Eternal Monday: New & Selected Poems

by György Petri, Clive Wilmer (Translator, Introduction), George Gömöri (Translator )

György Petri belongs to the generation of Hungarian poets who grew up after the uprising of 1956. He made his name in the West as the most uncompromising and outrageous of his country’s dissident authors. At home he was as often praised for his strangely disquieting love poetry, which is harsh, erotic and disenchanted. But all his poems are marked by his biting humour and bluntness of language.
Since the fall of Communism, Petri’s wit and his natural anarchism have been aimed at a wider range of public targets, yet his new poems also seem more private. Many are intellectual puzzles, sceptical about identity and the sureness of emotional attachments.
The poetry written by Petri before the collapse of Hungary’s Communist régime was published by Bloodaxe in 1991 in Night Song of the Personal Shadow: Selected Poems, also translated by George Gömöri and Clive Wilmer. Eternal Monday is a new selection, mostly written since 1989.
‘Petri is a lyrical poet who has deliberately gone sour… His love poems are his finest work: sad, dry-eyed, even cruel, but spiced with a bitter tenderness...He is the voice of his generation. To understand him is to understand the declining years of European Communism and to sharpen our eyes for intimate half-truths of our own.’
— GEORGE SZIRTES, Times Literary Supplement
‘It is a long time since a major verse satirist has emerged in any European language. That is what Petri is, and he combines an almost Juvenalian savagery with a striking range of techniques and genres. His bile is the product of injustice and moral outrage. He is funny, angry, sexy, morbid, disillusioned and wildly intelligent.’
— CLIVE WILMER

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

Published September 30, 1999

About the author

He was born in 1943 to a multi-ethnic Jewish family in Budapest. After his father's death he was raised by his mother, grandparents and aunts. According to his remembrance, he turned to poetry at 11 or 12, and from the early 1960s he published in such renowned periodicals as Kortárs and Élet és Irodalom. Disillusioned by their style himself, he never let any of those writings be re-issued, and soon he developed intention to change career. During the following years he nursed at a mental clinic as a preliminary exercise for planned psychiatry studies, resigning from which he showed interest in economics and law, but later he decided to be a philosopher. He informally attended philosophy classes at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. In 1966 he finally enrolled at Eötvös Loránd University with a Philosophy and Literature major, without ever graduating. His most inspiring professors were György Márkus, Endre Simon and György Lukács.

Reviews

[Patrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Of course I started and finished this book on a Monday! I recollect first reading some of this back in 2010 but didn’t get to find and actually read it front-to-back until this year.

There is sarcasm, wordplay, dark humor, blasphemous/atheistic humor, some love and sex as well. Through many poems there is a strain of misanthropy as well. He sounds bitter and tired but, that’s something very human. I really like how some of the poems are reflective, introspective, uncertain. And how Petri mixes his cynicism well, and can write poems that really have an amusing yet timeless quality, such as this one:

Sisyphus Steps Back

The age of intrepid idiots is upon us.
Fools or knaves? They're both at the same time.
I'm scared of understanding, and yet I laugh at it:
you can't stop a boulder once it's rolling back.’




and lastly, In my opinion, one of the most powerful and compelling poems in this book is this one:


Bosnia

fog, directions lost to sight,
mass graves, slaked lime, the smells
of carcasses in wells
and night, night, it's night

[Alexandru Madian · Rating 4 out of 5]

News Bulletin

As dust in a crook of the stairs coagulates,
softly the dirt of the age accumulates.
(p. 26)

From the Songs of the Doleful Lover

I’m bored with you, my darling, I am bored!
And that’s what I’d like to put across to you
quite churlishly, without room for misunderstanding.
I am now so full of strength and sure conviction
that, were you here,
I really would say this to you.
In the expectant silence
of this beautiful and lonely hour of night…

which is the hour that’s dearest to the heart,
that of receding darkness. Or you could call it
sparse light rather,
for in it things are faintly visible.
I listen to the sleeping universe
rumbling away and by fag-light vaguely see
how with the mediation of the wrist
my arm concludes in a gracefully shaped hand.
Or else I take delight in my wristwatch,
that functional, masculine ornament.

