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János Pilinszky: The Straight Labyrinth
What it will feel like to fly back
can be expressed with similes only,
such as an altar, a sanctuary,
shaking hands, coming back, embracing,
a festive board in the grass shadowed by trees,
where the first guest doesn’t outrank the last one,
what will it feel like in the end, what will
this rising fall with spread wings be like,
falling back into the blazing
common nest of the focus? – I don’t know,
and still, if at all there’s something I know,
I do know it, this burning-hot corridor,
this straight labyrinth, in which
more and more compact
and freer than ever is the fact that we are flying.
Translated by Katalin N. Ullrich
