In the decades of collaboration that followed, Cseh and Bereményi released at least twenty albums, prepared and performed countless shows (Cseh did the performing, along with various fellow musicians), and attained legendary status in Hungarian culture. Their songs—which may at times evoke Simon and Garfunkel, Leonard Cohen, Jonathan Richman, and a range of others, with literary tinges of Eugène Ionesco, Nikolai Gogol, and Samuel Beckett—mix melancholy and laughter, storytelling and incantation, meaning and absurdity. Cseh and Bereményi created a longform genre of their own, weaving stories and songs together into shows that varied from one performance to the next and could suddenly, whimsically, tie in a song through a little digression of plot.
In addition to their collaboration, both Cseh and Bereményi were prolific participants in film and theater: Cseh as actor and performer and Bereményi as writer and director. Bereményi has also written numerous stories, novels, poems, and memoirs; since Cseh’s death in 2009, he has participated in numerous events in Cseh’s honor. Both Cseh and Bereményi received numerous prestigious awards; a statue was erected in Cseh’s memory in 2013, and to this day many artists commemorate their work.
If I had to choose one song out of the Cseh/Bereményi opus to translate for readers and listeners, it would be difficult, but for now I have landed on “Lee van Cleef,” which they wrote in the 1970s and released on their album Műcsarnok (Art Gallery) in 1981, and which appears also in Bereményi’s 2020 poetry collection Versek (Budapest: Magvető). Many other songs are contenders, but this one has a great chance of coming across in translation. That said, it presents challenges: Hungarians themselves have difficulty interpreting the song, and that is part of its essence; thus the translation must not be more direct than the original. To hold back from clarity while also striving for it: this is like riding a horse forwards and backwards at once (or perhaps sideways). While it appears to be about the actor Lee Van Cleef (1925–1989), known primarily for his roles in Spaghetti Westerns, the allusions never come together into a specific reference. Instead, the listener is forced to look much closer to home for meaning.
Why translate it in the first place? To introduce it to those who have never encountered it? To give readers a sense of the literal meaning? To evoke its rhythms and tones? To bring out its secrets? To introduce English-language readers to Cseh and Bereményi’s work more generally? To bring out a little-known aspect of Hungarian culture? To honor this particular song? Any translator might reply “all of the above”—at which point the order of priority matters. I seek primarily to evoke the song’s rhythms and tones and to bring it to readers’ attention; but I am translating it here also as a poem—albeit one that cannot rid itself of its music. That is, I translate it with the song in my mind, but also with an eye to how it will come across on the page.
Hungarians themselves may find the song hard to pin down, and this is no surprise; unlike mainstream popular music, Cseh and Bereményi’s work eschews direct, conclusive messages. Listeners reacted (and react) to their songs in opposite ways. Bereményi has commented in interviews that some of this was intentional. They built ambiguity into their songs; for instance, Bereményi would set one of Cseh’s sorrowful melodies to absurd lyrics. In “Lee van Cleef,” the most prominent word is the repeated “hej,” an imitation of the American English “hey”—but this “hej” ranges in tone from amusing to angry to tragic to wistful.
One recurring feature of their songs is the recurring “tárára” or “türürű,” an onomatopoeic imitation of song itself, which Cseh rendered with inimitable subtlety of mood and timing. Their very first song, composed the day after they first met, has a refrain consisting of that very sort of “tárárá.” “Lee van Cleef,” too, has onomatopoeia of sorts, but of a different kind: the “hej, hej, hej” arises in both the verses and the refrains and is said by different voices. To make sense of any of this, let us go directly into translation.
The song can be broken into three parts, each one with its verse and refrain (though the lyrics of the refrain change). The verses and refrains have distinct musical modes: the verses are freer in their syllabification and melody (part spoken, part sung), the refrains more bound to the beat and tune. In the first part, Lee is presented as a stoic hero who says “hey” no matter what happens (but gets shot and starts to die). In the second part, he dies and gets dragged around behind a horse. In the third, a bunch of drunken men think they have spotted him, that he has become a photographer (but that can’t be him, they think). At the end, they hear a horse approaching and think it must be Lee. Thus the story seems to follow a story of life, death, and resurrection, but with many ironies and undertones, which will become clear later. While reading the translation, readers may listen to the song on Spotify or Apple Music and consult the lyrics (The translation mainly follows the poem version).
