Gravel and Reeds
Will nothing now ever break
the evening’s cast weight?
Will nothing now ever break
the evening’s cast weight?
I’m prisoner of a muted word,
a cry which can’t get out of my throat.
My breath is gravel and reeds.
Unknown spirits reside in my castle of words,
as there in the windswept world, where
no living heart may arrive.
Winding amid spinning desire,
giving birth to oneself, motherless, stuck
in the birth canal. But while from the darkness
wave breaks upon wave thick and grey,
stabbing beneath my ribs with every intake of breath,
at last I begin to see myself. There is no other hope
than for the despondent suffixes to
penetrate into the bones, and to attain
the wakeful nights within them: the body
lies there chilled on the operating table.
Gábor Schein, born in Budapest in 1969, teaches modern Hungarian literature at ELTE in Budapest. He is the author of ten books of poetry, five novels, and four children’s books. His work in English includes the novellas The Book of Mordechai and Lazarus, translated by Ottilie Mulzet and Adam Z. Levy (Seagull Books, 2017) and Autobiographies of an Angel, translated by Ottilie Mulzet (Yale University Press, 2022).
Ottilie Mulzet has translated the work of László Krasznahorkai, Szilárd Borbély, Gábor Schein, György Dragomán, László Földényi, and Edina Szvoren. She was awarded the National Book Award in Translated Literature in 2019 for her translation of Krasznahorkai’s Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming. She lives in Prague.
