‘A History of Wickedness’ is a cycle in my latest poetry collection, The Movement of the Moray Eel. It is made up of fragmentary texts dealing with different kinds of human cruelty set in unnamed historical periods, but mostly in medieval times. In these poems, citations from art history essays, passages of books and studies are mixed with my own sentences. The poems deal with aristocratic oppression, atrocities committed by colonialists, simple everyday executions, or the torture of saints. I wondered what all these texts had in common, and I realised that I was fascinated by human evil. That is what disturbs me the most.

The other question that intrigues me is a purely poetic one: how to write a poem that is unpredictable and astonishing for me and perhaps for the reader as well. How can I surprise myself? I've been inspired by studies in philosophy and art theory, and this is now articulated even more in another cycle, where I try to play the language of essays and poetry into one another. The poems in this cycle are gathered under the title ‘Pendulum Motion.’  

The basic idea, which I read in a paper, is the theory of the double pendulum in physics: basically two rods attached to each other, rotating freely around a fixed centre and around each other. Thus the motion system is "chaotic." This does not mean it is random, because if we could calculate all the variables, we would know which way the double pendulum would swing, but because the equation is too complicated, it looks random. 

The paper compares this to the movement of a predator and prey. It says that the prey is the extension of the predator's movement, and they're both interdependent. That's why my book's title is The Movement of The Moray Eel. However, this movement can relate to many things: the struggle between the poet and the poem, or between the poem and the reader, as they chase each other and constantly try to evade each other. Then there is the unpredictable zigzagging between the language of poetry and of the studies mentioned above. And finally the relationship between the signifier and the signified: the poetic image, the metaphor, that is, how the meaning escapes the signifier as one absorbs the other. The first cycle in the book is made up of an alternation of these two types of poems. I had an absolutely wonderful and exciting time working on the English translations with Anna Bentley.

Péter Závada



A History of Wickedness / The Tour

 

The majolica swan is a letdown. Though it’s true

that in the story, a bird tows the hero’s boat to shore,

in the wake of two lost wars this is not perhaps

the most effective myth to encourage

the flowering of a dominion’s symbols.

 

The creature selected is of key importance: it may be

embroidered in gold on red silk, onto chair covers and bedspreads;

centuries later its impact may be decisive, as much on

the takings of cheese shops and dairy-farms

as on ski-lift traffic in the Southern Alps.

 

The tour begins here. The website did not limit

the time spent in each room, but here we’re being

fobbed off with an audio-guide. The bed’s strangling tendrils,

the tapestry’s oppressive detail, you can almost feel

the gothic getting under our skin.

 

If we could choose between awe and slaughter,

we ought to banish war to paintings.

If, though, it’s between our mother and the woods,

whichever has less sympathy should be the one to raise us.

 

This is the Singers’ Hall, behind it the kitchen

complete with built-in stove and a special basin

for fish. Let’s skip the gift-shop, and exit

the ill-conceived symbol before sundown.

 

 

 

Pendulum Motion / The Octopus as a Word Infiltrates the Language as Ocean…

 

The octopus as a word infiltrates the language as ocean,

filling the space left by the outflowing water; language claims

the octopus, opening up a new market for it in its symbolic

system. We all know the ocean is a precondition

for the octopus, the incompressibility of water for the muscled

swimming bag; the animal’s backwards pumping

pushes against the medium’s resistance. It was made how it is

by environmental factors, much like the way leather gloves are stretched

by long use or the astute shoemaker’s business strategy formed

by the conditions of the footwear market. When all’s told

the octopus, too, is a commodity: Nature’s mischievous answer

to incompressible water within the ocean’s complex trading of goods.

But we mustn’t consider one variable alone; if, let’s say,

the price goes up, demand will drop. We must keep track of

the complex interplay of numerous factors, the frenzied dance

of graphs and equations, which resembles most closely the flailing

tentacles of an octopus. The immutability of the medium therefore

requires constant adaptation, much like when the living glockenspiel

of the octopus embryo’s protoplasm attunes itself to the waves.

 

 

©Anna Bentley 2022 for the English translation. You can read these poems and more by Péter Závada in Anna Bentley's translation at Panodyssey.

 

 

Péter Závada is a poet, playwright, and literary translator from Budapest. He has published five poetry collections at Libri / Jelenkor Publishing, and his plays are staged in major Hungarian theaters. In 2017 his fourth book, Wreck in Lee, won the Horváth Péter Literary Scholarship for best Hungarian poetry collection published under the age of 35. In 2018 for his second play, Je suis Amphitryon, he received the Szép Ernő Prize for playwrights. His 2022 poetry volume, Caring, was nominated for the Libri-prize among the 10 best books of the year. Internationally, his poems have appeared in English translation in The White Review and Cordite Poetry Review, as well as Modern Poetry in Translation. His most recent collection is The Movement of the Moray Eel (Jelenkor, 2023).

Anna Bentley was born and educated in Britain. She taught English before moving to Budapest with her Hungarian husband, where she has lived since 2000 and has brought up two bilingual children. She completed the Hungarian Balassi Institute’s Literary Translation Programme in 2018. Since her interest in translating Hungarian literature began in 2014 she has published a range of Hungarian writing, including Ervin Lázár's children's classic Arnica, the Duck Princess (Pushkin Children’s Press, 2019), Anna Menyhért’s Women's Literary Tradition and Twentieth-Century Hungarian Writers (Brill, 2020) an inclusive collection of rewritten fairy tales, A Fairytale for Everyone (Harper Collins, 2022), and István Orosz’s short story collection The Extra Horn (Typotex, 2023). Anna’s poetry translations have appeared on Hungarian Literature Online and Panodyssey and in Continental Magazine.


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