Mihály Babits: The obituary of Dezső Kosztolányi

I have always sensed a contradiction in this word: funeral celebration. The thought of death is terrible; mourning is a bleak and oppressive feeling, hardly fit for festivity. Yet death is not an utter ending, nor does mourning remain mere mourning for long. The life of a writer does not pass away; it is completed, finished, like a book. And that is as much a beginning as it is an end.
I bid farewell, and feel as though I stand at a departure. Dezső Kosztolányi now sets forth in final and perfect radiance into the future, into the Hungarian vastness. He departs along the path where Endre Ady and Árpád Tóth have already gone before him. Thus the renewal of Hungarian poetry at the dawn of the century becomes, almost before our eyes, the province of literary history; and we, who were still its witnesses and workers, feel ourselves growing lonelier among the living.
Yet our personal grief must now be restrained. What belongs to literary history does not necessarily belong to the past, and he who has died is often more alive than the living. It is commonly said: the man dies, the work lives. But this is not entirely so. In the work, the man himself lives. Indeed, it is he who sustains the work, which has become as it were his second body — a body built of words in place of the body built of cells and fibers that has been lost. Kosztolányi’s words are sound, like healthy bodies; they endure like strong sinews. Firm, wrought of the finest substance of the Hungarian tongue, they withstand the changing seasons of time.

Mihály Babits: Evening Question

When evening — that softly covering
black, smooth velvet coverlet
spread by a giant nurse —
slowly enfolds the cherished earth,
and so gently that every blade of grass
stands straight beneath its tender veil,
and no petal of the flowers is wrinkled,
nor does the delicate, double wing
of the painted butterfly
lose its rainbow glaze;
and they rest beneath this shadowing shroud,
this light and silken velvet cover,
so that they scarcely feel its weight —
then, wherever you may wander in the wide world,
or sit at home in your brown and mournful room,
or idly watch in a café
as one by one they light the gas that shines like day;
or wearily, upon a hillside with your supper,
gaze through leaves at the languid moon;
or along a dusty country road
your drowsy driver nods and sways;
or upon the rocking deck of a ship
grow dizzy, or recline upon a train;
or wandering through a foreign city
pause at the corners, lazily admiring
the long threads of distant streets,
the double line of streetlamps;
or in the watery city, in Riva,
where flame is broken on a matte opal mirror,
brood backward into the distant past
whose memory sweetly torments you —
into your vanished years,
which, like the imagin a magic lantern,
are and are not;
whose memory can never be cold,
whose memory is burden and treasure both —
there, bowing your head, heavy with remembrance,
to the marble ground,
wandering among beauty and delight,
you will yet timidly wonder:
what is all this beauty for?
You will still ask, forlorn:
why the silken water, the variegated marble?
why the evening, this winged coverlet?
why the hills and why the trees,
and the sea into which no sower casts his seed?
why the ditches and the ebbing tides,
and the clouds, these sorrowful daughters of Danaus,
and the sun, that burning stone of Sisyphus?
why the memories, why the past?
why the lamps and why the moons?
why the time that never finds its end?
Or take the little blade of grass as example:
why does it grow, if it must wither?
why wither, if it grows again?

Frigyes Karinthy: Méné, Tekel

Hello — Frigyes Karinthy speaking, poet of the twentieth century!
Méné, Tekel…
Listen — then repeat after me.
I speak in verse so you remember better.
I carve it in your heart and grind it in your ear:
It was ill to be human in this world,
in an age whose scales are false,
that will betray you tomorrow
as it betrayed you yesterday.
At noon man was tempted;
at night the ghosts wept.
They mourned Christ’s tortured cross,
yet once again the murderer was hailed a hero.
The man drank blood, the woman marrow;
outside the shop the poet bawled.
Silk and brocade were given to the dead,
the living went ragged and spat blood.
Flowers were strewn upon the grave,
the living shivered in the snow.
With loud voice they swore beside the coffin;
the living moaned softly over peas.
The child stared wide-eyed in wonder;
the elders listened, cowardly and sly.
The base one spat in his master’s face —
filthy wretch, shameless pupil.
Ships rushed headlong into blazing peril;
the harlot’s gaudy rags flew in the wind;
but the fairest and most splendid thing
rotted upon a dung heap like a dog.
Now, wringing my hands, weeping, I beg you:
prepare — attend — the true scales are preparing.
Set this now in your heart and ear —
its meaning you shall learn in time.
MÉNÉ, TEKEL— whether you grasp it or not,
mark it well: it speaks to you and for you.
One day my song, uttered in darkness,
will blaze like writing of fire upon the wall.
Remember: today these are gray words —
but they will live when I do not,
they will be when I am not.

Frigyes Karinthy: Sketches

Hello — Frigyes Karinthy speaking, journalist!
In this capacity I report the following. It is possible that beginning tomorrow the newspapers will appear in eight pages owing to shortage of paper. Should the shortage intensify, we must be prepared that within a month they will appear in two pages, and thereafter in only one. Finally the government will instruct the paper mills to produce paper with only one side.
Our task is to preserve every column of the paper; admittedly this will be difficult. The frames must be narrowed. We must confine ourselves to essentials. As a conscientious and far-sighted journalist, it is fitting that I practice this style. I therefore have the honor of submitting to the editor the following draft. The paper will appear thus; every column shall remain:
Leading Article. — Hungarian concerns. The foreign and paper shortage not at all as threatening as many imagine.
Feature. — A Life. By F. K. — The learned lady came smiling from the next room. “A boy!” she said brightly. Pál Kurt sighed. “Thank God,” he cried, “let his name be Peter!” Little Peter Kurt whimpered in the cradle, and a few years later everyone admired his fine velvet coat. A beautiful blond child he was. “Petey, Petey!” his mother called. Petey, playing in the nursery, lifted his curly head — and ten years later passed his final examinations. The university years passed like a dream. One day Peter sat sadly in his rented room: “Eh, what is life?” he murmured — and fifteen years later accepted a district physician’s post in Tapolca. The girl trembled, plucking at the whispering acacia leaves, looked at Peter; Peter gently drew her head to him, kissed her — and their child, Charles, was entered in military school at fifteen. “That is to say, what I meant to say…” Peter began — but fell silent, recalling that he had died two years before. The End.
Daily News. — Painter commits suicide. Reason unknown. — Run over by tram. Funeral tomorrow. — Price gouger sentenced. — Fraudulent clerk sought by police. — Hotel thief claims pathological coat-collecting mania. — Madman in the street; observation unimpaired. — Literature: Leo Ábránd, Epic of the War, nine volumes. Rubbish. — Court: eightynine years’ hard labor distributed among several defendants. They accepted the verdict and appealed.
Odds and Ends. — The flea. The flea is stronger than the elephant, because if the elephant were a flea, he could not jump so high.