FALCSIK MARI WEBLAPJA
a lélek megismerése egymagában menthetetlenül mélabússá tenne minket, ha a kifejezés öröme fel nem vidítana
IN ENGLISH
Contents:
- Two poems translated by the author;
- A study on contemporary Hungarian poetry by Enikő Bollobás;
- Four poems translated by US translators
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Two poems translated by the author:
AN AFTER-CHRISTMAS CAROL
flowers of dust on New Year’s dully snow
pins of pine-trees growing from the rugs
tiring gold of Merry-Christmas show
storm on the streets sweeping the waste of shops
the place’s deserted – Twelfth Night weeps around
my ears are hurt by razors of the frost
nails of bare branches make noise on the ground
dead pine-tree’s corpus moving like a ghost
poor Christmas-tree – ritual sacrifice
looking for feast on its bones lingering
pawing with empty wraps with eager eyes
as jade jackal the New Year’s hungry wind
I WILL TAKE THIS
I found something here in this lavish sight
in this rich and eurythmic hour of the night
when the sunset puts all binding details
of the obligatory picture that the evening paints:
first the human noises fading all away
then the birdy voices are becoming rare
and as the sky is facing the mirror
of the water: as blue as glass its cover
shining brightly while smooth lacquer blows
on it the pouring sunlight form the clouds -
frizzling curls of smoke and the misty veils:
the wind gathering every hangings in one place
and when all these fabrics are layered in big rolls
darkness is arriving as the evening falls
and new voices rising from the flossy dark:
the caterwaul of night swishing and bark
as young breeze tinkering in the liquid black
I feel fondling air-flow as I'm looking back
to my freedom here in this fresh watery smell
this may surely be the last night pretty well
the row of lamplights gleaming dancing on the waves
like a constellation looking its own face
and the biggest wizard as once in a month
full moon's appearing on the horizon
in its pride just now: its silver running down
under poplar and birch in the garden lawn
in its pride so far - but soon ready to wane
as I'm ready to pack - that's the way again:
just another birth from another death
poplar and birch standing waving with the breath
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To Topos, Oregon, 2006 Winter Issue
Lecke az öbölnél; Feminin; Dalocska az elszökő időről; Egy lélekhez
Foreword by Enikő Bollobás
A Nation's Poetry as Language, History, and Selfhood
If there were to be a national vote among Hungarians as to what part of their culture (if anything) they are most proud, their difficult language, their tragic history, and the grim pessimism of the Hungarian character would surely be among the top-ranking objects of national pride. Joking aside, somewhere in these possible self-images would lie, I suggest, the centrality for Hungarian culture, of literature, and of poetry in particular. For it is a culture that both reflects and is produced by a history peppered with oppression, failed revolutions, and a strange (Finno-Ugric) language related only to Finnish and Estonian in Europe, hopelessly difficult for speakers of Romance, Germanic, and Slavic languages (just about everyone else in Europe). Its psychological disposition to hopelessness is evinced in its consistently top rank in the world's suicide's rates.
In spite of the successive waves of "modernization" or "Westernization" this Central-European country has gone through in the past century, poetry is still a highly respected intellectual enterprise, with poets whose word seems to count even when they are not writing poetry. People still read poems just for fun, and they still go to bookstores to browse through poetry sections and then to buy the books that caught their attention. Of course, the world would be a better place with less television and more poetry in Hungary too, but I'm afraid this is yet a moment in history we will be nostalgic about later. Like the "average year" for a Hungarian: worse than the previous one, but better than the one coming after . . .
