Poetry
Nagyon fáj
Not translated into English
Attila József · 1936
Opening lines
Kivül-belől
leselkedő halál elől
(mint lukba megriadt egérke)
amíg hevülsz,
az asszonyhoz ugy menekülsz,
hogy óvjon karja, öle, térde.
From without, from within,
away from lurking death
(like a little mouse scared into its hole)
while you still burn,
you run to the woman
so that her arms, her lap, her knees may shield you.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from hu.wikisource.org
Synopsis
Thirty-six poems from the years 1935 and 1936, in which the speaker turns in turn to his own fate, to public life and to love. He stops on the bank of the Danube, addresses a belated lament to his dead mother, demands air, greets an older poet. In the poem that gives the book its title, a man excluded from everywhere seeks a last refuge in the love of a woman who does not love him, and cries out his pain so that she may hear it.
Context
The collection was published by Cserépfalvi shortly before Christmas 1936, under a cover by György Nemes, with fifty numbered and signed copies; only a few copies sold, which devastated the author. It brings together the poems written mostly in 1935 and 1936, during a psychoanalysis; the title poem, of October and November 1936, is addressed to his psychoanalyst, Edit Gyömrői. Andor Németh saw in it a book “half masterpiece, half clinical document”.
Who it is for
Thirty-six short poems, in simple language and tight construction; the whole collection has not been translated, only poems in anthologies.
Prizes and reception
The last collection published in the author's lifetime, almost unsold on its release, and regarded as the equal of his great poems of 1932 to 1934.
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