VERSEVILLE
  • Home
  • About Us
    • Contact
    • Media Coverages
    • Copyright Notice
    • VerseVille Blog
  • Submissions
    • Poetry and Essays Guidelines
    • Book Review Guidelines
    • Research Series Guidelines
  • Masthead
  • Editions
    • 2011 Issues >
      • ISSUE-XIV November 2011
    • 2012 Issues >
      • ISSUE-XV March 2012
      • ISSUE-XVI July 2012
      • ISSUE-XVII November 2012
    • 2013 Issues >
      • ISSUE-XVIII April 2013
      • ISSUE XIX November 2013
    • 2014 Issues >
      • ISSUE XX May 2014
    • 2015 Issues >
      • ISSUE XXI February 2015
      • Contemporary Indian English Poetry ISSUE XXII November 2015
    • 2016 Issues >
      • ISSUE XXIII August 2016
      • Poetry From Ireland ISSUE XXIV December 2016
    • 2017 ISSUES >
      • ISSUE XXV August 2017
      • ISSUE XXVI December 2017
    • 2018 ISSUES >
      • ISSUE XXVII July 2018
      • ISSUE XXVIII November 2018
    • 2019 Issues >
      • ISSUE XXIX July 2019
    • 2020 ISSUES >
      • Issue XXX February 2020
      • ISSUE XXXI December 2020
  • Collaborations
    • Macedonian Collaboration
    • Collaboration with Dutch Foundation for Literature
  • Interviews
  • Prose on Poetry and Poets
    • 2010-2013 >
      • Sylvia Plath by Dr. Nidhi Mehta >
        • Chapter-1(Sylvia Plath)
        • Chapter-2(Sylvia Plath)
        • Chapter-3(Sylvia Plath)
        • Chapter-4(Sylvia Plath)
        • Chapter-5(Sylvia Plath)
        • Chapter-6(Sylvia Plath)
      • Prose Poems of Tagore by Dr. Bina Biswas >
        • Chapter-1(Rabindranath Tagore)
        • Chapter-2(Rabindranath Tagore)
        • Chapter-3(Rabindranath Tagore)
        • Chapter-4(Rabindranath Tagore)
        • Chapter-5(Rabindranath Tagore)
        • Chapter-6(Rabindranath Tagore)
        • Chapter-7(Rabindranath Tagore)
        • Chapter-8(Rabindranath Tagore)
        • Chapter-9(Rabindranath Tagore)
      • Kazi Nazrul Islam by Dr. Shamenaz Shaikh >
        • Chapter 1(Nazrul Islam)
        • Chapter 2(Nazrul Islam)
        • Chapter 3(Nazrul Islam)
      • Kabir's Poetry by Dr. Anshu Pandey >
        • Chapter 1(Kabir's Poetry)
        • Chapter 2(Kabir's Poetry)
        • Chapter 3(Kabir's Poetry)
      • My mind's not right by Dr. Vicky Gilpin >
        • Chapter- 1 Dr. Vicky Gilpin
        • Chapter-2 Dr. Vicky Gilpin
        • Chapter-3 Dr. Vicky Gilpin
        • Chapter-4 Dr. Vicky Gilpin
      • On Poetry & Poets by Abhay K.
      • Poetry of Kamla Das –A True Voice Of Bourgeoisie Women In India by Dr.Shikha Saxena
      • Identity Issues in the Poetry of Nissim Ezekiel by Dr.Arvind Nawale & Prashant Mothe*
      • Nissim Ezekiel’s Latter-Day Psalms: His Religious and Philosophical Speculations By Dr. Pallavi Srivastava
      • The Moping Owl : the Epitome of Melancholy by Zinia Mitra
      • Gary Soto’s Vision of Chicano Experiences: The Elements of San Joaquin and Human Nature by Paula Hayes
      • Sri Aurobindo: A Poet By Aju Mukhopadhyay
      • Wordsworthian Romanticism in the Poetry of Jayanta Mahapatra: Nature and the Reflective Capabilities of a Poetic Self by Paula Hayes
      • Reflective Journey of T.S. Eliot: From Philosophy to Poetry by Syed Ahmad Raza Abidi
      • North East Indian Poetry: ‘Peace’ in Violence by Ananya .S. Guha
    • 2014-2015 >
      • From The Hidden World of Poetry: Unravelling Celtic mythology in Contemporary Irish Poetry Adam Wyeth
      • Alchemy’s Drama: Conflict, Resolution and Poiesis in the Poetic Work of Art by Michelle Bitting
      • Amir Khushrau: The Musical Soul of India by Dr. Shamenaz
      • PUT YOUR HANDS ON ME: POETRY'S EROTIC ART by Elena Karina Byrne
      • Celtic and Urban Landscapes in Irish Poetry by Linda Ibbotson
      • Trickster at the African Crossroads and the Bridge to the Blues in America by Michelle Bitting
    • 2015-2016 >
      • Orogeny/Erogeny: The “nonsense” of language and the poetics of Ed Dorn T Thilleman
      • Erika Burkart: Fragments, Shards, and Visions by Marc Vincenz
      • English Women Poets and Indian politics
    • 2016-2017 >
      • Children’s Poetry in India- A Case Study of Adil Jussawalla and Ananya Guha by Shruti Sareen
      • Thirteen Thoughts on Poetry in the Digital Age by Mandy kAHN
    • 2017-2018 >
      • From Self-Portrait with Dogwood: A Route of Evanescence by Christopher Merrill
      • Impure Poetry by Tony Barnstone
      • On the Poets: Contributors in Context by Donald Gardner
      • Punching above its Weight: Dutch Poetry in English, a Selection, 2013-2017 by Jane Draycott
  • Print Editions

