Morning prayer

translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet

Winter sunlight sits hesitantly on the window’s surface,
behind the marble dusk-clouded fog;
on the windowsill, frost’s iron teeth bite
into half a squash, coffee’s pungent fragrance bubbles.
Ha! Once again the turning of time,
this is Winter’s scent,
just like the old days! —
The kitchen floor is excited as it dries:
May all your wishes come to be.

Afterwards

translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet

It would be good, after my death,
to get up, like after a boxing match.
From another existence, from the outside, to awkwardly
keep looking, see what’s coming next:
how long will it last? diminution? illumination?
for who you are, what I am —
when does it flicker out, and is the border
a tumbling stone wall — a string of membrane?
where does the tunnel come to an end?
was the picture in my mind’s eye? and if I saw it,
when did it disappear, into what did it fade?

I don’t know which was dream:
the fullness of my being, my destruction
now kindled, now extinguished.

Being alive, I can still write.
How good it would be not to fear — but I do
because all is a lie in this constricted passage.
And fear cannot be pardoned.

I wish I could know what I only suspect,
the certainty of what is to come:
the opening of all that is concealed.

All that was connected is now a diluted pile.
What was revolving is now sluggish grain.
The shade is nimbler on the wall.
Do I hear the body of crackling
silence, the gnarled mass?
Because nothing holds together,
nothing by nothing led:
as if by magic, the cells
let go of each other’s hands.

The living body is the substance
of turning time — but now only its sheer
presence. Its transfiguration
is not magic or occult:

within the earthly points of two cast anchors
the beginning and the end glow, incandescent.
Although I crawled as far as the stars,
I am scorched to the bone by nothingness.

The beginning
                        is a river, from a drop of water.
Life conceived only from life.
Which blazing, flits across
thousands of years, a sustained
voice, an undying torch’s likeness.
Like the liquid ghost-lights of nightmares.

The end
                        also breaks into nothingness.
Death washes away the shore:
not a voice, but a lack: a plain
of silence, shrieking of intervals.
In the hospital corridor, a worn,
bespattered iron bucket — and
regression, a wistful sinking down.
The stars are losing their accustomed order.

What kind of strength broke out of me
so that from nonexistence, I was made to shine?
From dark and empty space, finitude
receives me like a homeland.
Hissing, falling into iron dust,
marching across my entire life,
it pushes me, shoves me, tosses me again
into empty space, where I am received
by the bloody kerchief of threadbare dreams.

Other existence glimmers through the mottled flame.
From fulfilment, my melting decay.

The living to the living, the dead to the dead —
they say. Who transgresses this will grow dizzy and fall.
Will be woven into shadow by radiant darkness.

And yet still
                                    the pine cone
which is myself, which I would only like to see,
afterwards; once it has died,
how its scales will open.

---

Zsófia Balla (1949–) studied violin in Cluj and received a teaching diploma from the Academy of Music in 1972. Her first volume of verse, A dolgok emlékezete (The memory of things) was published in 1968. Balla worked at the Hungarian section of the Cluj radio station until it was closed in 1985 as part of the anti-minority policies of the Ceausescu regime. Between 1983 and 1989 she could not publish her work, nor was she even allowed to leave Romania between 1980 and 1990. In 1993, Balla moved to Hungary, where she has lived ever since. Balla has published seventeen volumes of poetry and nine works for the stage, and is the member of both the Széchenyi Academy of Letters and Arts and the Digital Literature Academy. She was awarded the Attila József Prize in 1996.

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.

---

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.

Subscribe to Read More