Sandor Csoóri

foto de Jorg Dustervald


A Hidden Self-Portrait

They took me for a Gypsy? I let them.
For a Cumanian? a Spaniard? a Tartar?
I just smiled with slit eyes:
inside me, a flock of birds was flying about.

And I was the wing, too, and the sky, too,
a face beyond my face in the blue;
my fist in the Moon: a cramped fetish,
an angry Negro god in the myths.

What I had been through: that was me,
different pleasures, different woes each day;
in the vicinity of death there's a lot of wind,
summer-swishing and a flood of snow,

bones of armies dug up
there, where the chamomile-filled meadows
look back, remembering and revolted
into winters with cannons.

The forest of Bakony at my back,
Prague and Warsaw's forehead light,
one-thousand-year-old rain walks
before me in an end-of-May night

and I get drenched in it, soaked to the bone,
a rumpled man with peonies;
the next day's wind replaces
my wanderer's face with a sunny sky.


translated by Len Roberts and Mária Szende