Aurora Luque looks at past female toke midels

 

Aurora Luque

Aurora Luque looks at past female role models

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For Aurora Luque (Almería, Spain, 1962), winning the 32ndLOEWE FOUNDATION International Poetry Prize has been “an honour, a responsibility and a source of inspiration.” The poet praises “the enthusiasm and effort the LOEWE FOUNDATION puts forward to promote the Prize and ensure the books reach critics and, most importantly, readers.” Luque hopes “it will set an example for others to follow.”

Gavieras, the award-winning book, is the newest addition to her prolific writing career; Luque, who is a classical philologist, poet, translator, and columnist, goes on to explain that Gavierasis not “all that different” from her other works. “What has become clear to me over the past few years is that an existence based on a fixed identity and linked to an unalterable language and status is being called into question.” Perhaps that is why “we need to focus on myths that are structurally different and that allow us to redefine or reconstruct the meaning of “identity”, particularly the female one.” For Luque, “the most attractive models are those that allow characters to change and evolve, to be in constant search, to be dynamic. When faced with past static individual and female models, why not dream of new, richer, less “still”, more fluid ones? The gaviera, the flâneuse, the gleaner, the neodanaide, the woman who narrates her descensus ad ínferos (traditionally told from the male perspective: Odysseus, Aeneas). Why not take inspiration from the experiences of past female roamers, travelers, game changers, disruptors, or women who have been displaced or been forced into exile?”

For Aurora Luque, the list of LOEWE Prize winning books is “a key compilation of recent poetry, with the best of the newest talent, not because they represent an official group, but because of the aesthetics that they uphold.” Something that is a source of great personal satisfaction, since “the very first readings of living poets that I attended at university were theirs: I remember seeing Jaime Siles, Antonio Colinas, Luis Antonio de Villena, Guillermo Carnero, and José María Álvarez walk into the Madraza in Granada. Listening to their poetry meant discovering entire new worlds.” Luque does point to what she calls “an objective novelty”: after Cristina Peri Rossi, she is only the second female to ever receive the Prize. “In that sense, I feel somewhat alone. I’m hopeful that will change going forward.”

In some of Gavieras’ poems, Luque reviews and rewrites ancient myths “with certain fierceness. Those with hushed undertones; where whispers abound. I focus on what the characters, particularly the heroines and goddesses, are not telling us: Amphitrite, Danaides, Medea, Eurydice, Aphrodite, the anonymous prehistoric “goddesses.” Luque also adds that “myths represent language and I question the pitfalls of language; the ways in which it provokes or imposes silence.”

The refugees, according to Aeschylus

Sand between the toes
We didn’t know of knots or about oars.
We learned rigging tasks
on the fine sands of the Nile, by the sea.
Of all the misfortunes
we chose the noblest,
to escape freely.
We travelled, like Io
escaping from the beds where Eros
sowed horseflies, jealousy, asphyxia, landlords,
The ship is our floating agora.
We sail searching for the city
—You are looking for a city?
— Oh, yes, we want it. We can build it.
We know how to build
altars. To Athena the seafarer
we pray in Rhodes
with our free lips.
Do not grow up in the houses
caverns of rude Cyclops.
We long to search for fountains
in the Earth’s clean entrails.
May our orchards never be watered
by Ares’ blood.

Aurora Luque
LOEWE Prize 2019
Gavieras

Poem Translation by Orlando Ocampo

Photo Caption: LOEWE FOUNDATION International Poetry Prize © FUNDACIÓN LOEWE, 2019. 

FUNDACIÓN LOEWE

Mark Strand / The Marriage

The Marriage

by Mark Strand
BIOGRAPHY

Mark Strand / El matrimonio

The wind comes from opposite poles,

traveling slowly.

She turns in the deep air.

He walks in the clouds.

She readies herself,

shakes out her hair,

makes up her eyes,

smiles.

The sun warms her teeth,

the tip of her tongue moistens them.

He brushes the dust from his suit

and straightens his tie.

He smokes.

Soon they will meet.

The wind carries them closer.

They wave.

Close, closer.

They embrace.

She is making a bed.

He is pulling off his pants.

They marry

and have a child.

