I was sitting on the last step at the wharf,

I was watching how a melon rind swum away:

I hardly heard, submerged in my fate,

how the surface bubbled, how the deep kept quiet.

As if it had sprung from my heart,

the Danube was murky, wise and great.

Like muscles, when a man is working,

file, hammer, make adobe, dig,

that's how every wave and every motion

popped, stiffened and loosened,

like my sweet mother, rocked, told a tale

and washed all the citys dirty laundry.

And the rain began to drizzle.

But, as if it didn't matter, it stopped.

Yet, like one who watches a long rain

from a cave – I watched over the boundaries of the city:

The gaudy past was falling

like an apathetic, eternal, colorless rain.

The Danube just floated on.

And like a child on a fertile, day-dreaming mother's lap,

the waves were swaying playfully and laughing towards me.

They rumbled like gravestones,

staggering cemeteries in the flood of time.

II

I'm the type, that I watch for a thousand years

what I see all of a sudden.

The whole of time is complete in one second,

and a hundred thousand ancestors contemplate it with me.

I see, what they did not see, because they hoed,

murdered, embraced, they did what they had to.

They see, diving into the matter,

what I don't see, when one must confess .

We know about each other, like happines and sorrow.

Mine is the past, theirs is the present.

We write a poem, they hold my pencil.

I feel them and remember.

III

My mother was Kun, my father half Szekely,

half Romanian, or perhaps he was entirely that.

Food came sweet from my mothers mouth,

from my fathers came the beauty of truth.

When I move, they embrace each other.

Because of this Im sad sometimes;

this is the evanescence. I am made from this. “Youll see,

when we won't be around! . . .” – they address me.

They address me, because I'm already them;

That's why I'm strong in spite of my weakness,

remembering, that I'm more than the many,

because I'm all the ancestors back to the premordial cell--

I'm the Ancestor, who breaks apart to become more:

happily I change into my father and mother,

my father and mother also divide into two

and I expand to a fervent One!

I'm the world – everything, that was, is:

Many nations, which clobber each other.

The conquerers win with me dead

and the suffering of the conquered makes me suffer.

Arpad and Zalan, Werboczi and Dozsa

Turkish, Tartar, Slovak, Romanian whirl

in this heart todays Hungarians –

You owe a tender future to this past!

. . . I want to work. It's enough of a struggle

to admit the past. The Danube

is the past, the present and the future;

her soft waves embrace each other.

The battle, which was fought by our ancestors,

memory dissolves into peace;

and now we must finally put our house in order –

this is our work, and its no easy task.

1936

translated by Michael Castro & Gábor G. Gyukics