / a pair of cryptic / eagles guarding its front door”.

Part of the ambivalence of Muldoon’s own poems resides in modal verbs and associated speech acts, which together somehow clear a space between what is certain or not (“I must have been dozing in the tub / when the telephone / rang …”). These formulations – the longer one occupies them as a reader – appear to open up political possibilities; or rather, the possibilities of new politics. Muldoon’s forms, his metaphors, even his famous half-rhymes, now seem proleptic, throwing themselves forward to the realities of the peace process that would begin to emerge materially in Northern Ireland in the early 90s, like the forked twig “astounding itself as a catapult” in another poem in the book.

Yet there is never, in Meeting the British, any sense of settling into a particular political narrative. The associative power of language is constantly brought in to show us how fixed ideas are subject to slippage, like the length of chain from which the poet Gérard de Nerval hangs himself in one poem, which makes the speaker of the poem “think of something else, then something else again”. All through the book you can see Muldoon giving himself over to the play of language like that, and I suppose that one of the other things that changed me, on reading it, was realising that even in fictional prose, which tends to be more subject to external structures (the drama, the plot, the situation), a writer needs to be open to that.

That said, the collection contained Muldoon’s most structured piece of dramatic writing to date: 7, Middagh Street realises the voices of the illustrious occupants of a house in Brooklyn Heights in the early 1940s, including WH Auden, Chester Kallman, Louis MacNeice, Carson McCullers, Salvador Dali, Benjamin Britten and Gypsy Rose Lee. As a whole, this long poem is a consideration of the relation between politics and art. I suppose what I learned from 7, Middagh Street was that, in the right circumstances, it’s OK to voice actual historical figures, as I did with Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland, and that the brute material of history and politics can sometimes be corralled in art – even if there is always a cost, a cargo, some kind of residue of actual lived experience.

That’s always there in Muldoon, the feeling inscribed in the form. So it’s fitting that none of the so-called literary lessons of Meeting the British were the really important ones. The poems in it about love and death spoke to me most strongly, in particular the elegies for Muldoon’s father, to whom the book is dedicated. Everyone has a father story, of course, and it is a testament to Muldoon’s universalism that when he sees his father in a badger, we can see ours in his.

THE GUARDIAN