Musing like this, I get bored with you day by day
at this hour, this one I steal for myself, in silence.
How could I say to your face that I’m bored? And when?
Perhaps when, powered by your downy, white legs,
a sewing-machine, I move to my own rhythm?
Well, the cult of the Virgin, which
through the forms that proceed from it…
But on my own, I don’t always finish sentences
in these intimate little holidays of the soul. No,
I won’t say it. Of course not. I won’t tell…

though for ten years now, no, more than ten years,
you’ve set fire to the sugar-wrappers in the ash-tray
at coffee-time. Each of them separately.
And you unfold them first, so they burn longer,
and gawp at them. For the past ten years. That’s 3,650 days —
we’ve had coffee together every afternoon.
(p. 30)

Now Only

now only the filthy pattering of rain
now only heavy coats and squelching shoes
now only the din of steamed-up cheap cafés
now only trodden sawdust on the stone

now only mouldy buns in cellophane
now streetlights decomposing in thin fog
the advice given by a friendly cop
the last drink bought with the last of the small change

now only the tram-island’s desolation
now only the variable course of the night wind
rushing through a town of alleys to no end

now only the unfinished excavations
the night’s prospecting-hole its weeds and thorns
now only shivering now only yawns
(p. 31)

Gratitude

The idiotic silence of state holidays
is no different
from that of Catholic Sundays.
People in collective idleness
are even more repellent
than they are when purpose has harnessed them.

Today I will not
in my old ungrateful way
let gratuitous love decay in me.
In the vacuum of streets
what helps me to escape
is the memory of your face and thighs,
your warmth,
the fish-death smell of your groin.

You looked for a bathroom in vain.
The bed was uncomfortable
like a roof ridge.
The mattress smelt of insectide,
the new scent of your body mingling with it.

I woke to a cannonade
(a round number of years ago
something happened). You were still asleep.
Your glasses, your patent leather bag
on the floor, your dress on the window-catch
hung inside out — so practical.

One strap of your black slip
had slithered off.
And a gentle light was wavering
on the downs of your neck, on your collar-bones,
as the cannon went on booming

and on a spring poking through
the armchair’s cover
fine dust was trembling.
(p. 32)

It Would Be Nice to Translate Mallarmé

It would be nice to translate Mallarmé,
but in the mean time I keep musing how
I’ve always fancied sailing first-class, really,
to gaze at the crumbling waves from a deck-chair
with no debts or dependents. Nevertheless,
I have nothing to eat
and, what’s worse at the moment, others feed me
(though this is idle talk — it’d be worse still
if others didn’t feed me; this way,
like the vile Balkan pigeons in our courtyard,
I still have everything) but these thoughts distract me
from Mallarmé, though it would be so nice
to translate Mallarmé in another life
(other lives being always full of sunshine)
where people translate Mallarmé, not knowing
this world with its grim winters.
(p. 38)

The Fading Consciousness of Casanova

Women
women
in whom I have spent time

a garden hose in the care-
taker’s hands
(p. 40)

Sometimes the Sun Comes Out

Yesterday wafts through today and tomorrow.
The taste of beaten-back desire,
like a worm in a hard green apple, burrows deep:
beneath all our urgencies, failure gnaws.

We all know this — and yet, when in the morning,
a clean shirt on your back, you leave the house
and are glanced at by the well-washed world,
an illusion of perfect knees will penetrate
your numbed and idle senses,
scented hair brushes against your face
and this feminine challenge draws you further in
— offering a beginning, not a continuation!
It says not a word, but fixes you
with a smiling eye, no batting of the lid:
it promises joy, or a torment that’s more appropriate.
(p. 50)

Black Christmas

I’m forty. I can’t tell what will come.
The winter is mild. Not on to the snow,
but on to the coarse, straw-strewn mud
of a grim courtyard, time,
as if from a slashed artery,
ever-diminishing, spurts.
(p. 51)

