I was the first to sight it.
It had three legs and two heads.
Even the oldest among us had not
heard of or seen anything like it.
All the neighbors flocked to see it from the street, the village;
the wonder drew crowds from the whole area.
We watched with horror as the mother
licked the monster.
It was Easter Sunday during the war.
"The hand of God!" sobbed an old woman,
and all the women joined in. The men were
staring somberly in front of them. Consulted one
another, chased home the little ones.
"Sin itself, of the sinful world!" cried out again
the old woman, echoed by the rest.
The men were standing around, undecided.
"It's not going to live long, can't even stand up."
"We should put it out of its misery."
But there were no volunteers.
"All that innocent blood, all that innocent blood. God
revealed himself. His only son. On the Holy Day of the Lamb."
"What are you bawling about?" someone grunted at the women.
The mother just kept tenderly licking her
monster. With a mother's post-partum
tired-happy look, she raised her fuzzy eyes
at the bystanders, then there was a shudder,
and she dropped the placenta
as she was supposed to.
"It's a wonder, I'm telling you, a wonder."
"Belongs in a museum, for sure."
"Kid, you could cash in on this." This was followed
by someone with something that temporarily
silenced the women, too.
"Wants to stand up."
"This calls for a vet."
"The vet's on the front, too."
Never stood up. Died not long after.
We all went home, relieved.
It kept coming up in conversation all summer. Someone
even wanted to exhume it. Then
it was forgotten. It slowly took its place officially among
the other freaks of nature, but most of us
knew better. It was only later that I learned
around that time quite a few six-legged stallions and bulls
were born; four-eyed, two-headed women were sobbing
all over Europe; and in Japan the horrifying memory of
the Easter lamb is still very much alive in spite of the fact
that not all of the people there are Christian.
Easter Lamb
Appendix to Picasso paintings
Sándor Kányádi
translated from the Hungarian by Paul Sohar
Read the original in Hungarian
Listen to the poem read in the original Hungarian by the author:
It is difficult to give a representative sample of Sándor Kányádi's œuvre in just a few poems: he is a man—a man first, and then a poet—of contradictions. But the man and the poet are never at odds with each other; one never betrays the other.
A Hungarian born in a Romania dedicated to the suppression of the Hungarian minority, Kányádi's life was full of dichotomies from the start. He grew up in a village that did not even have a one-room school house, only chalk and a hand-held blackboard. Since then he has lived most of his life in large cities; yet the modern man never forgot the timeless images of village life and to this day the poet finds inspiration in them. His poetry, too, is divided; he has pursued both free verse and traditional forms throughout his career, filling both with a contemporary language free of excesses and sterile metaphors. It is easy for him to keep his style simple and direct because he always has something to say, whether about himself, the state of the world, or the human condition in general. He rarely writes mood or experimental pieces; he doesn't have that luxury. As a poet of a persecuted minority, he must stand up for his people, proclaiming their right to exist and preserving their cultural heritage. At the same time—and here comes another dichotomy—he often castigates his own people, trying to save them from the narcotic of nostalgia and from escape into dream. Kányádi is a realist who can dream and a dreamer who tries to turn dreams into reality.
One of his dreams is ethnic tolerance in his country as well as all over the world. He fights for the rights of ethnic minorities everywhere. He feels this is a fight for the survival of all humankind, since it is made up of diverse groups of people, and when any one group disappears or loses its language, the whole of humankind becomes poorer. In this respect, Kányádi is an internationalist nationalist.
A Hungarian born in a Romania dedicated to the suppression of the Hungarian minority, Kányádi's life was full of dichotomies from the start. He grew up in a village that did not even have a one-room school house, only chalk and a hand-held blackboard. Since then he has lived most of his life in large cities; yet the modern man never forgot the timeless images of village life and to this day the poet finds inspiration in them. His poetry, too, is divided; he has pursued both free verse and traditional forms throughout his career, filling both with a contemporary language free of excesses and sterile metaphors. It is easy for him to keep his style simple and direct because he always has something to say, whether about himself, the state of the world, or the human condition in general. He rarely writes mood or experimental pieces; he doesn't have that luxury. As a poet of a persecuted minority, he must stand up for his people, proclaiming their right to exist and preserving their cultural heritage. At the same time—and here comes another dichotomy—he often castigates his own people, trying to save them from the narcotic of nostalgia and from escape into dream. Kányádi is a realist who can dream and a dreamer who tries to turn dreams into reality.
One of his dreams is ethnic tolerance in his country as well as all over the world. He fights for the rights of ethnic minorities everywhere. He feels this is a fight for the survival of all humankind, since it is made up of diverse groups of people, and when any one group disappears or loses its language, the whole of humankind becomes poorer. In this respect, Kányádi is an internationalist nationalist.
Sándor Kányádi (born 1929) was born and educated in the Hungarian community of Transylvania, Romania. He published his first poem at the age of eighteen and has since produced numerous volumes of poetry and translation, garnering every important prize in Romania and Hungary as well as the prestigious Herder Prize in Vienna. Kányádi's work has been translated into most European languages. Translator Paul Sohar has introduced him to the English-speaking world with two selected volumes of poetry, Dancing Embers (Twisted Spoon Press, 2002) and In Contemporary Tense (Iniquity Press, 2013).
Paul Sohar earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy and took a day job in research. Since then, he has written in every genre and published seven volumes of translation, including two selected volumes of Sándor Kányádi's poetry, Dancing Embers (Twisted Spoon Press, 2002) and In Contemporary Tense (Iniquity Press, 2013). A volume of his own poetry, Homing Poems, is available from Iniquity Press (2005). His most recent chapbook, The Wayward Orchard (2011), was a Wordrunner Prize winner. Sohar's translations of György Faludy have just been published by TheWriteDeal (2012). His prose work True Tales of a Fictitious Spy appeared from SynergeBooks (2006). Sohar has given talks at the MLA and AHEA conferences; he lectures at Centenary College, NJ. His magazine credits include Agni, Kenyon Review, Gargoyle, Rattle, Salzburg Poetry Review, Seneca Review, among others. He received the first prize in the Lincoln Poets Society contest (2012).
