Light within the Shade: Eight Hundred Years of Hungarian Poetry

The Translator’s Thanks

196 | Light within the Shade The Translator’s Thanks I give you thanks, benign and gentle giants, That silenced I could speak, nor lacked for air, That my banned voice through yours voiced its defiance, Schiller and Goethe, Shakespeare, Molière! I’d not be one to echo, then, full-throated, The floodtide choiring of the fulsome lie; Instead, furtive, in foreign lines I quoted Piecemeal the secrets I existed by. When I translated Nero’s despotism Before me functioned that of my own time; In Tacitus’s solid aphorism I was set free to tell of it in mime. My blinded stress, that anxious elevation That comes from pained disgust, was rendered real In Villon’s lonely falcon-scream, whose passion Announced that I had never made a deal. Faithful to all in the old text explicit, The new experience could find a way: Just what I saw—that could alone elicit What William Tell’s poor peasants had to say. Once I had loosed the anger that arises, I went, as they had done, off the deep end: I saw the hat that in a hundred guises The Emperor’s margrave stacked wherever I turned. How many new things did my thought and feeling Lock into the old masterworks’ alloy? How much did I stamp into their annealing, Tartuffe mixed with the Party’s solemn lie? But while my rhyme, with Molière’s whip a-snapping, Upon the unsuspecting stage lashed out, I watched lest sneaking zeal, always eavesdropping, Had cast the holy hook into my throat. ist vá n va s | 197 Because I couldn’t change nor see commuted My nature’s secret bent, that which in me Is individual and persecuted Fled along ways unguarded, dark, and free: My trembling lawlessness, late-come and wary, Fled to the sunshine of a long-past scene, Where heroines and heroes might unbury Their authors, Goethe, Shakespeare, and Racine. Invisible the wall I looked through always To westward, westward—was it all in vain? But Thackeray would set me in his post-chaise And bear me to the West, to his domain. My wishes, sunlit, fell to the seduction Of Henry Esmond’s sentences and sense, And on the road of glory and of action, I rode that punishable elegance. He lies, who lives; unless they have elected That you’re an embalmed mummy, dead and safe; But in Hungarian you are resurrected By my will’s force and galvanizing life. I owe you thanks for this your sanctuary, Where true to you, as true to me I stay; Into the future’s oceans now you carry The waves my heart sends from its secret bay. Thanks, that through you I could affect the nation By those lost times I won back through your power, And to these days, steaming with their contagion, Could bring the ocean wind and the free air; Thanks, that from prison I can still keep peering, And can entrust my message to your hand, You gentle giants, generous and cheering, And to world literature, our common land. 1952 ...