"The Hotel" of Cormorans - Hotelul cormoranilor (Photo: Ioan Cepaliga)
"Where does river meet sea; does it conclude / or go no further? The house is standing, the house still stands," – one poem by Anna Zilahi, in Owen Good's translation.
Because onlythus is it / worth living, no? Leaving a trace of our self / behind, clinging between the pages of others. – Two poems by János Áfra in translation by Peter Sherwood and Owen Good.
János Áfra: Two Poems
Clichés of Closeness
It's on my mind all the time, I plan
to put her on a shelf, but I'm still just
trying out how it might look best, she too
must be someone like this, arranging
people on a shelf, writing on little slips
how and what she can do with whom and
for how long: easier to find your way like this
and yes, also to lose it, taking no risks,
striving for a target and an easy conscience,
the only troubling thing is being unable
to put oneself on any single circumscribed
surface, being torn to sheets and being thus
able to exceed oneself, in distinctive parts,
at points far from each other, placed between
a book here, a book there, barely protruding,
since it is safer to cling on under
fairly large pages, or between covers,
as if not alone, being just an organic fragment
of all these. Because onlythus is it
worth living, no? Leaving a trace of our self
behind, clinging between the pages of others.
Translated by Peter Sherwood
Earth, Water, Air
The forest first prepares its trees,
the soil is loosened up by oaks,
the earth traces its trodden routes,
whose courses meet at junctions,
and in a third direction
buoyant footfall accumulates,
a shower hastens the heartbeat,
ushers forward the beating feet,
washes away the tracks, the scents,
and the forest way regains its face.
A door handle fit to be handled,
our skin readies for excitement,
tiles welcome the sockless soles,
as the sofa does cast-off clothes
and the wet scent of movement,
the union lasts for sixty minutes,
but when I open in the windows,
the curtains carry on, moving with
the limbs of nearby trees, as if
supposing still we were free.
Translated by Owen Good
János Áfra was born in Hajdúböszörmény in 1987. He is a poet, art critic and editor of Alföld literary magazine. He studied visual arts, literature and philosophy at the University of Debrecen, where he is an instructor at present. He co-created the bilingual art-poetry book Productive Misreadingswith Zsuzsanna Szegedi-Varga. He has published three books of poetry: Glaukóma (Glaucoma) in 2012; Két akarat (Two Wills) in 2015; Rítus (Ritual) in 2017. Áfra was awarded two Hungarian debut prizes: Makói Medáliák (Mako's Medal, 2013), Gérecz Attila-díj (Attila Gérecz Prize, 2014), and got other important prizes and scholarships: Móricz Zsigmond Irodalmi Ösztöndíj (Zsigmond Móricz Literary Scholarship, 2013), Sziveri János-díj (János Sziveri Prize, 2014), Horváth Péter Irodalmi Ösztöndíj (Péter Horváth Literary Scholarship, 2016) among others.
Owen Good, from Northern Ireland, is a translator of Hungarian poetry and prose. His debut book translation, Krisztina Tóth’s short story cycle Pixel(Seagull Books, 2019), was shortlisted the EBRD Literary Prize and the TA First Translation Prize. His work has appeared in Asymptote, Modern Poetry in Translation, The Moth, and Ploughshares among others. He is co-editor of Hungarian Literature Online.
Peter Sherwood taught at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (now part of University College London) until 2007. From 2008 until his retirement in 2014 he was Distinguished Professor of Hungarian Language and Culture in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He received the Pro Cultura Hungarica prize of the Hungarian Republic in 2001, the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Hungarian Republic in 2007, the János Lotz Medal of the International Association for Hungarian Studies in 2011, the László Országh Prize of the Hungarian Society for the Study of English in 2016, and the Árpád Tóth Prize for translation in 2020. His translations from Hungarian include Miklós Vámos's The Book of Fathers, Noémi Szécsi's The Finno-Ugrian Vampire, and collections of essays by Antal Szerb and Béla Hamvas. He co-translated Zsuzsa Selyem's It's Raining in Moscow (Contra Mundum Press, 2020).
What with Krisztina Tóth’s participation in 2016 in not one, but two international literary festivals, The Krakow International Book Fair and New Literature from Europe Festival in New York, we thought it about time we gave you a portrait of one of Hungary’s most prominent contemporary writers of poetry, prose and children’s literature.
Physics for scientific connections, painting for vivid imagery, music for pulse, rhythm, and silence. We continue our series of excerpts from A Bay of Megaphones, a new anthology of young Hungarian poets, with the "unexpected and unpredictable" work of Eszter Kósa, in Owen Good's translation.
25th April, 2023
The situation of the speaker in Eszter Kósa’s poems is often not fixed, the position takes form in the vulnerability of natural and supernatural powers, in the constant exchanges. The poetic “I” can only manifest in the relationship between the other and otherness, communal and individual actions, as one agent of the network of micro- and macro-level occurrences. Yet, the position of mediator is still one of privilege, and this influence sometimes presents itself in the edifying nature of the speech and in the commands, inBier,for example, the speaker instructs us through the execution of a ritualistic sequence of actions. Therefore magical thought and the holistic approach of now wiped-out nature religions pervade this poetic world like the foundational ideas of Christianity, and this syncretism lilts beyond comfortable spheres of thought. The world-organising power of humans is repeatedly relativized in the series of position changes and the figurative workings of language.
The unexpected pairings of images and unpredictable associations in Eszter Kósa’s poems testify to sprawling branches of attention. Given her studies in theoretical physics, the author understands the natural scientific connections yet is also concerned with anthropological perspectives that can’t be grasped in formulae. Her ability to capture situations in vivid imagery can be traced to her interest in painting. What’s more, as a multi-instrumentalist she has an incredible musical ear and her poems build to a pulse marked with internal rhymes, to the silences audible between the constructions of short sentences. The silences and forms of absence allow the reader to dwell on the tropes. And create an opportunity for us to observe the foreignness that we once attempted to wipe out through naming, but which resurfaces, again and again.
János Áfra
Slumber Moths
We, who lived our entire lives under cover of trees,
have never known a branchless sky. In the evenings,
we tell tales of ourselves to the old ones, lest they forget
who we are, and we close the little ones’ mouths. We help
to button up the sleeping bags when everybody
has gone quiet, we form cocoons like larvae. Our head
a pearl, our chest silk, our arm a dangling thread,
we bond to each other, to the earth’s tissue. We break,
the sun ignites, we wash in its light, cleansing our bodies
for the resurrection. Our Father who art the summer sky. Blue
like the tents. In which there wriggle clouds
of sleeping bags. Their occupants awake, pale
and wet, but their sins forgiven. This isn’t yet
our own redemption. We haven’t learned to soar
across canopies, the treetops were chopped from over us.
Translated by Owen Good
Öbölnyi megafon – Fiatal magyar költők antológiája / A Bay of Megaphones – Anthology of Young Hungarian Poets contains new poems by young Hungarian poets in Hungarian and in English translation, with essay introductions to each new poet by their mentor, an established Hungarian writer.
Mentees (poems): Soma Kazsimér, Gergő Korsós, Eszter Kósa, Edward Kovács, Zita Kubina, Dávid Locker, Mona Aicha Masri, Dániel Nagy, Anna Ősi, Anett Rékai.
Mentors (essays): János Áfra, Kornélia Deres, Ferenc Gál, János Géczi, Ákos Győrffy, István Kemény, Endre Kukorelly, Katalin Szlukovényi, Krisztina Tóth, András Visky.