The poetry gathered in this volume was by no means intended as representative of contemporary Hungarian poetry. Major anthologies have brought together representative collections, for example George Gömöri's The Colonnade of Teeth (1996) and Ádám Makkai's In Quest of the 'Miracle Stag' (2000, 2003), to name just two of the most recent ones. Within this limited space we have only tried to provide a glimpse into the variety that so characterizes contemporary poetic writing -- of men and women, formalists and experimentalists, realists and surrealists, Roma poets and "minority poets" (Hungarian poets living as minorities in countries surrounding Hungary), those preoccupied with space and those preoccupied with time. The reader will find poems of a region devastated by ethnic wars (Ladik), animal brutality (Balla), loveless relationships and unmotherly mothers (Garaczi); Roma poetry reminiscent of the naive murals of Mexican surrealists (Balogh, Horváth); Eliot-like still lives of routine sex and other forms of gendered aggression (Bódis); tributes (Blue Beard's) to the past gone forever as embodied by women once loved (Csoóri); lyric pieces on feelings described as blood never clotting (Falcsik), musings on such semantic coincidences as those between Garibaldi as biscuit, shirt, and revolutionary hero and other coincidences between mother's name and maternity hospital's name (Gömöri); memorable images of quotidian bird death (Gyukics) and nightmares of total immobility (Jász); a desire for certainties, for a clear difference between good and evil, loss and gain, life force and death wish (Gyurkovics); a Hungarian's perspectives on New York (Kántor); satire on what history would have been like had the use of "small languages" been banned or limited (like Hungarian was/is) by Romanian authorities (Kányádi); celebrations of being anchored in the world and of ways of taking in the world (Kodolányi); attempts at walking the fine line between involvement and detachment (Ladik again); gentle New Year's greetings side by side with graphic descriptions of suicide and death (Nyilas); contemplations on very literal objects of women's history and recreations of supposedly canonical dramatic texts never written (Petrőczi); an objective assessment of man's obvious limits when put next to a hawk (Prágai); two grand versions for a female epistemology of time: one on the more/less and knowing/time (left) paradox and the beauty of aging love (Falcsik again, in her best [Denise] Levertovian mood) and the other where the past is present in its every detail, the world is populated with the dead, past loves, other memories, dreams, and fears (such as the recurring Bradstreet-like image of the flaming house that once held it all) (Rakovszky); perceptions of everyday coincidences (when the eternally loved ones of some [eternally famous] Hungarian poets accidentally meet in a pharmacy) and of the impulse to find the mysteries of life, absurd as they may be, even when one is under surveillance in a tormenting police state (Szőcs); self-effacing and easily distracted meditations on friendship, loss, ambivalent feelings, and a world invaded by everyday banalities (Várady); fantasies on nonhuman existence, when one is the evening or a sanatorium in ruins (Végh); as well as possibilities of withdrawal and stepping aside (Zsille).
Hungarians, remarked the London emigré critic László Cs. Szabó, believed that the only fatherland "worthy of human habitation" was the one "that sparked inside poetry" (1079). For a people who find themselves all alone in Europe in terms of language, who have been dealt a rather difficult history, and who see themselves most alive when hit by a black Irish mood, it is no wonder that they turn to poetry, where language, history and mood can all interact. Indeed, this "nation / is nothing but poetry ..."
A Lesson by the Bay (translated by Paul Sohar)
if some trivia should divert your mind
the thesis still stands and stands repeating again:
quite flattened and dried up you’ll be left behind
like the frog your feet squash in a country lane
take an animal that seems to have its soul
germinating but then it stays the same
you watch it closely and try to play your role
as close as you can to the directions of the game
the sun keeps piercing through baroque clouds
you keep looking at its rays since the sight
can reflect your most cherished hopes and doubts
when the sun finally sets your point of view
at last clears up like a pathetic poet’s last right
effort and his poem begins to sound quite true
Feminine (translated by
woman I am: not because I think
I know I exist because I suffer
like a cistern my soul is filled
with vast amounts
of oily thick sorrow
far from being proud
I don’t feel because I am good
I feel as my thick blood churns in the vein
for years it has carried many
clotless emotions
it is not easy for me: why would it be easy for you to be with me.
In memoriam M. A.
your proud name’s tossed against saloon and precincts walls
I hope you’ve slipped away in some nobler form that never palls
and not in that shapeless flesh formation poured
on top of the blood-dripping autopsy board
or else you had no more to do with it than with the snow
slowly sifting white flakes into
like the weightless handful of ashes that no one would claim
the dust of the once so slender and browned frame
from which you’d slipped out long ago leaving a large dose
of a gleam glancing behind without the punch-line pose
except the light that the Sun sprinkles now on river waves
yes the light; there’s not a sliver of sin in it nor happiness raves
A little song about time slipping away (translated by
the wisdom man owns is absurd:
by the time it is truly heard
it becomes deaf to his ear
for its trials the body can't bear
learn the law of our life-times:
what a God-invented game:
as it waxes so it wanes
Dutch and Italian
Hollandul:
De Tweede Ronde, 2004 Herbst, Hongaarse Gedicht
KI VOLTÁL; GYEREKSZOBA
Falcsik, Mari
Titel: Wie was je
Eerste versregel: 'Wie was je dat je zelfs dit meegebracht hebt'
Vindplaats: nr. 3, p. 153
Vertaler: Daróczi, Anikó - Hennink, Ellen
Annotatie: Het oorspronkelijke Hongaarse gedicht is ook afgedrukt.