Poems by Gábor Lanczkor

(Translated by Rita Malhotra)

​
In Buda


Amrita Sher-Gil the Indo-Hungarian painter’s mother
says of her coming into the world:
we were living in Buda, in Szilágyi Dezső Square, below the Castle
where there’s that brick church with a single steeple.


Later, in the 20s Bartok also lived there,
in the same block of rented flats where Amrita was born.
It may have been around the time we came to India that he moved in.
But as to what he composed during that period


I don’t know and I’m not interested,
we lived in that house in a different era, before 1914.
We lived in so many places in Hungary in those times,
I distinctly remember we lived the age


and not our rooms. Icy winds from the frozen Danube on our windowpane,
seagulls above the stained ice, in the narrow streets the snow reached to our knees.
Amrita’s birth. Summer came. Autumn. Earlier the Spring.
The black outline of the bare tree branches on snow-covered Gellért Hill 


like fine root hairs in the soil.
The bedroom wall glittered in the sunlight reflected from the snow’s surface
Amrita was born at mid-day, and outside, from the 
pointed steeple of the Protestant brick church, the bell rang out.


Malcolm, Journalist


I clarified to Amrita that
she is still an intellectual virgin.
The day before yesterday we shared lunch in the Cecil.
By the end of lunch her mother appeared at our table,
an extraordinarily vulgar Hungarian Jewish woman.
They conversed in Hungarian.
They went shopping.
At quarter to seven I bathed,
put on my light grey suit,
a blue tie and a light shirt,
the one that Amrita liked so much.
She arrived at eight, in green sari woven in gold and red.
She spoke in one breath while taking off her heavy Tibetan jewels
and letting off her hair
under my fascinated male gaze.
It was like re-watching a mesmerizing performance of a great play 
to see her on that day.
Suddenly fatigued.
I coaxed her to return home 
so as not to anger her mother
she was sad.
I felt a cruel gentleness for her.
I sat as a model in her studio.
With her short, quiet breaths,
with her brutal concentration she watched me 
a thin line of perspiration
on her pale dark upper lip.
She liked her steak almost raw.
I escorted her home, then walked back,
past fragrant pines in the chill of the Simla air.
She came to see me off
we walked to and from on the station platform
near the  hill train on the narrow-gauge 
we conversed in French.
I waved at her from the window 
until she disappeared.
I knew I would never see her again.
Indeed, as I heard later,
she died mysteriously in 1941,
only twenty-eight years old.
I also learnt that her mother committed suicide.
Neither of these deaths surprised me.


Viktor


My tummy hurts badly,
it’s like the shooting pain of the first day of my menstruation,
it’s close to that scale, gripes, I would push but I lack the strength,
oh the pain yet to no fruition
why should I get pregnant all the time?


