Pilgrims

translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet

Few are the meadow’s signposts.
Few are the light signals.
Few the immediate faces.
Few, as well, the angels.

That rustling — only butterfly wings.
The ocean still far away.
Few are the windmills, the wind.
The sky holds its narrow tent.

My pain, all clamped together
tries to walk on here.
And must move on, must keep stepping,
as it goes bereft of words.

Unaccustomed to silence
is the crowd, frightened.
Few are the hands, the muteness,
the buildings that are silent.

This is mirage or summons,
the oak forest is grumbling.
The light of the chiselled stars
obsessively is dying.

Few are the meadow’s signposts.
Hardly a crumb of bread.
May the rustling sounds                   
last till tomorrow at dawn.

Prayer Before Lights Out

translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet

Lord, save me from perfection
like the wedge-shaped burn marks on the edge
of the ironing blanket: leave upon me
my mistakes, the trace of your hand. In this city,
where the two shores watch each other grimacing,
draw upon me a Dutch tulip field. And if you write
upon your objects: “warning, high-voltage,”
place me as an accomplice in your electrical circuit. The
evening star can be seen so infrequently, guardian
of the sheep flocks of old. Among the cumulus clouds, in
this world forced apart, we do not see each other.
In my singed, ruinous, short-circuited bones
with their memories of ancient beings,
let me emit light, while darkness falls.

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Ágnes Gergely was born in 1933 in the small town of Endrőd on the Great Hungarian Plain, where she spent her early childhood. Her family moved to Budapest in 1940, although summers were still spent in the country. In 1944, her father was deported for forced labor and never returned; unconfirmed reports indicate that he perished in Mauthausen. Gergely attained a degree as a teacher of Hungarian and English in 1957 at Eötvös Loránd University despite the difficulties presented by her family’s “bourgeois” background. In 1952, Gergely also obtained a vocational certificate as an iron and metal lathe worker after being refused entrance to the University of Theatre and Film Arts for the same political reasons. After attaining her ELTE degree, Gergely taught primary and secondary school until 1963, when she chose to begin working as a journalist for Hungarian Radio. Her first volume, You Are a Sign on My Door Post, was published in 1963. In 1973–1974, she was a participant in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. Gergely has published eighteen volumes of poetry, twelve volumes of memoirs and prose, and been awarded over twenty literary prizes, including the prestigious Kossuth Prize. She is also a distinguished and prolific translator from English; her first translations appeared in 1958 and included work by James Joyce and Dylan Thomas.

Ottilie Mulzet has translated over nineteen volumes of Hungarian poetry and prose from contemporary authors such as László Krasznahorkai, Szilárd Borbély, Gábor Schein, György Dragomán, László Földényi, István Vörös, Edina Szvoren, and others. Her translation of László Krasznahorkai’s Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming was awarded the National Book Award in Translated Literature in 2019. Her translation of Krisztina Tóth’s Eye of the Monkey is forthcoming from Seven Stories Press in October 2025.

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These poems will appear in Under a Pannonian Sky: Ten Women Poets from Hungary, edited by Ottilie Mulzet (forthcoming from Seagull Books, December 2025). They are published here are as part of the thirteenth installment of our “Literature & Democracy column,” which presents writers’ responses to the threats to democracy around the world.

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