Questions at Night

. . . why all this beauty, jewel, graven marble? -Mihaly Babits, from "Question at Night"

Unless one knows the subtlety of both the languages involved, literary translations are notoriously difficult to judge. This is particularly true when one of the languages in question is Hungarian.

Linguistically, Hungary is a island unto itself. It is a country of only around 11,000,000 people (another 1,000,000 or so live in Romania, Slovakia, and the former Yugoslavia). It has a language that is unrelated to any of the others on the European continent, and only distantly related to Finnish. That doesn’t mean that Finns can speak to Hungarians, however, or vice versa.

What it does mean is that most Hungarian literature is not particularly well known outside of Hungary, since the language is very difficult to learn and few have taken the time or effort to do so. Of the Habsburgs, who ruled Hungary for several hundred years, only Queen Elizabeth, "Sisi" as she was fondly known, bothered to learn the Hungarian language, earning her the everlasting gratitude of the Hungarian people, who named one of the most famous bridges in Budapest after her.

How many of you have heard of the national poet of Hungary, Sandor Petofi, the great poet/martyr of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848? He disappeared and is assumed to have died at the Battle of Segesvar, only a few kilometres from our Partner Church village of Ujszekely in Romania. He wrote,

On your feet now, Hungary calls to you!
Now is the moment, nothing stalls you,
Shall we be slaves or men set free
That is the question, answer me!

The petals are falling and life is declining.
Come sit in my lap, my beloved, my own!
You, with your head, in my bosom repining,
Tomorrow perhaps will you mourn me alone?
Tell me the truth: should I die, will your sorrow
Extend to the day when new lovers prepare
Your heart for forsaking, insisting you borrow
Their name, and abandon the one we now share?

So, I have to take the word of my Hungarian-speaking friends when they tell me that such and such a literary work is among the greatest, or in the case of Mihaly Babits’ poem "Question at Night," the greatest in the Hungarian language. All I can hope is that the translator has managed to capture something of the spirit of the original language in his translation. All I can hope is that at least a few of the subtleties of one language and one culture have been rendered into another so that most, or even some, of the flavor of the original has not been lost or completely misconstrued.

I confess that I love the poem in question, but that I will never be able to judge much about the beauty of its use of the Hungarian language, though some of its musical quality is evident even to me when it is read aloud in the original by a native speaker.

In the case of "Question at Night," it has to be enough that I love the subject matter. It is the quintessential religious question, and it proves the truth of my old college English professor Carroll Terrell’s claim that "all great literature is religious":

and yet, in this delightful Paradise
the craven hearted question must arise:
why all this beauty, jewel, graven marble?

Babits’ poem wrings that question for all it’s worth:

oh, why the silk, the sea, the butterflies,
and why the evening’s velvet-silky marvel?
and why the flames, the sweet and sorry games,
the sea, where farmers never sow a grain?
and why the ebb and tide of swelling waters,
and why the clouds. . .
remembrances, the past in heavy chain,
the sun . . . ?
and why the moon, the lamps shoulder to shoulder
and Time, that endless ever-dripping drain?

The theologian will argue that it is a gift from God. The scientific reductionist will answer that it is in the genes, or in the electrical currents flowing in the brain. Neither answer really satisfies our hunger to know, nor penetrates the mystery of what is.

Babits seems to be pointing at the logical inconsistency of the theological argument in his closing lines, an echo of Isaiah’s lament in the Old Testament that "all flesh is grass, and all its beauty as the flower of the field: the grass withers, the flower fades, when the breath of the Lord blows upon it." Babits writes,

or take a blade of grass as paradigm:
why does it grow if it must wilt in time?
why does it wilt if it will grow again?

Why do we grow if we must age and die in time? Why do we age and die if the ultimate goal is our rebirth and resurrection? It makes no logical sense.

