Gipsy Dowry

We know from various sources that Attila József’s poetry was essential to Lajos. When the two translators (Éva Gergely and Tamás Gergely) started to analyze Rafi’s poetry, only as readers, the influence of Attila József was obvious to them. So, it was relatively easy for them to cooperate with Ove Berglund, since Berglund’s first translation from Hungarian was also an Attila József volume, thus he knew what this was about, but the average Swedish reader had no idea…
In the first section of his poem Gipsy Dowry, Rafi takes a line directly from his great predecessor: „and washed out all the city’s filth” and writes: „she washed out the city’s filth”. The Hungarian reader does know that this was originally written by Attila József. The reader also accepts the missing word, because the essence is what’s important. Rafi Lajos’s line is about himself, but it incorporates the A. J. poem, and by bringing into the picture the mother of A. J., he identifies A.J.´s destiny with his own. But how to explain this to the Swedish reader?! One cannot add footnotes to every second line …
The result was that the line was quoted, but the explanation was skipped. Thus, he foreshadows that someone sometime had this life experience and put into verse already. Could this be the poet himself?

(Translation: Zsuzsanna Tódor Zsuzsanna, Gabriel Farkas)