I really love you, Attila

About ten years ago, I did a reading course in Hungarian (it was supposed to allow us to make use of economics material in the original language, but the lecturers also covered some literature), and I translated a handful of the poems of Attila József. This was a labour of love, for which I sat in the old SSEES library with my English-Hungarian dictionary, splitting the words up one by one to discern their grammatical functions—consulting whatever English translations I could get my hands on for fresh possible connotations.

The best translations available in English at that time were by John Bátki; I still prefer the results of his first effort to those of his second, since the original formulations often seem to me to have more resonance—though perhaps that's because I read them first. (In one brash poem, called Attila József, he addresses himself: "I really love you, believe me. It's something I inherited from my mother".) Since then, the excellent Scots poet Edwin Morgan has produced a pamphlet, though it's difficult to get hold of and I've only seen a few of the individual poems.

As to my own efforts, I hadn't looked at them for some time, until reminded by the title of one of the posts below. Here is the poem in question, with its characteristic "list" form, illustrating the multifarious possibilities of action that the poet seems to be weighing up—illustrating too, perhaps, the anxiety and the luxury of choice. In Hungarian, it's in couplets, but that proved a bit too tricky.

To sit, to stand, to kill, to die
To shove this chair away from me,
to squat in front of a speeding train,
to climb a mountain carefully
or tip my bag out on the plain;
to feed a bee to my pet bug
or with some granny, snuggle close;
to have a tasty soup to sup,
to sneak through mud on tippytoes;
to place my hat on the railway line
or skirt the lake shore in a rush,
or sit on the bottom, looking fine—
or with the breakers, in a flush;
to bloom with the flowers of the sun
or merely to let out a lovely sigh
to drive away a fly—just one—
or dust my book of grit and grime;
to clean a mirror with my spit,
to make a truce with deadly foes—
or knife them all and from the slit,
study the blood as it overflows;
to watch a young girl as she turns
or sit around and twiddle my thumbs;
to light up Budapest so it burns,
to wait for a bird to take my crumbs;

o life, that's writing now this verse,
you tie me up, you let me loose,
you make me laugh, you make me curse—
o life, you make me choose!

(1926)