Rain in Skopje by Anna Terék

In Macedonia I hardly pay / attention to anything / but myself, / it’s strange how my mother / just keeps laughing, / Dad’s shoulders are so wide / he hides the sun / from us. – Anna Terék's poem Rain in Skopje translated by Kristen Herbert.

10 March 2021

Rain in Skopje 

by Anna Terék

Translated by Kristen Herbert

Have you ever been to Macedonia?
That’s where the sun shines, just like this.
The city became yellow from the dry
gnashing heat.

That’s where Dad worked,
in yellow Macedonia.
We went down there in the summer,
I remember how I used to curl up
inside the searing hot train car,
and for twenty-three hours,
we’d sit
my skin sticking ceaselessly
to the plastic leather seats.

Dad waits for us in Skopje
with a Greek driver. We all laugh,
the summer squeezing our shoulders,
the bits of dust couldn’t cover
my mother,
Dad manages all the bags,
we stand and we all just laugh,
then the rain pours down on our heads.

Dad’s cigarette butts soak
in the ashtray next to me.
I look up at the rooftops, the white sky
and the raindrops pouring out of it,
it doesn’t stop for days,
soaks the horse
tied to the lamppost
whose head hangs, then
you just wait
for the water
to mix into mud.

In Macedonia I hardly pay
attention to anything
but myself,
it’s strange how my mother
just keeps laughing,
Dad’s shoulders are so wide
he hides the sun
from us.

And I remember
how my father stood in Skopje,
facing our train car
at the station.
Behind us gypsies
play their trumpets,
and my father laughs sadly,
he says he’d give anything, if only
we’d stay and bother him still.
My mom giggles like a little girl,
and the conductor stares at us,
it’s good my father doesn’t notice
my sister and I are blushing.

He waves mournfully,
and all of Macedonia turns black.
My dad seemed so big and strong
there in Skopje’s station,
I thought he’d protect us
from anything, I shouldn’t fear,
but he didn’t
protect us, sir,
mostly from
himself.

And I sat silently until Belgrade,
my face sweaty
under my glasses,
and I would have liked to sleep
until I could hide again
behind my father’s wide shoulders.

Anna Terék / Photo: Gábor ValuskaAnna Terék is the author of five collections of poetry and drama, including Danube Street (Duna utca) Vajdaság Feast and Dead Women (Hallott nők), which received the Géza Csáth and János Sziveri Prizes. Her work has been translated into English, Spanish, Turkish, Croatian, German and Polish, among other languages. Her most recent collection, Back on the Sun (Háttal a napnak), was awarded the Milán Füst award last December. Kristen Herbert asks her about her process writing Back on the Sun.

Kristen Herbert moved from Chicago to rural Hungary in 2016 as an English teacher, after which she moved to Budapest and studied literary translation at the Balassi Institute. Her translations have appeared in Asymptote Blog Translation Tuesdays, Waxwing Journal, and Columbia Journal Online. Her original fiction can be found in Cleaver Magazine and Panel Magazine.

HLO HU

Bettina Simon: Four Poems by Bettina Simon / Translator's Note by Kristen Herbert

Bettina Simon: Four Poems

VISIT TO THE HOME

LETTER TO MY PSYCHOLOGIST

STUCK

TEN TRUE CONFESSIONS

Translator’s Note
by Kristen Herbert

While the content of Beach is diverse, many of the poems explore a troublesome family legacy, the mother often the center point, whose irrational and at times abusive behavior become the primary conflict. These poems explore mental illness from the perspective of an onlooker, at times a dependent, as poems alternate between a child and adult speaker. The anxiety of self-correction that results, the struggle to navigate a relationship with a person who has often been absent either mentally or physically, these are themes which recur throughout the collection.

Bettina’s style of narration lends well to translation. The speaker’s observations are expressed like direct, unfiltered thoughts, at times wandering, falling into tangents, confessing parallel worries, even correcting herself mid-sentence. Bettina often uses unexpected, concrete images to communicate intangible ideas, by stretching metaphors into physical realities, or creating unusual juxtapositions between living and inanimate objects.

While translating from Beach, I wanted to stay as faithful to the poems’ original structure as possible by keeping the length of the lines relatively similar, keeping the content in the same place it was, if I could, and to be careful to copy the stress in certain line breaks. However, Hungarian is a more mutable language than English, with verbs for almost everything, the ability to change the form of words easily between verbs, adjectives, and nouns, and verb prefixes that can specify the manner of doing something promptly and exactly. I often felt limited (or stretched out) by my English equivalents and could not always avoid simplifying or restructuring the translation.