Hungarians, you should know, are notoriously melancholic folks. It’s a stereotype that seems to contain more than a kernal of truth. Hungary has the highest suicide rate of any European country. The most popular place and method of suicide in Budapest? Jumping into the Danube from the aforementioned Elizabeth bridge. There is a saying among Hungarians to the effect that Hungarians only really enjoy life by crying. I have checked this saying out with my Transylvanian Hungarian friend Denes, and he has verified it.

Perhaps it is because of the tragic history of the Hungarian people that they tend to look a bit on the dark side. After all, they have been a subject people of, in order of precedence, the Romans, the Turks, the Austrians, and, most recently, the Russians. During their over one thousand year history, they have never, until recently, been truly free. The democratic Hungarian revolution of 1848 was a disastrous failure, ending in the executions of most of its leaders, as was the anti-Communist uprising of 1956. A recent history of Hungary carries the ironic, and perhaps overly optimistic title, The Hungarians: A Thousand Years of Victory in Defeat.

There is another expression that I have learned since I started traveling to Hungary and Romania to visit with our Partner Church friends and trying to learn more about the history and culture of that fascinating region. It is the expression, "Hungarian by choice." Some of us who are not Hungarians by birth or ethnic background simply feel a strange compatibility with the Hungarian temperament. I suspect that, in my own case, it is that profound melancholia in the Hungarian character, which seems to permeate their literature, that attracts me, as well as a tendency I have noticed among my Hungarian friends to ask the most profound of questions. Such as, the "why" question. . . .

I have spoken to you before of "the burden of why," most recently, I think, after the terrible events of September 11, 2001. At the time I said that I had no very satisfying answer to that question, but that I was forced like you to remain humble in the face of the mystery of it. I said, in part,

The burden of why must be borne by each of us. Our religion demands that we seek an answer, even though we may never find an adequate one. Our religion demands that we do so in the spirit of truth-seeking.

I did say that those things help to lighten my load, just as being together in a community of faith helps to lessen my loneliness and isolation. The burden of why is lessened by the knowledge that I am not alone in bearing it, but that doesn’t make it go away. The question of "why" keeps me, too, awake at night.

Babits’ poem poses that question in all of its inscrutibility and poignancy. We shall never know the answer, at least not for sure. What we can say is that the beauty is real, and this is the truth that Babits manages to capture:

As twilight softly turns to sombre brown,
you see a velvet-silky eiderdown
spread slowly by an otherworldly nurse
to tuck in tight the sleepy universe
so caringly, that not a periwinkle
is blemished by as little as a wrinkle,
that butterflies remain perfectly painted,
their double wings so delicately decked
and not a single rose petal has fainted
wrapped in the shades that comfort and protect,
in sombre soft repose they meditate,
unconscious of the velvet-silky weight:
on nights like this, wherever you should roam,
or muse inside your melancholy home,
or in a tearoom, by the setting sun
watch as they light the gas lamps one by one,
or walk your dog, and wearied by the climb
halt as the lazy moon begins to wane,
or drive along a dusty country lane,
your coachman nodding off from time to time,
or sail upon the swell, as pale as parchment,
or sprawl along the bench of your compartment,
or amble through a foreign city square,
entranced by gazing idly at the glare
of street lamps stretching many-many miles
in accurately even double files,
or cross the Grand Canal, towards the Riva
where opal mirrors split the sunny flames,
to brood upon the blush of bygone fever,
remembering sweet and sorry games
of seasons past, which like those lamps of yore
loom up some time and then they disappear,
remembrance that will linger evermore,
remembrance that’s a burden, yet so dear;
then lower your remembrance-burdened head
to contemplate the marble floor you tread. . . .

Perhaps there are only answers, with a small "a," not the Answer, to the "craven-hearted question" or questions we ask in the dead of night.

. . . or take a blade of grass as paradigm:
why does it grow if it must wilt in time?
why does it wilt if it will grow again?

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock

To find out more about Mihály Babits or to read some of his poems, click here.