József Attila

For My Birthday

Translated from the Hungarian by Jason Vincz

I just turned thirty-two and my
attachment to this pretty verse
is my
surprise,

a gift which I’ve surprised myself
in the corner of this coffee shop by
myself,
myself.

My thirty-two years have stolen away!
“I couldn’t keep them full on two hundred a month.”
But that’s
my homeland!

I could have been a teacher,
not this sort of pencil sharpener,
poor
boy,

but I haven’t been, because in Segedin
I was dissuaded by the university’s
strange
lord.

He opened with an admonition, quick and crude:
because of my poem “I Have No Father,”
he was taking
my home away.

He rattled his sabre at me,
citing my spirit,
its heat,
its infamy.

“You, as long as I have any say,
shall not teach anywhere in the hemisphere.”
He rambled on,
radiantly.

But if it pleases Mr. Horger
that our poet has not studied his grammar,
then he’s rather easily
pleased, isn’t he?

I myself will be teaching my entire people—
and not at the adjunct
level,
either.