A Hungarian friend shared poetry from her homeland on Thursday, which she has translated and continues to engage with in her off hours when not studying and soaking in new brain-stretched ideas. One in particular struck me, a beautiful slash through reality written in 1925 by Attila József, a poet who died at the age of 32. This is the translation of With a pure heart.

With a pure heart.

Without father without mother
without God or homeland either
without crib or coffin-cover
without kisses or a lover

for the third day – without fussing
I have eaten next to nothing.
My store of power are my years
I sell all my twenty years.

Perhaps, if no else will
the buyer will be the devil.
With a pure heart – that’s a job:
I may kill and I shall rob.

They’ll catch me, hang me high
in blessed earth I shall lie,
and poisonous grass will start
to grow on my beautiful heart.

Translated by Thomas Kabdebo

I include this as the body of my post because I want to embrace the essence of being human-as-scholar and scholar-as-must-be-human, not thinker-in-spite-of-pumping-heart-and-pulsing-caprices. It speaks of poverty, of useless youth in a time when youth was wasted and given no place to spend its sharpness, of what becomes of the starvation of the human flicker on a landscape all dark with turned-away eyes.

This realizes in me the answer to my occasional question as a lonely student: what more? I think the answer is less a concrete or fixed prospect but rather a negation of the alternative, that is, more than less might be. The study might isolate, might unhook from more vibrant, frequented spaces, but it is nonetheless a purpose, a proposal of mind. And this is something between the seller and the devil, yet.

This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published (or registered with the U.S. Copyright Office) before January 1, 1923.