Why abort my child each time,
why can’t I keep menstruation at bay for a little while,
surely this one is yours Viktor
for you’ve been my only one this year long.


As dawn descended yester-morn before the procedure
and the washroom light I turned on
it felt as though the space was already invaded by light.
The two of us bled a deep red.




“Colour is My Domain”


Where the dark crumbled soil
of the bare forest
passes under
the trees with the contour-lining 
of drift-boulders,
 
in the thick forest of Vrindavan,
where riverside bushes 
are woven into a pastoral: from broken branches,
Amrita collects the torn hair of sheep.
 
Then finds a small grass-laden meadow
And restfully lies down as sleep embraces her.
She is awakened by the scream of a peacock.


Its patterned plumage spread out in a fan,
the bird stands before her.
With its bill it pulls the sari off her thighs.
Amri spreads her legs, screams
and gives birth to her only son – 
then she chokes and devours him.


Amrita Died
 
The inordinate use of turpentine
and the original underpainting
for the one-time mat effect of the light of colours,
manifest themselves
as the surface of the pictures begin
to darken and crackle rapidly.
 
After Amrita died,
her husband and father left the pictures
(except for the portrait depicting Viktor)
at the national gallery of Delhi
where they still find place
in their true painful glory.


As colour came to be my domain,
I truly believe,
that it is only me that can embrace
my colours,
only me, only, only me.



Picture
Gábor Lanczkor (1981) was studying in Budapest, and spent longer periods in Rome, Ljubljana and London. He is an award-winning author with twelve published books; novels, poetry volumes, children’s books and essays.  He is the guitarist of the band Médeia Fiai, and is involved in the musical project Anarchitecture. His selected poems in English were published under the title Sound Odyssey in 2016 (Poetrywala, Mumbai). 

​


Archives

Interviews
Issue XXII November 2015
Issue XXIII August 2016
Research Series on Sylvia Plath
Research Series on Tagore
International Translation Project

The Magazine

Editorial Board
Guest Editors
Collaboration with Stremež
Media Focus
Copyright Notice
Blog

Support

Poets

Contact
Poetry Submissions
Media
Terms of Use
Featured poets 2012
Featured poets 2013
Featured poets 2014
Featured poets 2015
Featured poets 2016

Vertical Divider
Connect with us
© COPYRIGHT 2008-20. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Picture
Associate Partner:- 'The Resurgence Poetry Prize'

World’s first major ecopoetry award.  With a first prize of £5,000 for the best single poem embracing ecological themes, the award ranks amongst the highest of any English language single poem competition. Second prize is £2,000 and third prize £1,000.

    Subscribe to our latest updates

    Get latest updates and issues mailed at your inbox
Submit

Picture

​VerseVille (formerly The Enchanting Verses Literary Review) © 2008-2020    ISSN 0974-3057 Published from India. 


