On Wedding

A few years ago on Nesebar, an island of the Bulgarian coast, I saw the beginning of an open-air wedding feast. There stood the young couple on the tip of the island, while the music was playing, the guests were drinking, clinking glasses with the foreign tourists with their cameras around their neck. The ceremony was taking its course. But it took very long. I felt those two young people tying the knot were a mere pretext for the protracted revelry. They could only wait, standing there like two sculptures, watching the waves, the majestic drive of the sea, with a painful expression. I couldn't bear their motionlessness, and moved on. I took the sight with me, which started to conceive a poem in me. Back home, I couldn't go on after the first few lines. Later I audaciously thought I would invest the sight with symbolic power. I would write about the youth of all times, the young people who mean the future, write about the victory of new, more humane ideas, and how ossified, old-fashioned ideas can hinder this victory. And I also remembered my own youth from the early fifties, none too brilliant. So the poem shed the frame of the experience, and did not become a travelogue... what it has become instead, I'd like to believe, is a speech of struggle, one of universal validity, with living humanity as its concern. I considered adding a subtitle at the time of writing, but then I didn't. Now that I have admitted this, you can add this imaginary endnote to Wedding: I wrote this against decay and destruction, against all the powers that restrain, for youth.
(Nagy László, c. 1969)

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