This Translation Tuesday, we present a quiet and devastating tale of abuse, escape and dreaming, told with care and gentle detail by Ahmed Amran. Yemeni-born but a naturalized citizen of Hungary, Amran writes in Hungarian and here draws inspiration from its vast and “dazzling” plains—the story of Earth Mounds hinges on his protagonist’s first glimpse of a steppeland that stretches to the horizon. Its very endlessness holds the promise of a future; he need only grab it.
We were still kids, all of us short. While of our age group, he was smaller in bearing. He barely spoke. He would rather observe our games than join in. He was fearful, almost terrified, of ending up in the sort of squabble that would spill over into a fight. Yet once in a fight, he slowly turned into a wounded lion. Then he would strike hard, unstoppably, sobbing as he fought, and when he sensed his victory, he would pull his most grievous punches. Then he would break into a run. Later we found out his refuge. On the edge of the village, on the other side of the fearsome graveyard, several low earth mounds lay. He would run there, climb up them, and roll down.
I remember when we noticed his growth spurt. Under his pitch-dark hair, the brown of his forehead had darkened. We hardly ever saw him on the village’s narrow streets. Instead, he would turn up in the deep, steep valleys engirdling the village. Later we heard about how his stepmother used to torment him. She would accuse him of stealing; almost every day she would find some excuse to kick him out of his father’s house. His father, to stay on his young wife’s good side, berated and beat his son. The boy had no strength left to cry. Out of sheer exhaustion he would often fall asleep during a beating. But sometimes he found refuge in the house of a hobbling old woman, where he could rest his worn body.
From the proximity of our old house we saw and heard them every evening. As if he enjoyed it, his father would raise his voice while throwing stones after his fleeing son. His young wife, like a hawk swooping down, would snatch up any of her little children who were playing nearby. A sly smile, visible only to those familiar with her wicked nature, etched itself in the corners of her mouth.
Over time, the boy—seeing his father about to beat him—turned his back on his parents’ house and headed off somewhere, shrouded by darkness. We didn’t know exactly where the night paths carried him. He had somehow become braver than us. Neither dogs nor the wild scared him, nor was he even ruffled by the monsters hiding in the valleys, who gobble up all the night wanderers. Once, setting out on his night journey, he passed by our door. My mother called him quietly by name. For a moment he stopped still and lifted his eyes to meet mine. Whether it was a look of envy or condescension, I don’t know. My mother pressed a small bundle into my hands. I ran after him with all my might and caught up with him somewhere on the village’s edge. Panting, my lungs in my throat, I stood before him, wordless and helpless. He grabbed the bundle from my hands and headed off into the pathless, dark night.
His marks of manhood were showing more and more. He started to work as a day laborer. His arms could outdo a field plow when it came to turning the earth. He gave up his sleep to work as a night guard. It was even rumored that he was dreaming of marriage. His father’s voice suddenly reached our ears again. After Friday prayers, he demanded that his son’s wages be handed over to him and that his son be sent home. Apparently the village residents advised the boy to accept his father’s invitation. Having assembled some gifts, he returned home and ate out of the common plate. A few days later they kicked him out again. At one point the hobbling old woman saw him walking erratically toward the highway behind the distant mountains. She asked him, “Where are you going?” The boy didn’t turn around; he just said, “I’m following the sun.”
He reached the top of the western mountain. He wiped the sweat from his brown forehead. He looked behind him, took a last glimpse of the village, the graveyard, the earth mounds. He said goodbye to his childhood, with a tender thought of visiting one day. He would bring his whole household, he would show his children his mother’s grave, and every Friday they would murmur a prayer for her soul. He turned around. He crossed the wide plain, taking in the unfamiliar terrain. Across from him, on the other side of the highway, the sun was dressed in crimson orange, already preparing to set. From the edge of the plateau he saw the vehicles that rarely passed through and kicked up a great dust cloud when they did. He knew that these cars were not about to stop for his sake. They were like oxen at plowing-time: once they started moving, they would only stop at the end of the furrow, and there they would turn around. But he knew the solution: the same as when he used to catch fleeing donkeys that had gone wild. He steeled himself and formed a plan. When he saw an uncovered cargo truck emerge far away, he would choose the right moment, according to the distance, and start running as fast as he could, as he used to do with the earth mounds, just not upwards this time, but down. Eventually he would reach such a velocity that he would jump onto the truck, or cling to its side, as if to an escaping donkey. He felt a childlike joy and a whiff of freedom in the air. He was not going to worry about where the vehicle was coming from, north or south. It didn’t matter. It was coming from somewhere and would take him somewhere. That was what counted. Once it came to a stop, there would be farmsteads everywhere. Surely there would be people who would accept him without prejudice or a stepmother. He wanted nothing else, just to live in respect and dignity.
A long time later, I stand here at the village’s edge. I see how the earth mounds almost shroud the grave. Underneath it, the body, broken by the truck’s wheels. Sloping down towards him: the earth mounds that opened their bosom to him so that he could find childhood happiness and the infinite quiet of death.
Translated from the Hungarian by Diana Senechal
Ahmed Amran, born in 1966 in Dhamar, Yemen, came to Hungary in 1987 on a national scholarship upon completing secondary school in Saudi Arabia. In 1992 he graduated from Miskolc University as a geophysicist engineer; after obtaining his doctorate there, he began working at MOL Nyrt, where he continues to this day, currently as an exploration project manager. In 2003 he became a Hungarian citizen; he lives in Szolnok.
Drawn to literature since childhood, he began writing in Hungarian in 2015; his stories have appeared in many distinguished Hungarian journals. His first two Hungarian-language story collections, Az utolsó ebéd (The Last Supper) and A lélek gőze (Steam of the Soul), were published by Fekete Sas Kiadó in 2017 and 2019. An Arabic version of A lélek gőze, translated by the author, appeared in 2022; an English translation is in progress. In 2023 he was named Hungary’s Knight of Universal Culture.
Diana Senechal is the 2011 winner of the Hiett Prize in the Humanities and the author of two books of nonfiction, Republic of Noise (2012) and Mind over Memes (2018), as well as numerous poems, stories, essays, and translations. Her translations of the poetry of Tomas Venclova are featured in two books, Winter Dialogue (1997) and The Junction (2008); her translation of Gyula Jenei’s poetry collection Mindig más (Always Different: Poems of Memory) was published in 2022 by Deep Vellum. A member of the council of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers (ALSCW), in October 2022 she led a double-session seminar on “Setting Poetry to Music” at the ALSCW conference at Yale. Since 2017 she has been living and teaching in Szolnok, Hungary.
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Read more from Translation Tuesdays on the Asymptote blog:
Translation Tuesday: “Zinc” by Róger Lindo
Translation Tuesday: “Summer” by Cvetka Lipuš
Translation Tuesday: “23 Cents” by Appadurai Muttulingam