By the Danube

by Attila József

This 75 poems selection follows the chronology of Attila József career and offers a faithful record of a courageous poetic voice defying despair and projecting far beyond the shadows cast by the harrowing circumstances of a tragic life.

Selected and translated by John Bákti.

223 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2018

About the author

The son of Áron József - a soap factory worker of Székely and Romanian origin from Banat - and a Hungarian peasant girl with Cuman ancestry - Borbála Pőcze - was born in Ferencváros, a poor district of Budapest. He had two elder sisters: Eta and Jolán. When Attila József was three he was sent to live with foster parents after his father abandoned the family and his mother became ill. Because the name Attila was not well known at the time, his foster parents called him Pista.

His mother died in 1919, aged only 43. After this, he was looked after by Ödön Makai, his brother-in-law. Later he applied to the Franz Joseph University – his dream was to become a secondary school teacher – but he was soon turned out when a man named Antal Horger determined he was unfit for teaching because of a provocative poem he had written (With All My Heart).

After this he tried to support himself with the little money he earned by publishing his poems. He started showing signs of schizophrenia, and was treated by psychiatrists (now he probably would be diagnosed with borderline personality disorder). He never married and only had a small number of affairs, but frequently fell in love with the women who were treating him.

He died on 3 December 1937 at Balatonszárszó. Crawling through the railway tracks, he was crushed by a starting train. The most widely accepted view is that he committed suicide, but some experts say that his death was by accident.

Reviews

[Vesna · Rating 5 out of 5]

In his introduction to Modern Hungarian Poetry, Miklós Vajda expresses the sentiment shared by his fellow Hungarians, and certainly by my beloved Hungarian aunt (sadly late) who initiated me into the poetry of her heritage since my young days, that “in Hungary it was poetry alone that produced an unbroken line of immortals. With a few notable exceptions, like Bartok in music, none of the other arts, fiction or drama ever rivaled the level of poetry in this country.” Sandor Petófi, Endre Ady and József Attila are often singled out at the summit of Hungarian poets, and the country celebrates its National Poetry Day on Attila’s birthday, April 11. The highest annual honor in poetry is also named after him. It is unfortunate that the manifold linguistic differences between the Hungarian and English languages prevent the readers to experience this poetry as would native speakers.

In his magnificent Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea, Claudio Magris perceptively notes that many Hungarian writers and especially poets are “voices speaking from the shadows” in “a most desperate disenchantment”. I can’t think of a better way to express the life and work of József Attila. His life was short (1905-1937), committing suicide at 32, tormented with mental troubles, yet fully absorbed in his magnificent poetry-making and uncompromising dedication to social justice. He even managed to be expelled from the illegal communist party for refusing dogmatic social-realist esthetic. Many of his poems are about the working class, their economic hardship and marginalization, in which we frequently encounter desolate industrial landscapes, but from Attila’s unique perspective that blended socialist ideals with Freudianism. He also wrote (what might be called) philosophical poems with the strong existentialist undertones but then he knew to rise from the dark abysses of his mental turmoils to humorous surrealist word-play. And, of course, mirroring a few of his unhappy relationships, there are love poems of a wounded heart and desertion.

Poetry is notoriously difficult to render in another language, and it’s probably even more acute in this case. Keeping that caveat in mind, I’ll include in this review a few out of many Attila’s poems that I’ve been enjoying in the last few weeks. The Scottish poet Edwin Morgan is reputed to be most successful in translating his poems, but his selection was published by a small press without wide distribution and proved unattainable for me. I settled on John Bátki’s By the Danube, commendable for its faithfulness to the words and meaning while also approximating the rhythmic quality in the English idiom. Of course, the music of Attila’s verse and his characteristic playfulness and double entendre were impossible to capture in a vastly different language, but it takes only a bit of imagination for a reader to sense what might have been in the original.

In “To Sit, To Stand, To Kill, To Die (1926)”, we meet Attila’s defiant young soul:

To shove this chair away from here,
to squat down in front of a train,
to climb a mountain, with great care,
to empty my knapsack over the vale,
to feed a bee to my old spider,
to take an old crone, and caress her,
to sip bean soup, and eat cake,
to walk on tiptoes in the muck,
to place this hat on the railroad track,
to promenade around the lake,
to lie, all dressed up, in waters deep,
to get a suntan as waves leap,
to bloom among the sunflowers,
to let out at least one good sigh,
to shoo away a single fly,
to dust off a dusty book,
to spit at your mirror, look,
to make peace with all your foes,
to kill them all with a long knife,
to study how their blood flows,
to watch a young girl as she goes,
to sit still, and curl your toes,
to burn down the whole city,
to feed the birds, and have pity,
to hurl stale bread to the floor,
to make my good gal cry for more,
to take her little sister in my lap,
and if the world wants reasons,
to the god of carefree grace.

While his political inclinations are decidedly proletarian - from “On the City’s Edge” (1933):

We were created, not by god, or reason
but by oil, coal and iron

… his convictions reconcile Marx with Freud, as in the later verses of the same poem:

When our finest potential’s realized—
order shining bright—
then the mind can at last grasp
both the endless and the finite:
the forces of production outside,
and the instincts, here, inside…

Despite his difficult life, a playfulness and joie de vivre in his spirit were resurfacing from time to time with his humorous side, as in “Postcard from Paris” (1927):

The patron was never up in the morning,
in Paris the Berthas are called Jeanettes,
and even in barbershops you can buy
candles, spinach or suzettes.

Along the Boulevard Saint Michel
sixty nude girls sing to the sky.
The Notre Dame is cold inside;
to see the view, it’s five francs a ride.

The Eiffel Tower lies down at night,
hidden by quilted fogs from the moon.
If you are a girl, the cops might kiss you.
There’s no toilet seat in the men’s room.

Among many existentialist poems, “Consciousness” (1934) in 12 poetic fragments surely stands out for the exceptional range of ideas and poetic meditations. Here is fragment VI about the internal path to freedom from suffering:

The anguish is deep inside me, here,
while its explanation lies out there.
My wound is the whole world—it burns;
I feel the fever, my soul, as it churns.
You are enslaved by your rebellious heart,
and will be free only when you will stop
building yourself the kind of apartment
where a landlord moves in to collect rent.

and the poignant last fragment XII:

I live by the railroad tracks
watching the trains go by.
The shining windows fly
in the swaying downy darkness.
This is how in eternal night
the lit-up days speed by
and I stand in the light of each compartment,
leaning on my elbow, silent.

He met his death laying on the railroad tracks in front of an oncoming train.

Attila’s poems: 5*
Bátki’s translation: 4

[Donal · Rating 4 out of 5]

Józef Attila, one of Hungary's most famous poets known for his commitment to Marxism and later, to Freudian analysis, gives a truly unique venture into the human spirit in some of the most mundane of existences. Below the surface interaction of life, is a deeper pool of emotion we all experience during different times in our lives. Attila nurtures this part of existence and brings it to the fore in complete technical brilliance.