Mihály Babits (HUN) - Jonah's Prayer
Abandoned
by my words I'm left alone
or
I've become an aimless overflown
drifting
river and in my murky mud
I
drag the flotsam washed up in the flood:
old
idioms exhausted vain pretences
like
broken hedgerows signpost maybe fences.
Oh
would the Master wisely grant the force
that
channels deep, to lead a steady course
toward
the sea, and would He fit the rhyme
to
fringe my verse perfectly every time
ready
for use by me the good disciple,
(for
prosody I'd read His holy Bible),
as
lazy Jonah shirked to no avail,
and
then for three days rotted in the Whale,
I
too went down and shared those deadly bays
of
hot throbbing pain, but for thirty days,
for
thirty years or three hundred, who knows,
to
find, before my book will firmly close
and
even blinder and eternal
Whale
shall swallow my last departing journal,
my
real voice, to marshal every true
word
into action, as He gives the cue,
to
speak up loud as it is right and fitting
for
all to hear (my sickly throat permitting)
until
the powers, cosmic and Ninevean
will
silence me and send me to oblivion.
| Posted by kathy1981 on 03/15/2007 4:07 AM | Visits: 58 |
He died from throat cancer in the summer 1941, a witness to Hungary's alliance with Nazi Germany, not knowing what further monstrosities awaited Europe and his country. His last outcry in Jonahs Prayer was his poetic legacy, and demonstrates the obligation of speaking out in moral indignation.
Thanks for placing this here, Kathy. Hadn't thought about his writing in awile, but it looks it's a good time to once again read his works.
(I tried to post this earlier, and luckily made a copy. If it shows up as a duplicate, please just delete this one.)