Slow Italian rivers
Dark green with weeds
Verona’s opal glassblue water
Tumbling over stones
Lake Como that swallowed into itself
the great black mountains
not much further off
the mirror of its leafier companion
sandy rippled shores without secrets
and the lagoon-like sea
at night the sideways-scamper
of white weasel-backed waves
Sweet-tasting Balaton
wild mountain streams white and green
a tufa stream
washing the earth to a shining beard
the silky green-brown Danube
and how many tiled pools
how many shores keep and
construe my face my gaze
how many kilometres have I swum
that I might come to rest

 

 

 

Mónika Mesterházi is a poet, essayist, literary translator. She graduated from the ELTE Hungarian-English Faculty of Humanities in 1990. In 2002, she received her PhD in contemporary Northern Irish poetry. The first volumes of her poems, Visszahagyó táblák were published by the Cserépfalvi Publishing House in 1992, and her second volume of poems Hol nem volt  in 1995. In 1997 she participated in the translation and editing of Selected Verses of Irish Poet Seamus Heaney. Her third volume of poems, Nem hittem volna was published in 1999 and her fourth book Sors bona was published by Osiris in 2007. She works as a freelance translator since 1997; since 2006 she has been a member of the board of the Association of Hungarian Translators.
Important translations: Katherine Mansfield: Logs, letters, Novels by Alice Munro, Novels by A.L. Kennedy, Lawrence Norfolk, Joseph O'Connor and others.

Anna Bentley was born and educated in Britain. She studied English Language and Literature at Edinburgh University, before training to be a secondary school teacher of English at Oxford. During that year she met her Hungarian husband and, consequently, the Hungarian language. After teaching English in a secondary school in the north of England, she taught English as a foreign language in New York City and Kecskemét before moving to Budapest where she has lived since 2000. Her interest in translating Hungarian literature began in 2014, when she could not find an English translation of any of István Fekete’s works to share with family in Britain. Her translation of Ervin Lázár's children's classic Arnica, the Duck Princess was published by Pushkin Children's Press in February this year. Anna has also translated Women's Literary Tradition and Twentieth-Century Hungarian Women Writers, a book about five forgotten (or misrepresented) Hungarian women writers by Anna Menyhért, which will be published by Brill in December.  A short story in Anna's translation from Gabi Csutak's award-winning collection Csendélet sárkányyal (Still Life with a Dragon) appeared in the online journal Asymptote's blog in April this year. She is currently working on Zoltán Halasi's book Út az üres éghez (The Road to the Empty Sky).

HLO HU