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REPORT FROM THE OTHER WORLD – POEM

Author

  • George Gömöri

    GEORGE GÖMÖRI (Budapest, 1934) hasbeen living in England since November 1956. After studies in Oxford, he taught at the University of California (Berkeley), and then did research at Harvard. From 1969 to 2001 he taught at the University of Cambridge. He published many books on Polish and Hungarian literature; also numerous books of poetry in Hungarian and several in English. He is a member of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences (Kraków). He was awarded the Janus Pannonius Prize for Translation in 2014. His recent publications include Steep Path, an anthology of modern Hungarian poetry translated with Clive Wilmer (Corvina, 2018) and Magyar „apostol” Angliában. Tanulmányok és versek Békássyról (Savaria, 2020).

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There is pushing and shoving now at the railed gates
of Non-Being – the young mass-murderers
are queuing up for their reward in heaven.
Because they too in the end were blown apart,
the question remains: can they be reassembled
by the demons of the Prophet disguised as angels
or will their bodies go into orbit
somewhere in Alpha Centauri as space-waste?
It soon transpires that the promised virgins exist
only in propaganda brochures, but in any case
what persists of them and in what form?
Impossible to tell what will happen to the victims –
which of them will be saved and which will have
instead of eternal life a bleak, dark, final rest.
One thing is certain: it won’t be only the drones
that before long reach these selfless champions of death
but the curses of those who through them have been driven
away from the burnt-out ruins of their homes.


Translated from the Hungarian by Clive Wilmer and the Author

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