In a specific example from “Visit to the Home,” the speaker offers a few snapshots of her conversations with her mother, describing how they “usually just walk and chat about/ my work, and how things might go.” If I were to translate the Hungarian word-for-word, it would sound like, “on average we walk and chat,/ about what my work is, and what will be.” In very few words, the original text suggests that the mother doesn’t know what her daughter does for a living, which doesn’t necessarily come through in the English version. Instead, I chose to focus on the confusingly vague question they tackle, of “what will happen,” and from this lack of preciseness of what or whose life they are referring to, suggest that their conversation was distant and incoherent.

At the end of this poem, the speaker suggests that it doesn’t matter how many times she visits her mother, she still doesn’t see her. Bettina creates this juxtaposition with a simple play on words. In Hungarian the words for “to visit someone” (látogatni) versus “to see someone” (látni) appear and sound the same, so the phrase “This is my mother, who I still can’t see,” suggests even more strongly that the mother’s physical presence cannot make up for her emotional or mental absence. While in English we do have the phrase “go see someone” for visiting another person, I felt this phrase was too close, that it would probably become confusing, wordy, and repetitive, so in the end the word play was lost in translation.

Sometimes when I came across these absurd images in the text, I first wondered if I’d understood the language correctly, and after verifying the original meaning with the author, whether or not the reader will trust the accuracy of my translation. These questions sounded a bit like, did this character dress up for Mardis Gras as a pair of sunglasses and not with a pair of sunglasses? Was there really a voice fishing in a garbage can, and was it a man or a woman’s? My absurd interpretations were usually correct, and in the end it was this imaginativeness and unpredictability in Bettina’s poetry that hooked me into exploring more of her work.

 

Bettina Simon was born in Miskolc, Hungary in 1990. Her first poetry anthology Beach (Strand) was published in 2018, and she has recently received a Móricz Zsigmond scholarship to prepare her second. Bettina is active in Budapest’s literary scene, featured regularly in Hungarian literary journals such as Prae, Alföld, Műút, Élet és Irodalom and Irodalmi Szemle, among others. She also practices as a visual artist. 

Kristen Herbert moved from Chicago to rural Hungary in 2016 as an English teacher, after which she moved to Budapest and studied literary translation at the Balassi Institute. Her translations have appeared in Asymptote Blog Translation Tuesdays, Waxwing Journal, and Columbia Journal Online. Her original fiction can be found in Cleaver Magazine and Panel Magazine.

Letter to my Psychologist by Bettina Simon

 

LETTER TO MY PSYCHOLOGIST

by Bettina Simon

Translated by Kristen Herbert 

The therapy ended, but I still write
the homework for my psychologist.
For example, today I wrote I’m doing well,
though I haven’t gotten over my anxiety
that she won’t read my letters. Of course,
since the therapy is over, I don’t send her
what I write, so that fear has more to do
with the past, but now of course it’s real,
she won’t know what I realized, although,
that’s also part of the therapy.

I wrote about a sea of eggshells in my story
ten years ago. A kitchen scene, two characters.
One washes dishes and cries, the other doesn’t notice.
It might seem like the characters are a man and a woman,
but it’s about a kid and her mother.
In abusive relationships, victims
feel they must always walk on eggshells, I read
in a book my psychologist recommended.

After the mother finishes the dishes, the child
stays in the kitchen, like somebody defeated.
In the writing workshop they advised me to pull from images.
Blue flames, burner. Jar of cooked food between the window panes.
Seven years and clozaphine. The suspicion of the neighboring house.
Mom stirs her coffee. As she drinks it, she watches the stones,
the penguin on the wall watches her. Cold. I also took out the part
where I write about the eggshells.

Translator

Kristen Herbert is native to the Chicago area, but spent several years in Hungary as an English teacher. She is a co-editor and founder of the bilingual Hungarian-English literary journal The Penny Truth and serves on the masthead of Hungarian Literature Online. She is a current student in fiction at the MFA in Creative Writing at University of California-Riverside.

Author

Bettina Simon was born in Miskolc, Hungary, in 1990. Her first anthology of poems Beach(Strand) received wide accolades since its publication in 2018 by the Attila József Circle. In 2019, Bettina Simon earned a Zsigmond Móricz creator’s scholarship to complete her second anthology of poems. Since 2012, she has been a regular contributor to important Hungarian literary journals, and her works can be read in Prae, Élet és irodalom, and Alföld.

