"Journey on the Plain"
In memory of Sandor Petofi
The cellar ramp is steep
A heavy load is intoxication
Slowly I meandered homeward.
Under the load I collapsed.
Collapsed!
I stretched out on the ground.
The blood from my nose began.
If there would not have been a brick
The blood from my nose would not have flowed.
Would not have flowed!
I would not go to the cellar, either
During nice days or bad days...
But can I help it If that wine is so good -
That wine is so good!
My candle flutters dimly...
I am alone...
I walk up and down my room...
In my mouth is my smoking pipe...
My past's apparitions wave about me...
I walk, I walk, and I watch
The shadow of the smoke on the wall,
And I think about friendship.
Here I stand in the middle of the plains, as a statue, stiffly.
The prairie is covered by a grave-like silence.
Just as a corpse is covered with a shroud.
Far away from me a man mows.
Now he stops, He sharpens his scythe...
The ringing does not reach me.
I see only the movement of his hands.
And now he looks this way.
He stares at me, but I don't even move my eyes...
What does he think I think about?
Truly, truly, I am nearly croaked!
My chest tightens, I nearly choke,
And something chews about my heart...
From you, shadowy world, it seems I may chug off.
How often I yearned for death!
And now when it is near, When it breathes on me halfway;
I am now as the elder was in the story.
Regardless! Whatever death is
Life is worth more than it.
There is peace there, nothing else;
There is grief here, but in the pleasures.
Of merriment the blood bubbles.
in a short time I shall leave joy and pain.
The flower is now in my button hole.
And if the world greens again
Perhaps it shall bloom on my grave mound.
And then, good fellows,
You who are tied to me by friendship's chain
And with whom, together, we kept Wide awake so many nights;
You may mourn over my corpse.
But I say, my companions, Do not mourn me;
You know, that with me, You were all gay chaps.
And mourning would strike against our normal selves.
Most assuredly, come out to me,
And as you stand above my grave;
Cheerfully sound out Your dead buddy's songs
Of the happenings of by gone days!
One who has no sweetheart Should drink wine,
And he shall believe That every girl burns for him.
And wine should drink he, Who does not have any money
And to him will then belong Every treasure of the world.
And wine should drink he, Who has grief,
And then, from him, Grief shall rush away.
I have no sweetheart, I have no money,
I have only grief;
Thus, compared to others, I can drink three times as much.
Grief? it’s a great ocean. And joy?
it’s the little pearl of the ocean. Perhaps
By the time I bring it up I may even break it.
The birds travel away
if the weather Turns to autumn.
(In spring they return again)
They fly... fly... fly... their wings carry them;
Suddenly you notice that they already
Drink of the distant blue sky.
They fly so swiftly that one takes them as disappearing dreams.
What flies more swiftly Than the birds? Life!
But, unlike the birds, it never comes back again.
My cloak's fur is worn,
My spurs are rusty, bent,
My cap is not cocked to one side,
My mustache is not twirled.
This, too, is good for such a sad lad.
One who has been left by his rose.
She went down deep into the earth,
So that I cannot even look on her.
Did you know That the sun is a married lad?
But then this is the big curse On his head,
For he strains under the load of a puppet government;
His bad wife gives him grief.
it is natural then, that the good elder
Does not sow the wine material;
Wine, which doctors every trouble.
Wine, which scatters every grief from the heart.
But at home he dares not drink,
For then the fight would be ready with his wife.
Meanwhile, when he does his familiar travel
Across the sky; He waits that
Clouds should dress the horizon.
Then he is not afraid That his wife may see him;
He hobbles into a Nearby saloon
And drinks, in his grief, Like a brush maker!
When the night comes And the clouds start to disperse
You can see him with his red face
As he crashes from the sky.
Why do you look into my room, Inquisitive moon?
The world no longer goes here As it did in days of old.
Once, when your glance stumbled into me;
In my heart you saw a flaming life For which there was no room.
Between grief and joy you saw A life or death battle,
But you could not see Grief become victorious.
This was then - if you would now Look at my face
You could assume that you see yourself in a mirror.
I am cold and wordless as - From where my coldness
And wordlessness comes - The grave yard.
Where shall man finally go?
Socrates, Who drunk the poison,
And his executioner, who gave him the poison,
Did both of them go to the same place?
Oh, impossible!
Yet perhaps... perhaps...
Why can no one see into the world beyond!
My friends embrace me,
They have pressed their hearts to my heart;
How happy the soul is in me!
Later I found out: why do they embrace me?
While they embraced me they felt out:
Where is this bosom's most painful place?
That is where they will stab their daggers...
And they stabbed it there.
Lay down now, Men!
Or if you move about, Step softly.
Go about slowly On tiptoe,
And do not let your lips Strike rough noises.
You must respect mourning... For that is sacred..
Night, the mourning youth, Has arrived.
it had a love, And that died,
That is why The poor night mourns.
Quietly it falls Into the earth,
Sadly it’s tears Fall on the grass.
Now suddenly - What is it?
Though sadly, But still it smiles.
Behold, the moon comes up From it’s grave;
it is the pale ghost Of its dead loved one.
They meet With sweet bitterness,
They embrace With torturous beauty,
And they talk...
But who knows what?
What no one suspects, Supposes,
But then it would not be good For you to know this,
For this talk is an eternal, Great secret.
Only the lunatic Hears it,
When the feverish, Terrible hour comes;
And the dying, When his life is held
By only one-two Spider web strands;
One more hears it, A third one:
The poet, If he dreams while he is awake,
The wistful poet Understands
The mysteries of these Ghostly voices,
But he cannot Speak of it,
Don't ask him...
He forgets By the time he comes to.
What happens to the chuckle,
What happens to the sigh, When their sound's perished?
And what happens to the brain When it no longer thinks?
And love, and hate, When it goes from the heart?
I have leafed through history and I have come to the end,
And what is the history of man? A river of blood, which
Long ago came forth from the fog-lost boulders.
And in one length, without an interruption, flows down to our time.
Do not believe that it has now stopped. The started flood
Has no rest, not until it reaches the ocean's lap.
The long river of blood shall stop in an ocean of blood.
I see terrible days approaching, such that the world
Till now hasn't seen; and the present peace
Is only that grave stillness which follows the lightning
And comes before the earthshaking thunder.
I see your veil, you dark secret future,
And lighting the fairy fire of predictions, I see
Through this veil, and from what is under it,
I shudder, I am horrified, and at the same time, I rejoice
And I am wildly happy. The War-God again puts on his
Armour, and taking his sword into his hand
He sits on a horse and scouts the far world,
And he calls out the people for a decisive struggle.
The world then will become two nations
and they will face each other:
The good ones and the bad ones. That one, which till now always lost,
The good ones, will win here. But the first big battle shall result
In an ocean of blood. But regardless,
This shall be the judgment
Which God has promised, as it has been described by the prophets.
This shall be the judgment and after this life shall begin,
Eternal salvation;
and it shall not be necessary for us
To fly to heaven for heaven shall come down to earth.
Dedication:
Life isn't even worth as much
As a broken pot that is thrown from the kitchen
And from whose sides the old beggar licks off the dried-on food.
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