Tibor Tollas

They’ve Walled up Every Window . . .

(Translated by Watson Kirkconnell from the Magyar poem of Tibor Tollas)

(Free World!  To you in this verse our voices come: to you we call, we tens and hundreds of thousands of Hungarians who sojourn in the hell of prisons!  Our tongue falters too much in our dungeon and millions do not know what the poet says.  Foreign poets, our brothers! Translate us into the languages of your peoples, so that our message may reach you!  While in 1955, in Pest, the Communists were spouting about legality, in the Vác Prison  they sealed up the windows with sheet-metal, so as to take away even that much air and light.) 

Of life without, only this gleam was left,

A tiny patch of stars, a glimpse of sun.

In daily gloom, within dim walls bereft,

We watched the vent for this as day was done.

This too they stole, this streak of sunlight thin,

The’ve walled up every window tight with tin.

In memory’s eye, I mark the azure sea

At Naples, and beside the shining shore

Vesuvius waits and smokes.  Can you, like me,

See happy, sun-browned swimmers by the score?

We live in night like men who blind have been:

They’ve walled up every window tight with tin.

Our ten mouths gasping for the missing air,

Ten of us lie, in one close kennel pent,

As fish-gills on the bank might gasp despair.

To eat the food, which stinks of excrement,

Our stomachs lack the power to begin:

They’ve walled up every window tight with tin.

From the bright fragrance of the Alpine peaks

The west wind blows freshness of bouquets;

Of virtue to the soul that distance speaks,

And smiling summits swell the hymn of praise.

But phthisis grips my cell-mate, dark as sin,

They’ve walled up every window tight with tin.

For us no more the steamer’s whistle blows;

All maiden laughter from our sense is wiped;

No pleasure in our ears sonorous flows;

No summer plays an organ, myriad-piped.

Our cells are deaf, all sound is dead herein:

They’ve walled up every window tight with tin.

By Barcelona, in a garden fair,

The warm voice of a tawny woman croons;

The streets are pied with dances here and there;

A gay guitar gives dusk its tinkling tunes.

Our leaden days flow silent in chagrin:

They’ve walled up every window tight with tin.

We probe in darkness towards the velvet skies

As if within a coffin we were nailed,

We only touch our rags and agonize

Or, feel our hands by vermin-hosts assailed.

We once caressed the sunlight, like soft skin.

They’ve walled up every window tight with tin.

There is a ball in London; like a rose

A girl glides, in her silks, on floors that gleam;

In all the bloom of lustrous hair she glows,

Soft-mirrored in the vanished wainscot, like a dream.

The West is dancing.  Has it Magyar kin?

They’ve walled up every window tight with tin.

Our tongues recall the pleasant taste of Spring

Then swallow with a groan our morsel dank

Whose fecal horror chokes its entering

And turns our bellies sick, our reason blank;

Yet even this our famine forces in.

They’ve walled up every window tight with tin.

Sleep locks our hungered bodies in its spell

And there I sate a gourmet’s appetites

On all that Paris offers -- see as well,

Climbing above the city’s neon lights,

The Silent Ghost – but here no dawns begin:

They’ve walled up every window tight with tin.

The radios shout hoarsely of new deals,

Of freedom and of justice due to man,

But here my dungeoned body only feels

The million lashes of foul Moscow’s plan.

From Vác to far Peking, his slaves make din:

“Beware! Beware! Or through the entire world

They’ll wall up every window tight with tin.”