# Broadsheet Ballads

The group of sheet or broadsheet ballads (ponyva ballada) which tell about so-called true events–love, infidelity, murder originating from jealous love, family revenge, murder by family members pursuing wealth, infanticide, and similar themes (see Ill. 269–272)–is probably not earlier than the 19th century. We can feel in these ballads that they have just come off the huckster’s spread-out canvas (hence the Hungarian name ponyva, meaning canvas), and that oral tradition has as yet barely started its work of altering and transforming them. The verse is frequently jolting, the construction of the theme reminds one of primitive wood engravings or the depictions of scenes by picture exhibitors at fairs, its moral lessons connected unnaturally to the conclusion of its story as if the story itself was felt to be lacking in strength to publicize its inner truth.

Náni Bereg
(The Murderous Unwed Mother)
Debrecen town has a greenwood, greenwood,
Yellow bird is keeper of that greenwood;
I was once the keeper of that forest,
Náni Bereg’s faithful lover honest.
Náni’s flowing ribbon, as I guesses,
Never will she weave it in her tresses.
“Put it, Náni, put it in your drawer there,
It may come in handy for your daughter.”
“Oh good Lord, it gives me woe and sadness
When I see my life become so hapless.
Bitterly I weep and burst out crying
Though my lips took as if they’re smiling.”
Náni Bereg to the greenwood rode she,
Made herself a bed under an oak tree.
{543.} I did shout and call to her and cry too:
“Get up, Náni, lest a body spy you!”
Náni rose, and putting feet in stirrup,
To a csárda went she at a gallop.
As she was the Arad Inn to enter,
Nine gendarmes did get her to surrender.
Náni bids the goodwife of the tapster:
“Four-score quarts o’wine and four score candles,
Let the gendarmes, all nine lads be drinkin’!”
As she is escorted by these fellows,
Náni’s mother watches through the windows.
“Don’t look on my shame and scandal, mother,
’Cause it is for you I have to suffer.”
“Come tell, Náni, is your heart not achin’,
For to have your new-born child forsaken?”
“Yea, it is, oh sure my heart is breakin’,
Till I die the chains I shall be shakin’.”
Brass straps do my door of jail cell fasten,
And my berth is whitewashed in the ‘mansion’.
I must thank the gracious noble county
For their kindness granting me such bounty.
Tisza river, Tisza flows so murky,
Swimming ’cross it naught avails a birdie.
Have you heard such a word under heaven
That to love my sweetheart ís forbidden?
In my mind with Kálmán I am drinkin’,
On my parents rarely am I thinkin’.
I forget all, scarce do I remember,
Captive to him I must be forever.

The ballad develops its themes in rather rigidly juxtaposed images, jolting along like the performance of historical songs, in which the conflicts of peasant class society, its tensions, and problems are already expressed, often describing through the story of one single family an entire society.

There appears before us in these stories a new method of reflecting society, the peasant picture of feudalism in its state of capitalization, and also an emerging new form. Although in Hungary the broadsheet ballad cannot look back to such a distant past as it does in the rest of Europe, we do know that János Arany, who was very much interested in folk poetry, saw in the middle of the last century picture-exhibiting singers whose primitive manner of performance inspired him to write his most artistically constructed ballads, and we do know that one of the well-known {544.} figures of Hungarian rural fairs was the huckster with his calendars and his poetic or prose stories (cf. Ills. 269–272).

However, the broadsheet ballad is instructive not only because through oral tradition it can take on an ever finer, ever more clear form (as in the case of the well-known ballad of Kláris Szücs), but also because in this area the increasingly class-conscious, creative, peasant talent can be observed, peasant poets striving to be individual artists and do so, although a long and difficult struggle still awaits them.

Kláris Szücs
Soon the clock will strike eight, evening is beginning,
Every maid gets ready for to go a-spinning.
Poor maid Kláris Szücs too she would like to go there,
But the sky above her gathered clouds all over.
Heaven’s overcast and dark with dismal warning,
Poor maid Kláris Szücs put herself in mourning;
Come to the spinning-room, scarcely was she seated,
When a lad came up and called her out a minute.
Says the eldest woman: “Who is she, I wonder?”
“She’s my sweetheart,” said he, giving her the answer.
Then he called her out and took her down the valley.
There she will be murdered in th’ “Italian gully”.
When he struck the first blow: up and gleamed the fokos,*A Hungarian folk weapon resembling a long-handled ax
When he struck the second: oh, it made her blood gush.
“Come ye girls, come ye girls, come my friends and help me,
Never shall I come more to the Sunday spinn’ry.”
Out they went, led her, put her on the ground dead,
All the blood was in her made the earth around red.
“Dear my friends, dear my friends, learn of me this lesson:
Shun all jealous young men, don’t get friendly with them.
Do not carry distaffs when you go a-spinning,
Taking ’em along there might be your undoing;
You shall be all wordless by the Monday morning,
In th’ ‘Italian gully’ you will meet your ruin...”
Write this on the headboard, on my mournful grave post...
Every virgin maid her chastity should guard most.

This is the area in which we can trace most easily the century-long process of peasant creativity. Although the figure of a shepherd who knew Latin and wrote poetry had already appeared in the correspondence of the literati during the first quarter of the 19th century (Ferenc Kazinczy and Ádám Pálóczi Horváth), notice has been taken of creative, {545.} peasant poetic talent only very late. Since that discovery, and by means of the broadsheet and oral tradition, we now know the identity of an increasing number of peasant poets who, by using the turn of oral tradition and by serving the demands of their audience, endeavoured to recount events in verse. From these versifiers who wrote not only in the manner of the historical song writers but who also frequently made use of Tinódi-like phrases, a long road leads to the time when from among these cumbrous versifiers poets were born, those true poets who sang about the deepest sorrows of the Hungarian people.