Poetry
Hajnali szerenád
Not translated into English
Árpád Tóth · 1913
Opening lines
Setét csöbrök s olcsó székek között
Átballagok nyugodtan: odabenn
Bágyadt gázlángok égnek csendesen.
Between dark buckets and cheap chairs
I stroll calmly through: inside
Weary gas flames are burning quietly.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
The poem that gives the book its title paints dawn over a grey city: on the horizon, the dawn, “the great impressionist”, lays down silver and gold, while the streets remain dirty and sad and the gas lamps grow pale. The speaker wanders alone in these streets and imagines a serenade played beneath the window of the sleeping Annuska. Around it are other poems that the journal Nyugat had published since 1908, made of images and colours.
Context
The collection appeared in 1913 from the publishing house of the journal Nyugat, in a slim volume of seventy-two pages; the title poem had appeared the previous year. The book combines impressionist imagery, in which dawn becomes a painter, with an aesthetic of decadence, that of decline and wasted life. The same year, pressed by lack of money, the author left Debrecen for Budapest, and it was then discovered that he was suffering from a lung disease.
Who it is for
Short, highly imagistic poems; no French or English translation of the collection has been located.
Prizes and reception
The first book of a poet whose elegy of 1917 ranks among the most famous in the Hungarian language.
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The pages consulted to check this page.