Some years ago I did a translation of the song of Ágnes Vanilla below. It is part of an album, where each song is a musical adaptation of a József Attila poem. This particular one happens to be my favorite of the lot and it appears to be popular also among non-Hungarian people, and still one may find many requests for a translation on youtube. Mine got lost during the past few years, and there were many other attempts ever since. It is however, a very difficult task, since the lyrics is actually a poem of one of the greatest Hungarian poets, József Attila (Attila József in the English name order). The text is full of subtleties that are difficult to translate in the same compact verse form that the original used. I attempted that once. What I would like to do here is a bit different. I would like to give a transcription rather than a translation, in the sense that I would provide a more lengthy description for the lines than what would be possible if I attempted to put it into verse. The best suited person for such a task would be bilingual anyway, since only a person who knows subtleties in both languages can decide how to adapt or occasionally replace a phrase in the original with one that carries similar meaning in the target language.
József Attila had the difficult life of an artist, who found it hard to conform to some of the norms of his contemporaries. He attempted suicide several times, was fired from university, and got into conflict with the authorities because some of his poems were considered politically or otherwise incorrect. While previous generations learned that he was schizophrenic, updated textbooks urge the knowledge on younger generations that in fact he had borderline personality disorder. Whether his early death at the age of 32 in 1937 was an accident or suicide, is still not unanimously agreed upon. The fact remains he found his death among some railway tracks. His fame increased after his death, he is introduced to students among artists influenced by the Avant-garde (e.g. surrealism), others discuss his relation to transrealism.
The poem Óh szív! nyugodj! (Oh Heart! Be Still! written in 1928) repeated twice, is the lyrics of the above song. I will try to restrict myself to a technical/raw translation. The poem is a depiction of a winter scenery (daybreak), where various natural phenomena trigger poetic emotions. At least this is how I would summarize it, without too much explanation. Of course, here, and in the following, I base my translation on the image the poem triggers in my own mind. There are 4 stanzas:
Fegyverben réved fönn a téli ég,
Above, the winter sky daydreams in arms,
kemény a menny és vándor a vidék,
heaven is hard and the land is a wanderer,
halkul a hó, megáll az elmenő,
snowing decreases, someone leaving stops,
lehellete a lobbant keszkenő.
his breath is the flickered handkerchief.
The verb 'réved' is related to the French 'rêve' (dream), and perhaps could be translated as 'be in a reverie'. I personally imagine here that certain sleepy awareness that just precedes full awakening, and so it could perhaps also be translated as 'awakes armed in a reverie', though that sounds a bit complicated to me. The land is a wanderer could perhaps also be rendered as 'the land wanders'. In 'halkul a hó' halkul lit. means to become less loud, all in all it would be "the snow becomes less loud". In the last line flicker stands for 'lobban', which refers to one flicker rather than many rapidly suceeding ones (the latter would be 'lobog').
Hol is vagyok? Egy szalmaszál nagyon
Where am I? A straw moves about
helyezkedik a csontozott uton;
intensely on the boned road;
kis, száraz nemzet; izgágán szuszog,
little dry creature; snuffs restlessly,
zuzódik, zizzen, izzad és buzog.
(it) gets bruised, buzzes, sweats and boils.
The first two lines constitute one sentence (other than the initial question). 'Helyezkedik' means something like tries to find its place. For 'csontozott', 'boned' is risky. The first meaning of the corresponding verb would be to remove the bones, and so the participle here would mean boned or boneless. Together with the winter context I imagine bony patches of snow on the road when I say 'boned road'. The word 'nemzet' means nation, and I have seen it translated like that many times. However, I think 'nemzet' here stands in its more direct derivative meaning (something similar to 'fajzat'), i.e. 'creature'. The last line has a phonetic message, all verbs there contain 'zz' reminding one to noises a piece of straw could make.
De fönn a hegyen ágyat bont a köd,
But up on the mountain, the mist is making the bed,
mint egykor melléd: mellé leülök.
like once beside you: I sit beside it.
Bajos szél jaját csendben hallgatom,
I listen in silence to the laments of the troubled wind
csak hulló hajam repes vállamon.
only my falling hair flies about on my shoulder.
'The laments of the troubled wind' would lit. be the 'ouches of...' where 'jaj' is 'ouch'.
Óh szív! nyugodj! Vad boróka hegyén
Oh Heart! Be Still! On the mountain of the wild juniper
szerelem szólal, incseleg felém,
love talks, flirts to me,
pirkadó madár, karcsu, koronás,
a dawning bird, slender, with a crown,
de áttetsző, mint minden látomás.
but transparent as all visions.
And here, one has actually little trouble to give a literal translation. The question remains whether all this helps to understand the original? To convey the poetry, definitely, a poetic translation is needed, more suited to the subtleties of the English language. But in such a procedure, the taste of the original is likely to suffer, and I hope that with this more literal translation, I have managed to transfer at least some of it.
