For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you two poems by the Hungarian poet Gyula Jenei, in spare, elegant translations by frequent contributor Diana Senechal. In Senechal’s words, “Jenei’s poems convey at least three kinds of outsiderness: societal outsiderness, where he holds a distinctly different view from others; temporal outsiderness, where he returns, disoriented and unsure, to places of the past; and existential outsiderness, where he doubts even himself.” At once laconic and expansive, Jenei’s poems present a fascinating existential struggle, the speaker simultaneously overwhelmed by between the ravages of time and the solitude they impose, yet trying all the same to distinguish past and present, to make plans, to “imagine the future” in a chaotic and indifferent universe. Read on!
After a While
ever since my father died, it’s all one whether he
was happy or unhappy. nothing matters to him
anymore. just to us, who remember him, clashed
with him, used him, didn’t love him enough.
only we feel pain if others hurt us: hit us,
ignore us, abandon us in our suffering.
if we have a conscience, it can also torment us
if we humiliate, use, don’t love; or else
we just notice and abide the indifference
and violence around us, achieved with
peculiar inhumanity, if on TV we see
poverty and genocide explained: as in
the yellow mouth of the gaping capital… but these
are troublesome only as long as the stories
reach us, as long as someone reads a poem or
novel about the atrocities while nibbling
on chocolate. for who could have enough tears
to weep for all the Indians murdered
by settlers before the Wild West films
came along, and those who gave their lives in war,
childbirth, revolution, so that life could still
continue afterward; and to grieve for all
the survivors of atomic disasters, cancerous, peeling
wretches, the people of the camps, or those
tormented by diseases, spinal disorders, classified
pain. the mentally ill. the man who knows
he is choosing badly between ideas and loves,
but choose he must. how cruel a human
can be, says the human, but well, who causes more
suffering: man or god? of course it is all
the same after a while, since the rocks, the quarks
will recall no misery, and information is only
information as long as there is someone who
can interpret it. after that, the letters, bits,
sentences might just create some sense of order,
that is, if there still were sense, if it were possible to
grasp what order is. but there will be only void, distant
stars, pulsing through stupendous space,
pulsing in timelessness, tumbling, who the heck
knows what they’re doing; there will only be atoms,
carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and the whole lot,
but even they won’t feel like giving this comedy
another go.
The Lost, Olden Tenant
i am always going somewhere, and at the end, my end,
everything will be so familiar that i won’t recognize it,
so unfamiliar it will be. ever more uncertain, more vexed
i maunder here and there, knowing-unknowing. well-known
strange lands, towns, and the roads into them. the map
changes constantly. it morphs, fades away. new experiences
sketch devious memories, and i lose myself among the
past’s clustered puzzle pieces when walking from the train stop
to the center. thirty years earlier i make this route
almost every day. i rush from the train, toward it. familiar faces
nod at me, scraggly acacias. it’s raining, it’s snowing,
the seasons are falling, and the sun pushes the clouds apart.
god is blazing on high. there will be something irrational
in the way i stop, thirty years later, on a corner, not knowing
where to go from here. the trees will have grown or been felled,
the houses will be rebuilt, and the few vacant lots will no
longer be empty. of course i don’t get lost. a town. you can’t.
but i fall out of time, or it’s time that rains onto me, the past,
the past’s archway, fragments of brick and plaster. a floating,
floating of fine dust. this poem, an old man, jabbers, writes
itself in circles. ditches, sidewalks, bike paths, crosswalks,
sidewalks. and an open yard. thirty-odd years earlier
i will go home to the twenty-odd-square-meter worker’s quarters.
but grass has grown into the former road. the padlock on the door,
the kitchen windows are broken, and you can see through
the flat to the main square. just the lattice has stayed, the walls
have been knocked out, the cement or—i don’t know—floor slab
has been gutted. i think, as i peer inside, about how a table once
stood here, and chairs. there must have been some sort of
gas stove, sink, but where the kitchen cabinets were,
and what kind, i no longer remember. i go around
the house, i look in through the street side too, here the glass
will still be in place, through which, thirty-odd years ago,
we gaze at the square. my wife doesn’t like this room,
the window is small, north-facing, light doesn’t get in.
thirty-odd years later i peek into the bare apartment,
they’re renovating it right now, everything shows itself
naked, like an archaeological dig. i see where the partitions
used to be, as if studying the past’s floor plan
and structure in an X-ray. i gaze at the scars on the plaster,
healing beyond eight days, at the construction scraps, dust
settling upon them. if the window were open, i could reach
in and touch where the t.v. will be, which we will watch
sometime, somewhere in time. and there is the wardrobe,
the bed. and we will stare at the t.v., and make love, and dream.
and then daydream. it will be the time of regime change.
we will imagine the future. at that time we still won’t be thinking
of old age, just how many children we will have, and
what kind. by the time I spy into the window, the children
will already be raising a child. the ceiling falls down,
hits the dust. up to the ankles, up to the ankle-joint
the debris has risen.
Translated from the Hungarian by Diana Senechal
Gyula Jenei (born in 1962 in Abádszalók, Hungary) is a poet, writer, editor, and educator. As founder and editor of the quarterly literary magazine Eső (translatable as “Rain” or “Falling”), he has brought literature and literary events to the Szolnok area for over twenty years. His poems and other writings comprise seventeen books.
Diana Senechal is the author of two books of nonfiction as well as numerous stories, essays, poems, translations, and songs. Her translation of Gyula Jenei’s 2018 poetry collection Mindig más (Always Different: Poems of Memory) was published in 2022 by Deep Vellum. Since 2017 she has been living and teaching in Szolnok, Hungary.