Picture
Picture
Picture
Picture
  • Home
  • About Us
    • Contact
    • Media Coverages
    • Copyright Notice
    • VerseVille Blog
  • Submissions
    • Poetry and Essays Guidelines
    • Book Review Guidelines
    • Research Series Guidelines
  • Masthead
  • Editions
    • 2011 Issues >
      • ISSUE-XIV November 2011
    • 2012 Issues >
      • ISSUE-XV March 2012
      • ISSUE-XVI July 2012
      • ISSUE-XVII November 2012
    • 2013 Issues >
      • ISSUE-XVIII April 2013
      • ISSUE XIX November 2013
    • 2014 Issues >
      • ISSUE XX May 2014
    • 2015 Issues >
      • ISSUE XXI February 2015
      • Contemporary Indian English Poetry ISSUE XXII November 2015
    • 2016 Issues >
      • ISSUE XXIII August 2016
      • Poetry From Ireland ISSUE XXIV December 2016
    • 2017 ISSUES >
      • ISSUE XXV August 2017
      • ISSUE XXVI December 2017
    • 2018 ISSUES >
      • ISSUE XXVII July 2018
      • ISSUE XXVIII November 2018
    • 2019 Issues >
      • ISSUE XXIX July 2019
    • 2020 ISSUES >
      • Issue XXX February 2020
      • ISSUE XXXI December 2020
  • Collaborations
    • Macedonian Collaboration
    • Collaboration with Dutch Foundation for Literature
  • Interviews
  • Prose on Poetry and Poets
    • 2010-2013 >
      • Sylvia Plath by Dr. Nidhi Mehta >
        • Chapter-1(Sylvia Plath)
        • Chapter-2(Sylvia Plath)
        • Chapter-3(Sylvia Plath)
        • Chapter-4(Sylvia Plath)
        • Chapter-5(Sylvia Plath)
        • Chapter-6(Sylvia Plath)
      • Prose Poems of Tagore by Dr. Bina Biswas >
        • Chapter-1(Rabindranath Tagore)
        • Chapter-2(Rabindranath Tagore)
        • Chapter-3(Rabindranath Tagore)
        • Chapter-4(Rabindranath Tagore)
        • Chapter-5(Rabindranath Tagore)
        • Chapter-6(Rabindranath Tagore)
        • Chapter-7(Rabindranath Tagore)
        • Chapter-8(Rabindranath Tagore)
        • Chapter-9(Rabindranath Tagore)
      • Kazi Nazrul Islam by Dr. Shamenaz Shaikh >
        • Chapter 1(Nazrul Islam)
        • Chapter 2(Nazrul Islam)
        • Chapter 3(Nazrul Islam)
      • Kabir's Poetry by Dr. Anshu Pandey >
        • Chapter 1(Kabir's Poetry)
        • Chapter 2(Kabir's Poetry)
        • Chapter 3(Kabir's Poetry)
      • My mind's not right by Dr. Vicky Gilpin >
        • Chapter- 1 Dr. Vicky Gilpin
        • Chapter-2 Dr. Vicky Gilpin
        • Chapter-3 Dr. Vicky Gilpin
        • Chapter-4 Dr. Vicky Gilpin
      • On Poetry & Poets by Abhay K.
      • Poetry of Kamla Das –A True Voice Of Bourgeoisie Women In India by Dr.Shikha Saxena
      • Identity Issues in the Poetry of Nissim Ezekiel by Dr.Arvind Nawale & Prashant Mothe*
      • Nissim Ezekiel’s Latter-Day Psalms: His Religious and Philosophical Speculations By Dr. Pallavi Srivastava
      • The Moping Owl : the Epitome of Melancholy by Zinia Mitra
      • Gary Soto’s Vision of Chicano Experiences: The Elements of San Joaquin and Human Nature by Paula Hayes
      • Sri Aurobindo: A Poet By Aju Mukhopadhyay
      • Wordsworthian Romanticism in the Poetry of Jayanta Mahapatra: Nature and the Reflective Capabilities of a Poetic Self by Paula Hayes
      • Reflective Journey of T.S. Eliot: From Philosophy to Poetry by Syed Ahmad Raza Abidi
      • North East Indian Poetry: ‘Peace’ in Violence by Ananya .S. Guha
    • 2014-2015 >
      • From The Hidden World of Poetry: Unravelling Celtic mythology in Contemporary Irish Poetry Adam Wyeth
      • Alchemy’s Drama: Conflict, Resolution and Poiesis in the Poetic Work of Art by Michelle Bitting
      • Amir Khushrau: The Musical Soul of India by Dr. Shamenaz
      • PUT YOUR HANDS ON ME: POETRY'S EROTIC ART by Elena Karina Byrne
      • Celtic and Urban Landscapes in Irish Poetry by Linda Ibbotson
      • Trickster at the African Crossroads and the Bridge to the Blues in America by Michelle Bitting
    • 2015-2016 >
      • Orogeny/Erogeny: The “nonsense” of language and the poetics of Ed Dorn T Thilleman
      • Erika Burkart: Fragments, Shards, and Visions by Marc Vincenz
      • English Women Poets and Indian politics
    • 2016-2017 >
      • Children’s Poetry in India- A Case Study of Adil Jussawalla and Ananya Guha by Shruti Sareen
      • Thirteen Thoughts on Poetry in the Digital Age by Mandy kAHN
    • 2017-2018 >
      • From Self-Portrait with Dogwood: A Route of Evanescence by Christopher Merrill
      • Impure Poetry by Tony Barnstone
      • On the Poets: Contributors in Context by Donald Gardner
      • Punching above its Weight: Dutch Poetry in English, a Selection, 2013-2017 by Jane Draycott
  • Print Editions