Christmas of ’65

When Sára died, I didn’t exactly move back home,
though where I lived, in which ARMPIT (as they say
in some quarters), it’s truly hard to tell.
This home to which, as I say, I didn’t move
on Christmas Eve ’65 was in Buda (and still is,
a little uglier now): it was where
I wasn’t living, but there I had my fill —
of preserves made by my (then still living) Gran.
It was then I had a chat with my aunt’s husband
(with what d’you call him, my great brother-in-law?),
who, as you can tell from what I’ve said, was alive still;
I chatted about the state of things, about the current
power relations (and he, too, in his modest way,
poor bloke, was a factor in all that, a constituent
of power, on the way to Chief Engineer).
Then something in blue flashed up on the TV
about Jesus and the manger (it was just around then
that the atheist state began playing the fool). In a word,
the baby was born in the light of a blue lamp
when topics for conversation were drying up
and the fruit had towered above its preserving juice
like a wrecked ship, its peel already wrinkling.
My Grandpa — well, by that time he’d been dead
for the past six months — would surely have fallen asleep
beside his homemade cherry-wine with soda
(a few drops would finish him off) and my Gran would have tried
in un-Christmassy spirit to wake him: ‘Tony!
Don’t snore at the table, you old bugger!’ There were gifts even —
me, I think I got gloves. The women of the family
exchanged unopened skin lotions and creams
which would keep for the next occasion
when, having suffered repackaging after a shelved existence,
they’d transubstantiate into new gifts.
But Sára cannot be slapped back to life, with a little
mascara put on, or a frock, as a gift for men. So I,
probably wearing the freshly acquired gloves
(if I did get them that winter) set out at midnight
for a walk; my footsteps crunching through the snow
are perhaps retained in a Spirit-Ear’s deep tunnels.
I set out from the said place toward Margit Bridge
to wade through the public near the Franciscan Church
as they trickled away after Mass, and stood for a long time
near the foot of the bridge, against which old icefloes shattered themselves,
their heads teeming with thaw.
(pp. 58-59)

Revenge

I can do whatever I want.
For instance, when we’re making love,
I’ll begin to shrink all over, proportionally,
and so contract out of you. I’ll be tiny enough
to hide in your pubic hair. You’ll look
all over the sheet for me, you’ll diligently
comb the bedding, every last inch of it —
till finally you’ll hear from your own belly
a giggle thin as a wire: there I shall be
running about, swinging my mini-manikin
and chirping ‘Would you like to have me now?’
(p. 62)

Electra

What they think is it’s the twists and turns of politics
that keep me ticking; they think it’s Mycenae’s fate.
Take my little sister, cute sensitive Chrysothemis —
to me the poor thing attributes a surfeit of moral passion,
believing I’m unable to get over
the issue of our father’s twisted death.
What do I care for that gross geyser of spunk
who murdered his own daughter! The steps into the bath
were slippery with soap — and the axe’s edge too sharp.
But that this Aegisthus, with his trainee-barber’s face,
should swagger about and hold sway in this wretched town,
and that our mother, like a venerably double-chinned old whore,
should dally with him simpering — everybody pretending
not to see, not to know anything. Even the Sun
glitters above, like a lie forged of pure gold,
the false coin of the gods!
Well, that’s why! That’s why! Because of disgust, because it all sticks in my craw,
revenge has become my dream and my daily bread.
And this revulsion is stronger than the gods.
I already see how mould is creeping across Mycenae,
which is the mould of madness and destruction.
(p. 63)

To Imre Nagy

You were impersonal, too, like the other leaders,
bespectacled, sober-suited; your voice lacked
sonority, for you didn’t know quite what to say

on the spur of the moment to the gathered multitude. This urgency
was precisely the thing you found strange. I heard you,
old man in pince-nez, and was disappointed,
not yet to know

of the concrete yard where most likely the prosecutor
rattled off the sentence, or
of the rope’s rough bruising, the ultimate shame.

Who can say what you might have said
from that balcony? Butchered opportunities
never return. Neither prison nor death
can resharpen the cutting edge of the moment

once it’s been chipped. What we can do, though, is remember
the hurt, reluctant, hesitant man
who nonetheless soaked up
anger, delusion
and a whole nation’s blind hope,

when the town woke to gunfire
that blew it apart.
(p. 64)

Morning Coffee

I like the cold rooms of autumn, sitting
early in the morning at an open window,
or on the roof, dressing-gown drawn close,
the valley and the morning coffee glowing —
this cooling, that warming.

