For a long time I have had this on my mind: to create a cover of Platon Karataev’s “Tűz mellé” (“By the fire”), an untouchable song in a way, because if I’m not mistaken, they have never performed it live. For the recording (the fifth song on their Partért kiáltó album), the following people were part of the chorus: Gergely Balla, Péter Balla, András Bognár, Olivér Csepella, Boglárka Csonka, Zita Csordás, Sándor Czakó, Sebestyén Czakó-Kuraly, Szabolcs Czeglédi, Emőke Dobos, Dániel Gryllus, Gyöngyi Hegedűs, Henri Gonzalez, Bertalan Horváth, Viktória Horváthné Czakó, László Kollár-Klemencz, Dávid Konsiczky, Benjámin Lengyel, Soma Nóvé, László Sallai, Bálint Szabó, Benedek Szabó, Márton Szabó, Zsófia Székelyhidi, Levente Szűcs, Dorina Takács, H. Miklós Vecsei, and Attila Vidnyánszky Jr. There’s no way to come close to replicating that—not just the numbers, but the the individuals, the voices, all together, singing with such simplicity and fullness of soul.
Still, the thought kept coming back, and last week I started putting it together. A few tracks later, I realized something was taking hold, and I kept on going. At the end of it all, it still can’t compare to the original (and what it means to those who sang and played it), but it has a quality of its own. Not perfect, but surprising anyway. It brings something out of the song.
In an interview, Gergely Balla explains the song’s origin (I translated the quote below):
I was volunteering in a Buddhist monastery in Sri Lanka. It was then that I read the Tao Te Ching for the first time, so I felt strong impulses from several directions. I had an experience there, a dream, a profound and intense encounter. It was a thick night, dark, I was walking through a forest, and then I emerged into a clearing surrounded by trees of inconceivable size in human terms. Truly, the trees reached almost up to the sky. I arrived at a big clearing, and far away from me, in the middle of the clearing, a bonfire lit up these trees. As the fire projected onto the trees, it was as if they burned up to the sky, like a mythical torch, but they didn’t burn; rather, the firelight illuminated them. People were squatting around the fire, crouching next to the flame. Everyone held their palms close to the fire and then withdrew them. I also crouched there, stretched out my hand towards the fire, and sensed that the fire was all human knowledge, all that human consciousness can access and receive. As I moved my palms closer to the fire, this knowledge grew and grew in me. After a while, though, I realized that this knowledge was actually the knowledge of not knowing; the closer I got to knowing, the clearer my not-knowing was to me. This experience stirred me strongly: that everyone is sitting by the fire of knowledge, and as they approach, they feel on their palms the warmth of the knowledge of non-knowledge. That’s what made this song. I felt that many people should sing this, so we invited into the “Tűz mellé” choir those who mean a lot to us as creators and people, and with whom we feel we are crouching there together, next to the fire.
Here are the lyrics along with my approximate translation (taking some liberties on purpose, not for rhyme, except in the middle, but rather for cadence and emphasis):
| a fák lombja az égig ég a tűz mellé guggolt az éj a láng felé kinyújtott tenyér fényt tapint az éj ütőerén nézd, ahogy száll a sok pernyemadár száz elmúló izzó bogár nem tudok mást csak a nem-tudást a tűz mellé ősi kuporodást a fák lombja az égig ég a tűz mellé guggoltam én | up to the sky burn the leaves the night bent low and crouched by the fire stretching toward the flame, the palms feel light upon the pulse of night look how they fly the ashbirds on high a hundred insects glowing, passing by i know nothing else, just the not-knowing itself the ancient act of crouching by the fire up to the sky burn the leaves the one crouching by the fire was I |
Every word in this song is beautiful, but when I first started listening to the song, one word, “mellé,” was magical for me, because of the care with which the singers pronounce it. It still gives me the shivers. “Mellé” is untranslatable into English; it means “next to,” “by,” or “beside,” but it’s directional, so it expresses a movement towards being next to something or someone. In other words, the the acto of crouching brings the person beside the fire. Two different words for crouching are used in the song: “guggol” (the verb, which can be translated as “squat”), and the noun “kuporodás,” “crouching.” I translated both of these here as “crouching,” because “squatting” didn’t sound right. I sing the song in Hungarian; the translation is just meant for readers who don’t speak Hungarian.
And here is my cover of the song. (I also made it into a YouTube video—well, not really a video, just the music and a picture—but then deleted it, since I found the picture unnecessary.)
On another (related) subject: on Friday, Detti and I led Szim Salom’s Rosh Hashanah evening service, which in our tradition includes a Torah reading. Besides leading all the chanted and sung parts, I leyned the Akedah (Genesis 22:1-14, about Abraham and Isaac). Detti did a fantastic job with the spoken parts of the service, her commentary on the verses, and her overall presence. It went absolutely beautifully, and I got home around midnight. We have no first-day Rosh Hashanah services, just workshops and Tashlich (I love Tashlich, but for me it’s more solitary), and nothing at all on the second day, so I stayed home yesterday and rested, as I am doing today. Next week I lead both the Shabbat service (with Moses’s poem, “Haazinu,” in the Torah reading) and the Yom Kippur day service; in addition, starting this Wednesday, I will be going to Budapest daily for seven consecutive days—for services, concerts, and doctors’ appointments (it makes no sense to stay in Budapest overnight on any of those occasions, since I need to be back in Szolnok in the morning).
The subject of Rosh Hashanah is related because this beloved song is part of my New Year. Not only the meaning of the lyrics, not only the soaring beauty of the melody, but the act of putting this together, crouching beside the original song, and feeling the sound rise up in flame.
I added to this piece after posting it and changed the name format of the chorus members (given name first, family name second) for the sake of consistency.
Take Away the Takeaway 
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