.
It was a crime for me to be born. What pain I caused an unknown strange poor woman, my mother. I cannot conceive of how much pain it must have been for this woman to give birth, all my heart senses of it is what a seismograph picks up from an earthquake in Australia. I made my mother’s face more worn, I mangled her breasts, I was to the detriment of her belly and her whole Eve-like beauty. I truly do not recall that I asked to come into the world the way that I did. No, I did not choose this way and means of breaking and entering into life; that my being called to earth should happen that way was not at all to my taste. No matter, that was how it happened all the same, and no amount of air will wash off me the first of the cruel acts that I committed against a frail woman.
Never, oh never
I prepared myself not to look at anybody with an air of indifference, only ever smiling. I also prepared myself always to greet anyone I might see, familiar or not, and in foreign countries and on railway trains I would exchange a few words with every man, woman and child so that we might hear one another’s voices, and I would part from them for ever with a tear in my eyes, because we all die. I made up my mind that I would never complain about anything to anybody but would tell some acceptable lie if I had to talk about myself, and I also made up my mind that in company I would not express an opinion on any matters of reality, I would only unbutton my heart, so people would fall into a reverie from hearing me talk as from hearing music, and so that they would chortle in delight when I spoke and be beside themselves from surprise and enthusiastic and awaken from a hard night of life to an easy morning of dreams. And I counted on rapping on every window and wishing the hidden residents a good day. And I wanted to stuff live flowers in all my pockets, violets, lilies-of-the-valley and sweet-scented little marguerites, so as to be able to toss a flower at every stranger in the streets.
I did not do it.
-Translated by Tim Wilkinson
Excerpts from Ernő Szép: Bűneim, Budapest: Athenaeum, 1924
(HLO)
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