Hungarians

by Sándor Weöres

translated by Edwin Morgan

A thousand years I sat on the bank of the Danube and wept. Then
a clump of mud moved under my feet, slithering, a mud frog, leant
over me and quietly asked:

‘Can you recognize yourself? Look at me!’

The riverbank was thorny, with its relentless harvest of spiky
sunshine and shivery fog and light; it lay whispering at my feet, a
deadweight of froth and foam, a sack shouldered off, and I even failed
to notice;

beside me, my woman had just set up a tent over us, not that
anyone else saw it, and she baked doughnuts from the sandbank,
while my collie, in a black-striped yellow grub, shouted like an
immortal god at the phases of the moon,

above me. the stony breast of Esztergom and Visegrád was roaring,
the jazzy throng, Szentendre was in full cry, and the Celts offering
sacrifices on Naphegy, invaders from Rome, horseshoes clattering,
Vu-Vang, Frauendienst, Renascence, the tombstone of the Father of
the Roses, Budapest woven of steel bridges, all passed in my dream,
since how was I to believe my waking eyes -

but what it was I missed for a thousand years now leant over me,
its face replaced by a cloud, by hammer and sickle of froth and foam,
by nothing else,

and I wept even more, since I was sure I had living blood in my
veins, like the animals.

It held my hand, led us out: our little group was clad in the red
shapes of the smoky brown harbour lamps which made a frill as they
wavered over the bank.

We reached the ferry at the end of the broken bridge in the dark.