Dawn on the boulevard (Árpád Tóth)
The dawn was blind, filthy, gray. The shops
Still slept with glassy eyes
And the sleepy cleaners, with tired strokes
Kicked up the dust over rocky outcrops
Like slow jinn or morose sprites.
Suddenly, between two firewalls,
An ember lit up the Eastern sky:
Onto every glass, a hundred small suns dropped
And on the dirt of the asphalt rolled
The million carats of Infinite Light.
Still slept with glassy eyes
And the sleepy cleaners, with tired strokes
Kicked up the dust over rocky outcrops
Like slow jinn or morose sprites.
Suddenly, between two firewalls,
An ember lit up the Eastern sky:
Onto every glass, a hundred small suns dropped
And on the dirt of the asphalt rolled
The million carats of Infinite Light.
The street stood enchanted. A thin
Acacia breathed the precious sun with deep swirls
And as her bun of hair turned green
A hesitant movement of pale, spring
Treasure: flowers from a few curls.
No earthly sound yet replied to the Light
But the birds of colour did tell
The world of the purple tie
In the shop window; and then, from far
There swelled a mellow bell.
A solemn factory siren came on,
A tram on worn-out tracks wailed
It was day, the workman set off with a slow run
And it was late, no one saw how the gold Sun
Threw a kiss on the hands of a maid...
I can tell that was akward to translate (I know about 15 words in Hungarian, I can only translate the simplest rhymes found in toilets). If you had to describe nature's cogs starting the day in an ethereal manner, this is how you'd try to do it.
ReplyDeleteSteve
Cheers, it was very tricky. I tried to keep to the rhyming scheme abaab as much as possible, and also keeping true to the original meaning. I wonder actually, what the google translate version says?
ReplyDeleteWas blind in the morning, dirty, gray. More
Glassy eyes were asleep in the shops,
And the game sluggishly swept kővidék
Beaten in the dust of the sleepy vice,
Dsinnek as slow, ill-tempered goblin.
Not bad.. anyway, if anyone has ideas on a different way to translate a verse, or how it can be polished, I'd be interested to hear your opinions!