Fraternity-Testvériség, 1952 (30. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1952-12-01 / 12. szám
8 TESTVÉRISÉG The event I tell oi happened not in Pest: Romance is there a thing at which men scoff. The members of our noble company Mounted the cart, and then they started off. They went upon a cart, an old ox-cart; Two pairs of bullocks were their team bizarre. Drawing the cart along the highway white, The four great oxen plodded on afar. The night was luminous, the moon was high; Pale in the midst of clouds it wandered there As when a widow in a cemetery Seeks for her husband s grave in wan despair. The wind—a merchant from the nearby fields,— Had bought their sweetest scent for his bazaar. Drawing the cart along the highway white, The four great oxen plodded on afar. I, too, was one of that glad company; By little Erzsébet I sat that night. While all the other members of our band Chatted aloud and sang in their delight. I dreamed in silence-then said suddenly To my sweet neighbor: “Shall we choose a star?” Drawing the cart along the highway white, The four great oxen plodded on afar. “If we should choose a star,” I whispered on To little Erzsébet, “the star some day, If destiny should separate us two, Will serve to lead us back, where’er we stray, To a remembrance of the happiest time.” And she was willing, and we chose a star. Drawing the cart along the highway white, The four great oxen plodded on afar. The reliable rhythmic structure, which characterizes his lyrical, political and social poetry, is also observable in his epic poetry. His epic poems hold one’s attention because of their imaginative wealth and ingenious treatment. “Bolond Istók (Silly Steve) relates the experiences of a young man whom the world judged to be a fool, who, however, proved to be very sane indeed. He found shelter in the home of an old couple. His meeting their lovely granddaughter, their love, marriage, and his ability to reorganize and manage a farm, is told with pleasing narrative inventiveness. The poem, optimistic in its theme and its resolution, has the charm of folk-tales; it voices Petőfi’s healthy spirit. János Arany, too, wrote a poem based on the subject, but his poem remained a fragment. “Szécsi Mária” (Mária Szécsi), a poetic narrative, was inspired by the heroism of a Hungarian noblewoman; István Gyöngyösi, a seventeenth century poet, was the first to write of her. The theme was used by János Arany and Mihály Tompa in epic poems, and others used it in plays and stories. “Az apostol” (The apostle) expressed Petőfi’s revolutionary spirit. “Szerelem átka” (The curse of love), “Tündérálom” (Fairy-tale dream), and his historical epics, “A király esküje” (The king’s vow), “Kun László krónikája” (The chronicle of Ladislas Kun), “Kont és társai” (Kont and his brothers- in-arms), are valuable documents of Petőfi’s epic qualities. Petőfi was conscious of his vatic mission. “Dalaim” (My songs), “Jövendölés” (Prophecy), and other poems clearly show to what extent he believed in his poetic fate. “Az őrült” (The madman) is probably his most rhapsodic work. This poem, as if written in a trance, is a mingling of lyric and narrative elements; it seems different from his other works. “Az ember” (Man) reveals his philosophical temperament; “Homer és Osszián” (Homer and Ossian) is a beautiful ode, inspired by Greek and Celtic poetic history. But of all his epic poems the longest, “János Vitéz” (Childe John), is the most delightful and the most powerful. It consists of twenty-seven cantos, written in the metrical structure (rhyming lines) of Count Miklós Zrinyi, the seventeenth century Hungarian epic poet, whom János Arany compared with Torquato Tasso. “János Vitéz” is a charming and lusty tale of Kukoricza Jancsi (Johnny Corncob), a sheepherder, and his love for Iluska (Helen), “a sweet, blonde, blue-eyed maiden.” The farmér fired Jancsi because he was careless tending the herd. In his sadness he roams afar over hill and dale, and in his wanderings he visits France, Italy and the Land of the Tartars, Poland and India. The poet disregards geographical authenticity, which is frequently the empirical logic of fairy tales. Wherever Jancsi finds himself, he never stops thinking of Iluska. Then the king rewards him with a sack full of gold and his blessings. On the wings of a griffon and upon the clouds he flies home, but arrives too late, as Iluska, abused by her stepmother, is dead. He leaves home again, wanders into the Land of the Giants, where he slays their king and becomes their leader. He then wanders into the Land of Darkness, where dwell the witches. With his magic flute he summons the giants who kill all the witches, including Uuska’s stepmother. After this he reaches Fairyland, the land of “eternal spring”. Passing a lake he tosses into its waters a rose he had plucked from Iluska’s grave. The lake is “the water of life”. The rose becomes Iluska. The fairies elect him their ruler, and Jancsi and Iluska live happily ever after. Even this brief synopsis of “János Vitéz” should indicate how richly Petőfi fused his own imagination with folk-lore. In the twentieth century a libretto was made of this epic by Károly Bakonyi and Jenő Heltai, and set to music by Pongrác Kacsóh; as an “operetta” it was played innumerable times in Budapest and in the provinces. In “János Vitéz” Petőfi’s idealistic purport is transparent. The correlation of animate and inanimate things, the real, the plausible, the possible and the impossible, and faith in ultimate justice typify Hungarian folk-tales. Petőfi was true to this pattern. (
