# Ballads of Outlaws

The first and most important group of new-style or 19th-century ballads still echoes the tone of 18th-century ballads in a number of ways. This is the cycle of the ballads of outlaws (betyárballada) (cf. also pp. 495–500). One of the main reasons for their widespread distribution and popularity was discovered early: the poor and oppressed people saw in the heroes of the outlaw ballads its own heroes, the defenders of the poor and the {540.} punishers of the lords. The people took pleasure in the outlaws’ show of courage, and all their sympathy belonged to the chained or hanged outlaw. These ballads already use a new poetic language and a new method of description.

Rózsa Sándor’s saddling up his Velvet horse,
Thirty-three gendarmes pursue his trail and course;
Rózsa Sándor didn’t take it for a joke,
Jumping on his horse named Velvet off he rode.
“Publican’s wife, good day give the Lord to you,
Have the mounted gendarmes been here, tell me true!”
“No, the mounted gendarmes were not here today,
Szeged betyárs only just have gone away.”
“Publican’s wife, pour out some wine in this cup,
Send your maid and as a look-out set her up!”
All at once the frightened maid comes scurrying:
“Nine gendarmes are coming this way hurrying!”
Rózsa Sándor didn’t take this for a joke,
Riding to the crown-land puszta out he broke.
Stumbling in a hole the horse did throw him down:
Rózsa Sándor was arrested lying down.
“All I ask you, corporal of gendarmerie,
Here my right arm, will you please my arm set free?”
But the corporal listened not to what he said:
All the nine let fly in his arm shots of lead.
Rózsa Sándor’s led by the constab’lary
Up the prison steps of the gendarmerie.
Town of Szeged, yellow*Yellow, a colour of the Habsburgs, was symbolic of Austrian oppression. city, dark yellow!
Rózsa Sándor’s locked up there, all brought down low.

Sándor Rózsa (1813–1878) was the best known Hungarian outlaw and there are ballads and songs about him throughout the entire linguistic territory. At the age of 23 he was already prisoner in the notorious prison of Szeged, from which he escaped; that escape and a whole string of other adventures are associated with his name. During the War of Independence of 1848–49, he formed a “free troop” that fought against the oppressors, thus further increasing his earlier popularity. After the war was lost, Rózsa and his mates continued their outlaw existence, taxing primarily the rich. He was captured twice and condemned to death both times, although there was very little evidence against him. His punishment in both cases was commuted to life imprisonment, and he lived out his life in prison.

In the outlaw ballad the epic-lyric tone once again returns. It sings about its hero not by means of dramatic condensation, but rather {541.} through realistic portrayal. At times this calm, realistic tone, telling the cruellest story, is truly astounding. We can say that it is indeed a novel voice, looser, more informal, not containing the sultry tension and suffocating density of the ballads of earlier periods. It is, by the way, precisely this liberated tone, this simple method of description of the Hungarian outlaw ballad that differentiates it from its Russian, Ukrainian relatives, from the cruel-toned Spanish robber ballads, or from the English Robin Hood ballads. Although outlaw ballads display connections with the murder ballads from this period that were sold as broadsheets, and other broadsheet ballads, the outlaw ballad is much more mature, more artistic than those and was better filtered through the sieve of oral tradition:

Where’s Péter supping, poor man so forsaken?
By a little greenwood he is toasting bacon.
Poor man Péter Barna stole and sold some horses,
Both the Roman daughters clothed them from these sources.
Poor man Péter Barna ’twixt gendarmes is walking
With the Roman daughters through the window gawking.
Poor man Péter Barna two gendarmes cross-question,
Mrs Roman’s daughters in the doorway listen.
“O you ill-famed lady, don’t you make them listen,
’Cause it is for you three I must go to prison.
Gentlemen of Kálló they are four and twenty,
Who is hauled afore them suffers more than plenty.
All the four and twenty torture me and question,
Any man they keep in learns a painful lesson.
‘Bring him to the gallows,’ one of them is saying,
But another thinks that ‘He is not past saving.’
And the twenty-fourth is entering my name in,
But the dame beside him is the one dictatin’.
O you ill-famed lady, don’t my name you utter,
’Tis alone for your sake all this I must suffer.”

This ballad probably originated in the first half of the 19th century. It describes without any romanticism the life of the lonely outlaw, who in most cases finally faces death.