Light within the Shade: Eight Hundred Years of Hungarian Poetry

Refuge

g y u l a i lly é s | 149 Refuge In vain you comfort me and tell me: put up with it, it’s no big thing, but I am sick; not even you, love, dare feign to be encouraging. This god-damned plague, I didn’t catch it yesterday or the day before, and there’s no way for me to kick it, it groans in what my mother bore; and there’s no analgesic for it, its pains so many and so sore— the hapless sufferer who’s got it, the doctors know they can’t restore; no shooing-off its horror-image even one day, it can’t be glossed; no getting past it, we must face it, acknowledge it: that I am lost. For it’s an ancient woe, old age is, its symptoms creep up, then surpass— so terrifyingly, I tremble to venture near a looking glass; so he must feel, whose face with cancer yellowing, starts to lose its bloom, so he whose forehead with a sentence syphilis stamps its imposthume; naked each day against the end. So now I behold myself, he me; in every year beyond the fiftieth, sooner or later, agony. It doesn’t strengthen me to cover my eyes from that which, frankly, I am not at all sure, now I’ve seen it, I’m really all that frightened by. 150 | Light within the Shade I should see, if I’m not a coward, that which I surely cannot flee, and you, sweet comforter, might even with women’s wisdom succor me; I should be able, when fate’s hounds have found me and come to tear and seize, retreat, no looking back, as I would retreat between my mother’s knees; be able—hear the sweet old poem: te spectem suprema mihi cum venerit hora—”my final hour, when departure calls on me: to raise my eyes unto your glory” and—te teneam moriens deficiente manu—”thou shouldst clasp my weak hands in providence.” Because with your angelic dictate, you, you women, understand how to support the bloodstained hero just as the babe, with tender hand; and since one bed serves love and dying, and since however we end here, death strips us naked and depraves us, taints and degrades us in our fear, and since for long now in your seeing, my secret has no alibi, help me then with a mother’s patience to pass the shame of death, and die. 1954 ...