Fog everywhere: anxiety was a tightcold sleepless night;that’s my life I thought and felt it glideswiftly away but I wasn’t part of the ride;my life went on without me inside. — Anna Szabó, from “This Day,” Wherever I Lie Is Your Bed, edited by Margaret Jull Costa, Marilyn Hacker (Two Lines World Writing in Translation,… Continue reading Anna Szabó
I lived, but then in living I was feeble in life andalways knew that they would bury me here in the end,that year piles upon year, clod on clod, stone on stone,that the body swells and in the cool, maggot-infested darkness, the naked bone will shiver.That above, scuttling time is rummaging through my poemsand that… Continue reading Miklós Radnóti
Do you also believe that what gives our lives their meaning is the passion that suddenly invades us heart, soul, and body, and burns in us forever, no matter what else happens in our lives? And that if we have experienced this much, then perhaps we haven’t lived in vain? Is passion so deep and… Continue reading Sándor Márai
But don’t leave me, delicate mind! Don’t let me go crazy.Sweet wounded reason, don’t leave me now. Don’t leave me. Let me die, without fear, a clean lovely death,like Empedocles, who smiled as he fell into the crater.” — Miklós Radnóti, “Maybe …,” Clouded Sky.( Sheep Meadow; Revised edition August 1, 2003)
And anything might happen now, I suppose, the way it did that first night there, back then. Though there are only rails and fog. Who knows. Wherever you go now, come with me again. — Anna Szabó, from “This Day,” Wherever I Lie Is Your Bed, edited by Margaret Jull Costa, Marilyn Hacker (Two Lines… Continue reading Anna Szabó
I’ll write my arm out in stars, my legs in blood-boltered ash trees, so that words may be transmogrified into all my organs one after another but then I’ll pull the pen from my hand, and dip it into the river’s icy form, just as burning, molten meteors … Continue reading József Tornai
The Vale of Soul-Making 