That Autumn feeling

I promise my poems won't all be about doom and gloom. However, it is the 4th of November today. To bring you the historical context, read these heart-wrenching SOS teletype messages a week later in 1956, when the invasion had been completed.

Anyway, here is my translation of Sándor Csoóri: "In Remembrance of November 4" (original):

It had been autumn, autumn, for days, weeks,

perhaps years: despotic autumn.

The wind checked the identity of every stray,

stateless leaf on the street corner,

every chestnut in a battle helmet.

And the wind stopped me as well.

I shivered in a spring coat

near Boráros square,

like the dew-nipped

refugees by the borders.

I had no gun,

or flag,

or knife,

no suspicious statue fragment,

but under my skin I carried

the names and faces

of those executed at Maria Theresa barracks.

One need only have

shouted from above: stop! who are you?

and what are these mournful leaflets

you are carrying up and down this ruined city?

Perhaps a well-aimed

sniper-finger would have been enough.

Enough, enough, I would have there and then confessed,

that I’m like the blood-martyred country’s dead,

every last one of them,

and whether I go North or South, there is no escaping myself.

No way, nowhere,

since even in verses,

muddy tanks and corrupt,

scabby rose gardens stand in my way.

The wind … it was as if

cling film wings creaked

and gillette blades snapped under boots.

Who forgot

to shout at me that autumn?

Who had failed to bring me closer

to my destined death?