Thema: Hongarije nummer (tevens Vrouwennummer)
Falcsik, Mari
Titel: Kinderkamer
Eerste versregel: 'We hadden een kachel als een klein dik hondje'
Vindplaats: nr. 3, p. 152
Vertaler: Daróczi, Anikó - Hennink, Ellen
Annotatie: Het oorspronkelijke Hongaarse gedicht is ook afgedrukt.
Thema: Hongarije nummer (tevens Vrouwennummer)
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Olaszul:
Lecsukott szemeden át látom...
A fordítóműhely keretében olaszra fordított további versek: Casanova másodszor s végleg elhagyja Velencét; Egy utazás képei; Ezt elviszem
- Már megjelent előző évben is egy kötetjük, szintén magyar költőnők verseiből. Ebben, hogy női lírára összpontosítanak, van némi feminista szellemiség is?
- Nem mondanám, hogy feminista szellemiség húzódna az antológia hátterében, habár ebben sem találnék kivetni valót. Évszázadok óta megszoktuk, hogy férfiak szerelmes verseit olvassuk, olyan verseket, melyek a nőkhöz, a nőkről szólnak, úgy, ahogy a férfiak látnak minket, és ahogy ők élik meg a szerelmet. Most megfordítottuk ezt a hagyományt, és összegyűjtöttünk olyan szerelmes verseket, melyek a férfiakhoz, férfiakról szólnak. Valójában ez egy játék. Olyan játék, mely segít sok mindent megérteni a férfi-nő viszonyról, az önmagunkhoz és a külvilághoz fűződő viszonyról, de sok mindent megértünk belőle közvetetten is a nők szerepéről a magánéletben és a társadalomban is.
Valójában a két antológia nem keresztezi egymást, azaz nem terheli az olvasót, hiszen a fordítások Magyarországon nincsenek forgalomban. Az első válogatás Kaffka Margittól indul, Nemes Nagy Ágnesen, Károlyi Amyn, Szécsi Margiton, Hervay Gizellán át. A most Magyarországon megjelenésre kerülő antológiát, melyben ma élő kortárs szerzők lesznek, eljuttatjuk a többi külföldi magyar kulturális intézethez is (17 ilyen intézet van), abban a reményben, hogy a válogatást több nyelvre is lefordítják.
- Milyen szempontok szerint választották ki a részvételre felkérendő szerzőket?
A szempontok gombolyagszerűen jöttek. Valójában minél szélesebb képet szeretnénk adni arról, hogy milyes sok női arca és hangja van a kortárs magyar költészetnek, és ennek elengedhetetlen és szerves része a határokon kívüli magyar hang is: így erdélyi költőnőket is felkértünk, küldjenek nekünk két-két költeményt. De talán valódi “szakmai” szempontjaink nem voltak. Igyekszünk egy szép, gazdag gyűjteményt az olvasó kezébe adni, ami alapján esetleg majd önállóan is útnak indulhat a költészet sokirányú ösvényein, illetve olyan verseket beválogatni, melyek a szerelem kifürkészhetetlen természetét ábrázolják - női érzékenységgel.
- Az RMA a magyar kultúra egyik nagykövete a világban. Az erdélyi magyar irodalom népszerűsítése milyen teret kap ebben?
- Örömmel fordítunk kortárs erdélyi irodalmat is. Most éppen egy májusban sorra kerülő felolvasóest anyagán dolgozunk (Can Togay, Falcsik Mari és Karafiáth Orsolya versein), illetve Somlyó György Mesék a mese ellen ciklusán, de fordítottunk már Szőcs Gézától, Egyed Pétertől is, és valószínűnek tartom, hogy készítünk majd egy erdélyi kortárs antológiát is, de ez még csak terv. Talán egy apró adalék lehet, hogy fordításomban hamarosan megjelenik Olaszországban Polcz Alaine Egy asszony a fronton című regénye, és talán ez is segít majd abban, hogy az “irodalmi figyelem” is Erdély felé, és főleg azok felé az összetett kulturális, nemzetiségi és identitás-kérdések felé forduljon, melyeket az itteni – nyugati, illetve olasz – átlagemberek nagyon nehezen érzékelnek, értenek meg.
