Georges Gondard : A Dunánál, after a poem by Attila Jozsef

I sat on the lower stone of the loading dock,
I watched the melon rind float away.
I barely heard, immersed in my fate,
that the surface chatters, the depth is silent.
As if it flowed from my heart,
the Danube was confused, wise and big.
Like muscles, when a person works,
file, hammer, sow clay, dig,
it snapped, it tensed, it relaxed
every wave and every movement.
And like my mother, she rocked and told stories
and now all the laundry of the city.
And it started to rain
but as if it didn't matter, he stopped.
And yet, like someone watching from a cave
the long rain - I looked at the border:
it fell like an eternal rain,
without a sense of humor, what was colorful, the mult.
The Danube just flowed. And like the fertile
on the lap of a mother who thinks otherwise
the little child, they were playing nicely
and the foams laughed at me.
At the price of time they trembled
like cemeteries with tombstones, roaring.
2
I have been like that for a hundred thousand years
I look at what I see suddenly.
A moment and all time is done,
what a hundred thousand ancestors contemplate with me.
I see what they did not see because they were hoofed,
they killed, they hugged, they did what they had to.
And they see it, they descended into matter,
what I don't see, to be honest.
We know each other like joy and sorrow.
The past is mine and the present is theirs.
We write a poem - they hold my pencil
and I feel them and remember them.
3
My mother was from Kun, my father is half from Székely,
half-Romanian, or maybe completely.
Food was sweet from my mother's mouth,
the truth was beautiful from my father's mouth.
When I move, they hug each other.
I feel sad sometimes because of this -
this is passing away. I'm from this. "See you
if we won't be!..." - they address me.
They address me because they are already me;
for being weak, I am strong
who remember that I am more than many
because I am every ancestor down to the stem cell -
I am the Ancient One, which strives to multiply:
I will happily become my father and mother,
and my father and mother are divided into two
and this is how I breed into an enthusiastic Egg!
I am the world - all that was, is:
the many generations crashing into each other.
The occupiers win with me dead
and the agony of the surrendered torments me.
Árpád and Zalán, Werbőczi and Dózsa -
Turks, Tatars, lakes, and Romanians are swirling
in this heart, which is already indebted to this past
with a gentle future - today's Hungarians!
...I want to work. Sufficient
fight that the multa must be confessed.
To the Danube, past, present and future,
soft waves embrace each other.
The fight our ancestors fought
memory dissolves it into peace
and finally settle our common affairs,
this is our job; and not a little.
June 1936