Stuck by Bettina Simon

 

STUCK

by Bettina Simon

Translated by Kristen Herbert 

 

This train doesn’t stop at every
station, and what I can’t say,
I can’t write either. The train’s wheels
stick to the tracks, like how something sticks
to my hand, which got there earlier,
and I can’t wash it off. You left, but you kept
your hand on my back. The shame stuck.
Why are you sitting all rigid they ask,
and I can’t lean back, because then your hand
would press down on my heart.

Translator

Kristen Herbert is native to the Chicago area, but spent several years in Hungary as an English teacher. She is a co-editor and founder of the bilingual Hungarian-English literary journal The Penny Truth and serves on the masthead of Hungarian Literature Online. She is a current student in fiction at the MFA in Creative Writing at University of California-Riverside.

Author

Bettina Simon was born in Miskolc, Hungary, in 1990. Her first anthology of poems Beach(Strand) received wide accolades since its publication in 2018 by the Attila József Circle. In 2019, Bettina Simon earned a Zsigmond Móricz creator’s scholarship to complete her second anthology of poems. Since 2012, she has been a regular contributor to important Hungarian literary journals, and her works can be read in Prae, Élet és irodalom, and Alföld.

Visit to the Home by Bettina Simon

 

VISIT TO THE HOME

by Bettina Simon

Translated by Kristen Herbert 

 

I visited my mother again.
For fifteen years I’ve been visiting
her, she used to visit me.

I love traveling, but I’m afraid
when I arrive.

Since they tore up our pictures,
we usually just walk and chat about
my work, and how things might go.

Mom shows me the way to
the cemetery where she’ll move next.
Though she’d rather I take her in
when the opportunity comes.

Then I look at my shoes,
and nod.
I think of the poems,
I wrote to her or about her,
it doesn’t matter which ones, I won’t
show her anyways.

Mom says good things, I should record them,
but I’m afraid then she’ll become quiet.
So I listen, and forget what she’s talking about.

When I visit her, sometimes
I write poems, except she is the poem,
I copy everything from her.

Like how everything falls in place
next to each other,
or splits in two, which was one.
This is my mother, who I still can’t see.

Translator

Kristen Herbert is native to the Chicago area, but spent several years in Hungary as an English teacher. She is a co-editor and founder of the bilingual Hungarian-English literary journal The Penny Truth and serves on the masthead of Hungarian Literature Online. She is a current student in fiction at the MFA in Creative Writing at University of California-Riverside.

Author

Bettina Simon was born in Miskolc, Hungary, in 1990. Her first anthology of poems Beach(Strand) received wide accolades since its publication in 2018 by the Attila József Circle. In 2019, Bettina Simon earned a Zsigmond Móricz creator’s scholarship to complete her second anthology of poems. Since 2012, she has been a regular contributor to important Hungarian literary journals, and her works can be read in Prae, Élet és irodalom, and Alföld.

Ten True Confessions by Bettina Simon

 

TEN TRUE CONFESSIONS

by Bettina Simon

Translated by Kristen Herbert 

 

I went to visit mom,
but a photo was waiting in her place.
I decided to write her a poem.

I address her, and then briefly,
as if I were planting onions in the garden,
I explain that I will not be coming anymore.

From now on, I’ll have a lot more to do.
I help strangers
remember their childhood,
and if they didn’t have one, I make something up.

Slowly, like how the sick walk circles
around the hospital smoking cigarettes,
it became a letter, and I repeated it, like a poem.

Translator

Kristen Herbert is native to the Chicago area, but spent several years in Hungary as an English teacher. She is a co-editor and founder of the bilingual Hungarian-English literary journal The Penny Truth and serves on the masthead of Hungarian Literature Online. She is a current student in fiction at the MFA in Creative Writing at University of California-Riverside.

Author

Bettina Simon was born in Miskolc, Hungary, in 1990. Her first anthology of poems Beach(Strand) received wide accolades since its publication in 2018 by the Attila József Circle. In 2019, Bettina Simon earned a Zsigmond Móricz creator’s scholarship to complete her second anthology of poems. Since 2012, she has been a regular contributor to important Hungarian literary journals, and her works can be read in Prae, Élet és irodalom, and Alföld.