Here is my translation of the first verse (with slight liberties for rhythm). It consists of four stanzas, both audible in the song and visible on the page:
It’s been four days that we haven’t ate and
Lee Van Cleef says nothing but: “Hey, heyheyhey, heyheyhey!”
Lee, he’s that kind of guy.
When we crossed town and they shot at all of us,
he said nothing but: “Hey, heyheyhey, heyheyhey!”
Lee, he’s that kind of guy.
In Oregon he was shot in the shoulder, fear flashed on his face, but he just said: “Hey! Heyheyhey, heyheyhey!”
Lee, he’s that kind of guy.
Dying on a street corner, you still send four others into the fight: Hey! Heyheyhey, heyheyhey!
This only Lee could do.
So far, a reader can glean the following: the first two lines of each stanza are crowded with syllables, flexible in their timing (though they fit into the overall beat). The third line of each stanza comments on the previous two lines. The “heys” are all spoken by Lee Van Cleef until the fourth stanza, when they seem to come from the narrator; even on the page, the varying punctuation and grouping gives the “heys” different tones. This verse portrays a stoic, inimitable Western hero getting killed by enemies. We don’t know whether the song is referring to Lee Van Cleef’s own life, or to his combined roles, to his mystique, or to something else entirely.
The refrain, in contrast, has measured syllables that align with the beat (I have taken slight liberties for meter and rhyme):
We knew from afar that Lee’d soon be here,
it takes Lee Van Cleef to gallop that way,
Barleycorn, Charley, Hombre and Dick
and others join up and gaze the same way:
“Yeah, Lee Van Cleef, soon he’ll be here.
It takes Lee Van Cleef to gallop that way.
Hey, hey, hey, it can only be Lee.”
This refrain seems to go back in time to when Lee is still alive—or else to a timeless Lee Van Cleef, always galloping, always known by the sound of his horse, about to arrive any moment. We proceed to the second verse, in which it seems that Lee dies.
And one fine day we arrived, tied together,
in Fort Phil Carney, hey, heyheyhey, heyheyhey.
Lee was brought out front.
They struck his throat with the edge of their palms
and yelled in our faces, every one of them:
Hey, heyheyhey, heyheyhey. Look, look, Lee’s leaving himself!
They had taken his pistol away, they dragged him behind
a horse with a rope, hey, heyheyhey, heyheyhey.
Lee left himself behind.
A curse on Phil Carney, that on that burning,
scorching day, hey, heyheyhey, heyheyhey,
Lee fell to the ground.
The misspelling of Kearny in “Fort Phil Carney” is important to the whole—because it reflects a time in Hungary when access to foreign films was limited, when there was no internet on which to look things up, and when Hungarians nonetheless picked up what they could. In Cseh and Bereményi’s songs, foreign languages sometimes end up in mimicked form. For instance, at the beginning of “Arthur Rimbaud elutazik” (Arthur Rimbaud Is Leaving), also on the Műcsarnok album, Cseh warms up with “Arthur. Voiture. Ouverture.” The misspelling also adds to the song’s mystery; even when a listener figures out the allusion to the place, it remains unclear whether it is supposed to evoke the place itself—Fort Phil Kearny, a US army outpost in Wyoming, was the site of the Fetterman Fight in 1866 and the Wagon Box Fight in 1867—or a range of Western films (such as George Sherman’s 1951 film Tomahawk) or whether there is a specific film, with at least a scene at Fort Phil Kearny, in which Lee Van Cleef acted. I believe that a hunt for a specific reference will turn into a wild and aimless forage, that the semi-references are meant to evoke something perhaps more imaginary, and perhaps more real, than a particular role in a film.
