Szilágyi, Domokos: Bartók in America
Written by Admin in English -
How wide is the ocean
for him who thinks of home —
who is pained more when so painfully short is the way.
And a hundred fold the woe for him who, by and by,
can’t even worry from the worry.
Woe betide you flesh and blood stranger!
Organic machine is here the man –
just try to love it – yet this is your job –
and not with love measured in kilos.
How deeply debased have you fallen from
spectrum snowcapped mountains,
from rainbow snowcapped mountains,
into the fire cast
ash of an outcast
like good Peter Radouy,
and the bride of his eye –
Marinka in Rumanian
Marika in Hungarian –
the bride of young Peter Radouy’s eye
Marika in Hungarian
Marinka in Rumanian?
Oh-me-god, the world’s a noose,
to some too tight, to some too loose,
unto the bone cuts its tight rope,
through milk marrow, through crunch-crushed bone,
and oh how loose gets the tether,
when bright-lit skies bring good weather!
A man is a working beast,
he can suffer himself thus,
and one day there may be a goal
in a world already planned to death.
For everything has cause and aim
and is of to some benefit;
the design of the future
is in the wrinkles of the face –
this is destined for under the ground,
that is destined for the stars.
To compose? Is that still possible?
Oh well… One still works.
The girls of Hungary’s lowlands
Rumanian Carpathians,
the tent dwellers in Arab lands
the Turks who live in huts not tents:
the ancient songs – forever new
because each of them will renew,
renewed by self-renewing folk –
and no one knows this like Bartók.
“Do not toss your pearls in front of pigs
so that they may not be trampled under their feet and,
turning on you, they may not tear unto you.” (Matthew 7:6)
In evening clothes and tuxadoes
Ladies and gentlemen, gentlemen and ladies,
here not the pianist, the lacquer’s the aegis,
orbiting diamonds shine
waltzing chatter
to those of bare ears
the music is clatter.
Little man, can you tell
beautiful lies,
can you believe that well,
what all belies?
Do you have strength still left
to strike a pose, alas,
can you empty, bereft,
every last glass?
To what, at last, will you charge
your own night’s grim dark,
when you’re who’s blamed by those
who tore you apart?
The home pains, who denied you,
the home pains, whom you denied.
From death into the dying runs the one who lives –
Is the road a road that does not exist?
There is little room for life where there is too much blood,
there is too little room for men where there’s too much god.
Him whom fate wants to sustain:
will burn in hope to the grave, no less –
while those that fate disdains
bestows with helplessness.
Worry is money, while freedoms provide,
worry is stillness, when all is not still.
To understand all – yourself cannot hide:
your own soul embarrasses you at its will,
when your own self it does not recognize –
where meek submission must prevail
for freedom fit for fingernail.
For the soul, the soul, the soul –
that soul that is now so bereft,
that it can now find happiness –
befriending a cat.
(Indeed you did, you did anon –
the while you lived in Mount Vernon.)
Marinka, Margitka,
in the grave’s urn,
from your lips roses bloom –
hands trampled by dirt;
bride of Peter Radouy,
light of his eye,
Marinka, Margitka
part earth and part sky.
Faraway is the hate – but also the love withal,
will you have company on your journey,
no less,
from West Side Hospital
to everlastingness?
No hurt may be measured except by its gain –
Will it be understood how truly worth was the pain
to express such great bitterness
to be understood by the smallest of pettiness?
Oh-me-god the world’s a noose,
to some too tight, to some too loose,
unto the bone cuts its tight rope,
through milk marrow, through crunch-crushed bone,
and oh how loose gets the tether
when bright-lit skies bring good weather!
Wooden prince of pain of late,
hammer-hardened stone of hate,
allegro-barbaro-present, bring
on a polyphony of dreams!
Oh, future, resonate
from the finite to the infinite,
on the purposeful strings!
Resonate through,
from the finite to infinity,
the conscious, purposeful magic – –
For self-compromise is tragic,
no less,
and only that is true which is endless.
Fire-Water-Earth-Sky
Basha Peshta had to die
grass-smoke-green-rye
fire-water-earth-sky
Basha Peshta had to die
fire-water-earth-sky
grass-smoke-green-rye
coveted calling –
nature organizes itself into music
attend
its voices
(humming is the deep-brown-eyed –
here only Mr. Bartok –
among Americans a European
among skyscrapers a man of nature.)
Over its cry, pounded onto tear-soaked nerves,
intelligence
steps over the world –
aye –
by passing life’s immutable sounds.
The red corpuscles, dying, make no sound.
Do you have the right to condemn
– for in it and from it you live –
the present,
that in its consternation, mayfly-like,
short-lived concepts presents?
But he who creates cannot step back within –
and once he has grown out of all clothes,
trembles naked on the unknown shores
until the world catches up with him.
At last the thought crashes through every dazzling form –
a bitter road is this toward simplicity.
Bitter and long is the road from proof to revelation,
from reasoning to the forming of axioms, — bitter and long
is the road: for it is life. And life is proof.
The axioms may bring shame to logic:
but be the masterpieces of truth.
Bitter and long is the road from existence to knowledge,
from knowledge to recognition.
The blissful method of acquiring knowledge is not
description but creation;
and that of recognition is struggle.
Thus tranquillity is born out of a balance of restlessness.
Nothing is for naught: nature does not waste,
and even if it does: it is of necessity.
Not your words – only yourself you have wasted –
often not only the kitchen budget,
but freedom itself has to be proportioned –
so that some of it is left for tomorrow.
The budgeting has been imposed; the wasting of self is of
necessity: an act of resolution.
You always loathed those who have invented certain things
only to create an opposite to that which already existed.
Does it give you solace if you waste yourself of necessity?
“…and the world I recreate at will at any time”
(Aladár Lászlóffy)
The world loves to be recreated:
for the recreation itself
becomes objective reality:
thus the world becomes everlasting.
Matters not the I, the you, the he,
my eternal life – only our struggle
matters for universal survival.
Uncomprehendingly lives and dies the one,
who does not understand the dialectics of emotion.
You can pity the androgynous species:
double the function – double the loneliness.
They can never understand that life,
the hopelessly loved, is:
interdependence, and that the highest
form of organization forms love.
For every living creature
shares a thousand deaths –
the stone also cries.
Of the dreary days of horror
time itself tires.
Man is a working beast;
his goal is at once hope, and so
even the much feared death is not so
fearsome.
Nights’ raining down secrets
are appeased by the sun.
He who sees the far light is the happy one.
He without false hopes is contented yet pained,
to be mirrored in a grandchild’s eyes is
to be redeemed.
Translated by Frank Veszely May 5, 2006