Red and yellow multiply, but the green
wanes, and into the mud the leaves
fall — fall in heaps,
the devalued currency of summer:
so much of it! so worthless!

Gradually the sky’s
downy grey turns blue, the slight
chill dies down. The tide
of day comes rolling in —
in waves, gigantic, patient, barrelling.

I can start to carry on. I give myself up
to an impersonal imperative.
(p. 68)

Daydreams

Into destruction I would bring
an order whole and classical.
Hope for the good? Out of the question.
Let me die invisible.

Sors bona nihil aliud. To
whoever digs my bones I send
a message: which is, Look how all
God’s picture-images must end.

And no there cannot be a heaven,
or else there oughtn’t to be one
for, if there were, this plague of love
would still (come what may) go on.

Nor do I want the obverse — hell —
though of that ve had, will have, my bit
(planks beneath the chainsaw wail).

For anything unready, yet
ready too, I lie in the sun:
let the redeeming nowhere come.
(p. 70)

Something Unknown

Towards that something unknown
we’ll come up against,
do we strive or are we driven?
the blue flower
of a new world, of new love,
enticing us, keeps flickering on and off:
will it lure us into a swamp?

How can you tell.
‘Let it all be different now’ —
the impulse, desire for that is no more than just:
so run-to-ground we were,
so pissed off we are!
As for self-pity, you can’t object to that:
who else, ever at all, felt sorry for us?
And anyway,
we should ourselves
know best — if anyone does —
why we deserve
pity.

All the same, what lies ahead?
What lies ahead? I say.
It’s the question
you can’t evade
and can’t answer.

As for the clot, it is
slowly, yes,
and also surely
swimming
towards the heart.
(p. 72)

Ideas and Dance-Music Records

‘And where are our ideas
Of twenty years ago? Just being realised.’
ISTVÁN VAS

And what remains of István Vas?
I mean, apart from his writings,
but just now it’s not of his writings
I wish to speak. Where’s it gone, into what’s it changed, his human stuff:
what we loved, the bodily dross, what’s left when the spirit’s been burned off?
God’s servant the priest gave a balanced, an almost
precise consolation for loss.

But what shall I do with such comfort, who do not believe?
I who have only this single and singular life,
a bumpy, stony, muddy, swampy road of it
which leads, in the end, into the pit.
Or rather, another’s hands in expert mode
board up one’s “person” for one’s last abode —
according to where on the scale of rank and wealth one happens to be,
one’s coffin will be plain pine, or bronze, or mahogany.

So that ‘we’ll meet again up there’ is something I can’t believe in:
it’s -270C in my notion of heaven.
The work, yes: there’s no question of that not surviving.
But the man who drank red wine and smoked cigars — him I shall never again
meet in this stinking life, and still less in that yet more stinking death —
though our many stupidly unachieved encounters,
alas, how they ache with a sort of phantom pain,
just as legs, long since amputated, can start hurting again!

But never mind. We have to get used to this:
with time there’ll be more and more people we miss.
After all, we have buried Pilinszky and Kálnoky;
how vile that a few of us should live on parasitically —
because for me, for a long time, survival or post-vival
has been bare-faced cheek, I wonder I have the face at all…
(My word-play, probably, wouldn’t strike you as fun.)
But this whole poem, half out of tune, is just a dissonant drone:
a lot of sounds struggling to make a sound. Not for you.
You are no more. I do it for no reason, for myself, for I don’t know who.
On a gramophone gone mad they keep going round and round —
worn-out ideas, old dance tunes, that scratchy sound.
(pp. 74-75)

Credit Card

It’s never a good idea
to rush things.
Annihilation included.
No good
ever comes of haste.
Therefore:
we stay alive.

In other words: we keep open
the purse of possibility.
We take death’s million-pound note
and break it up
into the small change of life.

Or, not break it up exactly —
only present it.
For who on earth can give change
for such a fine, crisp deathnote?
But it’s impressive. So
we can live on the never-never.

The General Bank of Death
guarantees everything.
So our balance always stands
at moral zero.
(p. 78)

[Harrison Jack · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘For anything unready, yet
ready too, I lie in the sun:
let the redeeming nowhere come.’