In this second verse, even in the poem alone, without Cseh’s performance, the tone of the “heys” has changed drastically. It is now spoken by the narrator three times and by the enemy once; it contains anger, dismay, violence. The refrain continues in this vein:
If you come from Carney, stay out of my way,
Lee Van Cleef stood there that scorched afternoon.
Barleycorn, Charlie, Hombre and Dick,
If you came from Carney, they’d hunt you all down.
Carney’s where Lee Van Cleef ceased to be.
“Hey, hey, hey, tell me, where could Lee be?”
One might wonder who Barleycorn is; there might be a vague allusion here to the English and Scottish folk song “John Barleycorn,” or perhaps Robert Burns’s 1782 version, which contains the stanza:
And they hae taen his very heart’s blood,
And drank it round and round;
And still the more and more they drank,
Their joy did more abound.
If the Burns poem is at all material here, then the allusion contains an irony, for, while Burns suggests that Barleycorn attains immortality and glory through his death, Lee’s ultimate “resurrection,” suggested in the third and final verse, has tinges of humiliation, not only for Lee himself, but for those who know him.
We would drink far into the night, like ailing dogs,
just to get through a slushy winter, hey,
heyheyhey, heyheyhey, four ailing dogs.
We were hanging out on a street corner,
when Dick grabbed my arm and said,
“Hey, heyheyhey, heyheyhey. Look! Isn’t that Lee?”
He’s become a photographer, that’s the word on the street.
We laughed when it came up: “Hey, heyheyhey, heyheyhey!
No way, that couldn’t be Lee!”
We called after him, but he hurried away.
I never forgot that spiffy jacket of his.
Hey, heyheyhey, heyheyhey, it’s all over now.
At this point the song is clearly no longer about Westerns, or Lee Van Cleef, or Fort Phil Kearny, but about something closer to home. Ákos Somos writes about it: “It spoke in and about an age when there were no such cursed heroes, because whoever wanted to be one was caught by the system, dragged through the city on horseback, and then either killed or turned into an obedient servant and informer. Gun heroes became photographers. But when that resounding western chorus comes in at the end, you feel like the gods are singing.” Here he refers to the final refrain of the song:
His back to the wall, breathing his last,
Lee Van Cleef was great at this feat.
Barleycorn, Charlie, Hombre and Dick,
See how he stands alone on the street.
They’re waiting for Lee to come straightaway.
“Dick, listen, isn’t that Lee’s horsebeat?
Hey, hey, hey, that can only be Lee!”
Here I took a few liberties with the translation to convey not only the rhythm and rhymes, but the concurrence of different scenes: Lee standing on a street corner (“the street” in translation), and Lee heard on his horse in the distance. I used the neologism “horsebeat” to convey the sense of the original that “Lee’s horse is pounding” and also to connect the “horsebeat” with a “heartbeat,” thereby implying that Lee is still alive. Yet possibly Lee never comes; the sound of Lee’s horse may be the sound of song, of poetry.
The final verse and refrain bring out the possibility that this is not only a Western story, but also a story of communist Hungary. Still, the song remains uncatchable, as does its hero in spirit; while Lee ultimately gets caught and killed, something of his essence makes itself felt even after his death, even though the despair surrounding his death does not go away. The song’s shifting time frames and perspectives, its ambiguity of life and death, and its rich nonsense syllables make this a song never to be figured out. Yet the “hey” itself is so elemental that it cuts through the mysteries, telling the listener that the song is somehow about us, even if we don’t know exactly how. Perhaps there are Lee Van Cleefs among us: people who get dragged down for their excellence, who prevail in some way, but also get destroyed. Perhaps we ourselves are gossips and onlookers, “ailing dogs” waiting for our Lee, the one who will save us even though we ruined him. If so, that message is not all. The poem and the song have a life that goes beyond us, a “heyheyhey” spoken by many voices, a syllable that turns into the world.
