The Boy Changed Into a Stag: Selected Poems, 1949-1967

by Ferenc Juhász, Kenneth McRobbie (Translator), Ilona Duczynska (Translator)

English, Hungarian (translation)

Genres: Poetry, Hungary, Hungarian Literature

158 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1970

About the author

Ferenc Juhász (16 August 1928 – 2 December 2015) was a Hungarian poet and Golden Wreath laureate (1992). He was considered a close contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976. His brother was historian Gyula Juhász.

Ferenc Juhász published his first poem in 1946. His first book of poems, The Winged Foal, was published in 1949.

His poem The boy changed into a stag clamors at the gate of secrets, has been translated into English.

Reviews

[Steve]

Ferenc Juhász (b. 1928)()

Tingling,
sparkling,
smouldering,
over the mute earth the loosed night falls.


I know next to nothing about Hungarian literature and am still stumbling about in the dark. Attracted by rumors of a secreted genius, I tracked down some translations of work by Sándor Weöres and in the process found a volume in the old Penguin Modern European Poets series that contained translations of poems by Weöres and by Ferenc Juhász. The poems by Weöres I have briefly discussed elsewhere;(*) here I wish to say a bit about the work of Juhász.

Juhász, who was born into a working class family of recent peasant origin and of mixed Hungarian, Swabian and Italian blood, appears to have been untouched by the influential poetic styles and fashions of the late 19th and 20th centuries. Instead he went to the roots of the Hungarian poetic tradition - ballads, folk songs and epic poetry - and exercised a richly endowed and individual poetic imagination to create what is reportedly a huge and uneven oeuvre.(**)

The sample I read was Selected Poems: Sándor Weöres, Ferenc Juhász (1970) - translated by David Wevill - and The Boy Changed Into a Stag: Selected Poems, 1949-1967 (1970) - translated primarily by Kenneth McRobbie -(***) and on the basis of this sample it would appear that Juhász' early work was deeply felt and beautifully phrased descriptions of family, village and nature that matured into larger-scale poems expressed with more intensely stressed diction and partaking of the mythic and folkloric.

Among these is a poem W.H. Auden called "one of the greatest poems written in my time": "The Boy Changed into a Stag Clamors at the Gate of Secrets". In this poem an aged mother is calling to her son to return to her.

She knotted her fingers to tendrils of stars,
the moon-froth covered her face,
and like this she cried to her dear son
as once she cried to her child -

She is failing (blood crawls in this skin of veins as through the beak of a stone-bruised bird) and needs his help, though she promises him

I'll cook you sour-cabbage soup, you can slice onion-rings into it,
they'll crunch in your teeth like bits of stone in a giant's jaws,
I'll give you warm milk in a clean glass,
in my cellar the lair of fire-bellied frogs,
in my cellar blinking like a giant green toad
I'll gently pour wine into heron-necked bottles

But the son has been transformed into a monstrous stag incapable of human speech and of living in the old way, a danger to her and everyone else.

To die I'll come back, only to die.
To die I'll come back,
mother - only to die will I come.
Then you can lay me out in my childhood home,
with your age-veined hands you can wash my body,
close my eyelids, swollen glands, with kisses.
And when the flesh falls off me,
and the stench it was sweetens to flowers,
I'll be a foetus drinking your blood,
I'll be your little boy again -
and this hurts only you, mother,
aiii, hurts only you, mother.

This lengthy poem can be read as an allegory of the impossibility of the adult-transformed child to return to his childhood and has also been read as an allegory of the familiar nature/culture dichotomy. But the nature of real poetry is to resist all attempts to distill it into a little lesson, pace my English teachers in secondary school.

In a very different long poem, "The Grave of Attila Jozsef", Juhász unleashes an apostrophe to his fellow poet in a long-lined effervescence of image and word that brought to mind Gerard Manley Hopkins; not that I think that he knew Hopkins' work, but maybe you do and so have an idea of the baroque richness of diction to be experienced in this poem: striking among the richnesses is when Juhász addresses Attila as

...my Master, my Brother, my Ancestor, my Father, my Jesus-genitalled very
own dead, frail stallion of the universe, angel-winged blue crystal,
whimpering web of life's nervous system...

In this word-rush Juhász praises poets and lets

...captains of industry, half-witted stone counts, shiny medalled
nitwit Army officers, brooding princes of commerce pouchy in bronze,
granite-bellied bankers, well-born young men heavenwards aspiring

have it. At the end one must draw a deep breath. I found this poem even better than the "Stag", pace Auden.

Like Weöres (who between 1948 and 1964 was only permitted to publish his translations of other poets' work), Juhász underwent a publication ban by the Communist regime from 1957 to 1965; at the same time he suffered from severe depression that resulted in lengthy treatment. Some of the poems written then are harrowing. But, in general, Juhász' work is life-affirming and beautifully expressed. Well worth trying to find translations.


() Can there be a more Hungarian face?!

(*) I've recently posted a review of volumes of translations carrying the titles Eternal Moment and If All the World Were a Blackbird.

(**) Already at the age of twenty-nine he published a 720 page "Collected Works"!

(***) Both Wevill and McRobbie benefitted from Hungarian speaking collaborators, who prepared literal translations and made other essential contributions. This is not an unusual process for translations from "small" languages and did not seem to adulterate overmuch the result: the poems common to both books were remarkably similar in content and diction.

[Illiterate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Socialist humanism and folk motifs. Juhasz evokes labor/industry and love/death to fend off decay/stagnation and chaos/nothingness. Top tip: Four Voices.

[Joanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really want to know how much of the strangeness of this poetry relates to the fact that it's translated from the Hungarian and how much relates to the author's own intrinsic strange ideas. The poetry was very affecting, but I'm not sure I always understood what was happening in the poems. Rife with images of insects and sometimes downright violent, I walk away from this book feeling a bit bruised. But there are definitely images that will stay with me and I'm glad to have had this suggested by good old Harold Bloom (on his Western Canon list).