Search
Close this search box.

FUNERAL ORATION FOR THE FALLING LEAVES – HALOTTI BESZÉD A HULLÓ LEVELEKNEK

Author

  • Sándor Reményik

    SÁNDOR REMÉNYIK (Kolozsvár/Cluj-Napoca 1890–Kolozsvár/Cluj-Napoca 1941) was a Hungarian poet. After graduating from high school in Kolozsvár, he began studying to become a lawyer until an eye disease ended his aspirations. He continued his studies at the Royal Hungarian Franz Joseph University in Kolozsvár, but did not pursue a degree. From 1921 on he was the Editor-in-Chief of Pásztortűz, a significant journal of Transylvanian prose and poetry. His first collections of poetry Fagyöngyök [Mistletoes], Mindhalálig [Until Death] and Végvári versek [Végvári poems] were published between 1918 and 1921. He received the Baumgarten Award in 1937 and in 1941, and the Corvin Chain Award in 1940. His poems were translated into English, French, Croatian, German, Italian, Swedish and Czech.

    View all posts

HUNGARIAN POETS OF TRANSYLVANIA

A late 12th-century text known as the “Funeral Oration” (“Halotti beszéd”) is the first surviving complete work in (Old) Hungarian.1 Its opening is known to every schoolchild in Hungary: “My brethren, you see with your own eyes what we are: verily, we are dust and ashes.” Several 20th-century poets used this opening as a point of departure, among them the Transylvanian poet Sándor Reményik (1890–1941). Born in the Hungarian city of Kolozsvár, he wrote most of his works in the Romanian city of Cluj, died in Kolozsvár and lies buried in Cluj-Napoca. He performed this peregrination without ever leaving the city of his birth. With the post-World War I transfer of Transylvania from Hungary to Romania, its ethnic Hungarians went from being a dominant minority to being a subservient one; where the pre-WWI Hungarian policy of Magyarisation had suppressed Romanian culture, afterward the roles were reversed. It was in this atmosphere that Reményik became a leading Hungarian poet of Transylvania, concerned with preserving and propagating Hungarian culture. At first glance, his “Funeral Oration for the Falling Leaves” would seem to replace the grim dust and ashes of the original with a more sublime vision of death as a series of metamorphoses from one form of beauty into the next. Reményik, however, points to a crucial factor: such sublime metamorphosis is possible only in one’s native environment (he highlights this with jarringly unrhymed lines that contrast with the rest of the poem, in which he does not shy away even from rime riche). The poem becomes a coded rebuke to those Hungarian Transylvanians who, seeing no future for themselves in Romanian society, contemplated or indeed chose emigration.

Peter V. Czipott

 Do you behold, my brethren, what we are?
 Verily, scarlet and bronze and golden,
 Eternal, holy beauty is what we are.
 We cross death’s door, fall soundlessly:
 Our pomp is greater, verily,
 Than this world’s senseless pomp can be:
 Nothing at all can ever mar
 Our true and beautiful selves, our birthright;
 Clinging to the tree, we glow in sunlight,
 And when we leap to the waiting forest floor,
 Brother leaves enclose brother limb, as before.
 And there too we are at home, we are at ease.
 When we turn brittle, harden, freeze,
 Hoar frost glitters on us, ermine-white.
 After the scarlet comes the ermine-white.
 Verily, beautiful is what we are.
 Do you behold, my brethren, what we are?
 When we at last are one with Mother Earth
 We also will be as beautiful as the Earth.
 We’ll also be at home there in the Earth.
 My brethren, only one thing orphans us:
 To be outside our forest home
 Without a homeland, or a home,
 Being windswept to and fro
 Across the cobblestones of a cold, unfriendly city,
 Commingled with all sorts of litter.
 My brethren, just that one thing orphans us.
 Yet here at home we’re what we are:
 Verily, scarlet, bronze, and golden,
 Eternal, holy beauty is what we are.

Translated by Peter V. Czipott and John M. Ridland

Note:

1  For a reproduction of the page of the Pray Codex that preserves it and a trilingual (Old Hungarian, Modern Hungarian, and English) presentation of the complete text, see, for example, http://users. tpg.com.au/etr/oldhu/halotti.html.

Most recent

Newsletter signup

Like it ? Share it !

More
articles

AN INTERNMENT CAMP COMMANDER’S STRUGGLE

The Story of István VasdényeyPart II ‘The train departed a second time.’1The title of István Lengyel’s conversation with the poet Erzsi Szenes, an inmate of the Kistarcsacamp. See: István Lengyel,

Nation Building in Central Europe

On the Relationship between Religious and National Identity The purpose of this study is to outline the cooperation between Slovak, Czech, and Polish national movements and the Christian denominations that

Separation of Powers
and Sovereignty

The Question of External Executive Power The title István Bibó gave to his academic inaugural address on 16 January 1947 was ‘Separation of Powers, Then and Now’. 1István Bibó, Az

Religious Conflict in Poland

An Interim Report Even though Christianity is perhaps the most persecuted religion in the world, and the severity of the living conditions of oppressed Christians is getting worse by the