Claire Hurt

Daybreak drunkenness (English) http://www.babelmatrix.org/works/hu/Kosztol%C3%A1nyi_Dezs%C5%91/Hajnali_r%C3%A9szegs%C3%A9g/en/1832-Daybreak_drunkenness

By Kosztolányi Dezső 

I would tell you this - I hope it won’t bore you.

Last night I stopped working at three.

And went to bed.

But the machine in the mind was rattling on,

and though I tried to sleep, all I managed

was tossing and turning furiously

instead.

Yet I went on with drugs invoking,

calling out to sleep to come, imploring,

counting up to a hundred -

no use. With a hundred

eyes the words I had written gazed at me,

and the toxin of forty cigarettes were working in me,

as well as other things. The darkness. Everything.

So I got up, shrugging my shoulders,

pacing up and down in nightgown

in my room - around me the family nest

with the honey of dreams on their lips

they had gone to rest -

and so shuffling, tumbling like a drunk

on the front window I happened to look out.

Hold on, how should I begin, how can I explain?

you know my home, the site,

and if you recall my bedroom will remember

how deserted the street is there

at that time of the night.

Through the window you can look into open flats.

Felled and blind

the people horizontally lie

in their beds with eyes turned up into

the mist of their minds

since the leukemia of everyday existence

covers them up like blankets.

Their shoes and dresses lie next to them,

and they are closed up in a box

which they beautify when awake dreaming,

but - I can tell you - when you just look at them

every flat is like a cage.

An alarm-clock pulses through the silence

limping, then giving a sudden buzz

to the sleeper - saying: „Wake up to reality.”

My home is asleep dead and dumb,

just as it will after a hundred numb

years be, when as ruins it will lie

with grass appearing in the cracks,

and no one will know whether it was a home

or a pigsty.

But up there, my friend, up there the radiant sky,

some clean and pure and grand symmetry

trembling yet firm like loyalty.

The firmament

just as it had been of old

when my mother’s eiderdown that bold

blue patch of watercolor just like

that one on my exercise-book spread,

and the stars

whose breathing souls shine in the silence

of the lukewarm autumn night

which precedes the cold,

it were they, the stars,

who yonder and from afar

gazed at Hannibal’s army

and now are gazing at me,

dropped down and standing there in a nightgown and a vest

by a window of a house in Budapest.

I don’t know what happened to me at the moment

but it seemed a pair of wings fluttered above me

and something I had long buried,

my childhood was bending down towards me.

For such a long time

was I gazing at the marvels of the sky

that it turned red on the eastern horizon

and the wind made the stars swing in the firmament

and an immense shaft of light

flared up in the distance.

The gates of a heavenly hall flung open

torches were lighted all around

something flickered,

the guests were dispersing,

in the deep half-lit shadows of the dawn.

The portico still swam in brightness

and standing on the steps

a grand lord, the glorious giant of the ball

was bidding farewell.

Shuffling of feet, timid impatience of ringing bells,

quiet whispers of ladies were heard:

the party was over,

and the doormen were shouting for carriage and coach.

A lace veil was seen

to descend

from the distance

like a net of diamonds

on a brilliant blue

opera-cloak

that a dear and beautiful dame

would wear with a diadem

which is covered with the light of peace;

or was it an angel

with an immaculate hand

putting his crown on his head

and silently like a dream

gliding into a swaying carriage

and with a smile

driving away

amidst sparkling hooves of hundreds of horses

and showers of silvery confetti

on the torchlit Milky Way.

Gaping I stood

and shouted of happiness:

there is a party in the sky a party every night!

And then the sense of the great old secret

lit up in my mind,

the fairies of heaven, just like in a city,

go home at dawn

on the lamp-lit boulevards of eternity.

Until sunrise

I stood motionless gazing

then I said to myself:

what were you seeking

on this earth, what old wives’ tales

what tarts were keeping you captive,

for what scribbling were you so active,

that so many summers and winters passed by

and so many a slovenly night

without noticing the party in the sky?

Fifty,

oh fifty years, my heart recoils,

my dead and departed and buried are more

and yet they still sparkle above me as before

those heavenly neighbors all alive

who can see me crushing my tears and my heart.

Well, I tell you the truth

I bowed to the ground, broken with gratitude.

Look here, I know there is nothing for me to believe in

and I know that before long I shall be leaving,

but stretching my heart to be a string

to the azure I started to sing

to him I search for in vain as alive or when dead later

whom no one knows where to find here or in the ether.

But now as my muscles get softer just

so I have a feeling my friend, that in the dust,

where I was groping by clogs of earth and souls

I was the guest of a grand and unknown Lord.

I chose to use an image of a light at the end of a tunnel because it represents the speaker's mental journey throughout the poem.  

Biographic info: 

-Born in 1885 in Hungary

-Published first poetry book in 1907

-Went to the University of Budapest

-Wrote novels and short stories

-Was the child of a physicist 

      The speaker can't sleep and is gazing out of a window, having an existential crisis.  He then has an epiphany and comes to terms with his mortality.  The speaker's identity is a man who is feeling lost and conflicted about his life.  He is looking outwards for answers.  In the fourth line of the first paragraph, the speaker's mind is compared to a machine "rattling on," using a metaphor to represent the turmoil of the speaker's mind that was keeping him from sleep.  Later, in stanza 2, flats are compared to "a cage."  Here, the speaker is using simile to describe how life can feel confining.  In the second to last stanza, the author uses imagery of stars to represent the dead.  Form:  Originally, this poem was written in Hungarian, and had a rhyme scheme throughout the entire poem, but the translator chose to instead give only the last stanza a rhyme scheme with a few other rhymes throughout the poem.  The translator likely made this decision because the speaker seems like he is falling apart at the beginning, but later finds peace, and the rhyme scheme reflects this.  The tone of this poem is at first distraught and chaotic, but later becomes wistful and calm.  The theme of this passage is that life has meaning.  

Poem website:

http://www.babelmatrix.org/works/hu/Kosztol%C3%A1nyi_Dezs%C5%91/Hajnali_r%C3%A9szegs%C3%A9g/en/1832-Daybreak_drunkenness

Biographic info websites:

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Dezso-Kosztolanyi

https://thebiography.us/en/kosztolanyi-dezso

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dezs%C5%91_Kosztol%C3%A1nyi