Tamás Jónás: The Price of Flight (A repülés ára)

Fear, the beautiful vixen sits down beside me and embraces me.   

She would gladly stay on my shoulder, she says, like a pair of black wings.

Her lips are heavy like pasta dough, her smoldering face is her Mars.

Like a stepladder, her legs are long, her hair is a thick weed in Fall.

What do you want in exchange, I ask. No cost for the first few seasons.  

But later on it will have a price: I must endure the smell of blood

that will freely ooze out of my wings and I will have several nights,

during that time a few blind, frail, sick girls of my dream will step out.

They will use my sculptured body with immense hunger until daylight    

but I will remember nothing, she promises me, when I wake up.

Now gliding on the strong wings I am in wild terror during the day.

I become a friend of heaven and the angels show respect to me.

But my body is fading weekly, the duvet of my face is rumpled.

The bed groans when I get into it. Every night I become crippled. 

Translated by: Maria Bencsath

Árpád Tóth: You Dropped the Sun (Elejtetted a napot)

I was thinking about you

In the golden afternoon

As the pink hue of the sun

Reflected through my closed eyes.

The bright light gently heated

My pallid and tired face

And I waited with eyes closed

For the customary journey,

The one when  - as a quiet boat

On a  mysterious sea -

My recliner’s off to sail,

On my fever’s flow it sways

Towards carefree, beautifully

Imaginative regions

Where some of the sorry dreams

Of my sad life made their home:

Everything that will not be,

Everything that never was -

I started the day like that,

With eyes closed, as if dead,

I was dreaming: about life.

And the sun turned towards me

As if it dropped pink embers

Onto my eyelashes

From that certain sacred light

That the eye there still perceived

On the holy Father’s breast,

And with constant thirst for it.

And it happened all at once,

Fervently, fully, suddenly

I thought about you, how far

You are, and how lost I am.

And my frightened eyes quickly

Opened: on the tip of the

Mountains where the reddening

Clouds were already grieving.

And a curious vision

With great force took hold of me.

I felt as if: your hands held

The sun up today for me.

That’s why it was so special,

More precious than any light,

And I only know it now

As the evening has arrived,

When your tired hands at last

Are ready to drop the sun,

So will also fall the songs

Softly silent in my heart.

1927

Translated by: Maria Bencsath

Gábor Nagy (1972-): The Poem of Poet (Poéta verse)

Fool is one who keeps on writing
without joining an order,
keeps on being modest, doesn't beg
or plays a role: observes.

Will not become and artist,

not a real poet:

a scribbler, a starveling

only, it is clear

that he is useless,

parasitic bad lot.

Thence the prejudiced

coeval hidalgo.

If not ostentatious, then why?

On the tip of his pen

like some flying dust,  

another posterity hangs. 

Translated by: Maria Bencsath