New Ballads

The last group of ballads from the 19th century and the turn of the century already speak about the theme of capitalization. The village encounters the machine, and it appears in ballads as something unknown and frightening, the cause of tragedies. Ballads are known about the peasant girl’s fate in the factory, her misfortune, and these similarly reflect a fear of the machine:

Julcsa Farkas

(The girl who fell into the threshing machine)

Harvesters began to work at Beremend,

On the feed-plate Julcsa Farkas had to stand;

Julcsa Farkas to the feed-plate up she went;

She did tumble in the drum by accident.

Shouts the feeder high up on the thresher’s top,

“Hey, machinist, bring the engine to a stop!

Hey, machinist, bring the engine to a stop!

‘Cos the drum my lil’ sister swallowed up.”

Julcsa Farkas they did bundle on a cart,

Took her to dear Doctor King, in his backyard.

Doctor he just looked at her, and this he said:

“But for God’s grace she is now as good as dead.”

Floating wicks are lighted at the Farkas’s,

’Tis her folks are keeping watch, or so I guess.

Julcsa Farkas has around her flower wreaths,

By the bed her mother wakes and sore she grieves.

Every time Ol’ Farkas goes to see her there,

Droops he o’er his walnut table in despair.

“Lord, you have deprived me of my only child,

God, your frightful punishment near drives me wild!”

That machinist goes out to the cemet’ry,

And before the cross he falls down on his knee:

“Good my Lord, do take my soul to you above

Once you have deprived me of my only love!”

{546.} The steam-driven threshing machine was the first machine to appear in the Hungarian village and also to spread rapidly during the second half of the last century. Naturally, people not used to machinery often fell victim to the turning wheels, primarily those girls who fed the sheaves into the threshing machine. Ballads about them spread over the entire linguistic territory during the last decades of the 19th century, and in these the balladic manner of description can still be found.

The stories in the ballads of emerging capitalism show the bleakness, hopelessness of peasant fate; the songs of migration recall the tone of the ballads of wandering; in others, the evicted kills the auctioneer, and the religious stanzas that are linked to the ballad do not alleviate the barren, cruel mood. In these ballads, even if not always in artistically ripened forms, the image of the plundered, aimlessly lost, tortured peasantry is frequently conjured up.