In a Bucolic Land

                                                  […] Because speech, to us,
is a defense against death. But he who can no longer speak,
what would he say? Or what could we, here,
say to him—here, where the urn lends merely
its form to the ashes. […] 

Shadowing everything in this final collection by the eminent Hungarian poet Szilárd Borbély (1963–2014) is the central trauma of Borbély’s life, the murder of his mother during a brutal home invasion and the breakdown of his father, which led to Borbély’s own posttraumatic depression and—years later—suicide. If Borbély himself could not defend against death, the idyllic, philosophically minded poetry of In a Bucolic Land, translated lucidly by Ottilie Mulzet, lends enduring form to the ashes of affliction.

Because “[a]ll things from the end / speak to us of the helplessness of the beginning,” Borbély recounts “the smothered life” of his childhood in a remote village, where both Communism and Christianity nominally supplant pagan traditions, such as small children being held over a heifer as a “good-luck ritual.” The gods are still present in the corrupt officials who fire Borbély’s father for failing to secure machinery in a flood, and in “the cold eye” of the Graeae, who gaze eternally upon the wound that “blossomed” on his mother’s “beautiful skull.” Cruelty—boys almost hanging another boy, a puppy being painfully euthanized—coexists with the exquisite specificities of peasant life: painting houses “Vienna-blue,” pinching horseflies from under a grateful cow’s eye, “the warm blood dripping onto my palm.”

Borbély’s spectrally beautiful poems give perpetual shape to the tenuousness of his parents’ lives—“I kissed your hand for the last time / and I asked you to forgive me, that I could not do more.”—and to his own attempts to stave off meaninglessness:

Meaning, lifeless and moving toward
the beyond of language, finally becomes
a mere text. And it remains only here.