The wind carries them off

in different direction.

The wind is strong, he thinks

as he straightens his tie.

I like this wind, she says

as she puts on her dress.

The wind unfolds.

The wind is everything to them.

Mark Strand / Living Gorgeously

Mark Strand

Mark Strand: Living Gorgeously

BIOGRAPHY

By Charles Simic

Mark Strand, who died in November at the age of eighty after a long battle with cancer, is the first among my oldest friends to go. Having known him for forty-six years, I’ve come to realize since he passed away what a huge presence he was in my life and still continues to be. Every time I read something interesting, hear some literary gossip, have a memorable meal, or take a sip of truly fine wine these days, I want to get in touch with him and tell him about it. It’s not that we talked every day when he was alive, but he was often on my mind as I went about my life and it was the same with him.

I happened to see him one day just hours after he got back from Italy. After showing me the beautiful socks and shoes he bought in Rome, he said he had something exciting to tell me. When he was in Sicily, he discovered that there were magnificent old palazzos in Siracusa selling for peanuts. He thought he and I should buy one, move our families there and commute back to the States, he to his job at Johns Hopkins and I to mine at the University of New Hampshire. First we’d drive to Palermo and catch a flight to Rome and then he’d fly to Washington and I to Boston and we’d fly back every couple of weeks or so. I burst out laughing, but he kept after me for weeks about those cheap palazzos, until I was just about convinced that we could pull it off.

That’s what made being with Mark so much fun. He was a restless man, always ready to start a new life and obsessed with money-making schemes. One time he and I were making plans to import Australian and New Zealand wines, which were then little known in this country; another time we were thinking of opening a restaurant in Inverness, a town fifteen miles or so away from Drake’s Bay north of San Francisco, where the waiters would be well-known poets of our acquaintance who’d work there for a week or two and then be replaced by other poets. He thought the public would go for it and our place would be a great success. “Imagine having a Pulitzer Prize or National Book Award winner bring you a plate of cheese and a glass of wine,” he said. Even our wives loved the idea at first, until they discovered that they were the ones who were going to do all the cooking, while Mark and I took turns serving as hosts and chitchatting with customers.

One wild notion of ours actually bore fruit. We started a new poetry movement that we hoped would make us famous. Every other poet was starting one forty years ago, so we thought, Why not us? Ours was to be called Gastronomic Poetry. Both Mark and I had noticed at poetry readings that whenever food was mentioned in a poem—and that didn’t happen very often—blissful smiles would break out on the faces of people in the audience. Thus, we reasoned, in a country where most people hate poetry and everyone is eating and snacking constantly, poems ought to mention food more frequently. To fix that deplorable omission, we thought we’d include one or more mouth-watering dishes in every poem we wrote, no matter what its subject was. Literary purists were bound to be shocked finding barbecued ribs or a slice of apple pie in some sublime poem of ours, but those millions of Americans who buy gourmet magazines and cookbooks and dream of eating the gorgeously prepared meals described in their pages, without ever bothering to make them themselves, would rush to buy our books and enjoy them in the same way. Mark’s poem about pot roast is an example of gastronomic poetry:

I gaze upon the roast,
that is sliced and laid out
on my plate,
and over it
I spoon the juices
of carrot and onion.
And for once I do not regret
the passage of time…

There are more than a few of mine where yummy dishes are mentioned. Here’s a love poem called “Café Paradiso”:

My chicken soup thickened with pounded young almonds.
My blend of winter greens.
Dearest tagliatelle with mushrooms, fennel, anchovies,
Tomatoes and vermouth sauce.
Beloved monk fish braised with onions, capers
And green olives.
Give me your tongue tasting of white beans and garlic…

By now, you are probably asking yourself, Did these two ever talk about anything serious? Of course, we did. We talked about how writing a poem is no different from taking out a frying pan and concocting a dish out of the ingredients available in the house, how in poetry, as in cooking, it’s all a matter of subtle little touches that come from long experience or are the result of sudden inspiration. I recall once Mark sitting deep in thought after dinner for what seemed like a long time before finally looking up at me and saying: “I don’t think I put enough cheese in the risotto tonight.” I had to agree. Cooking is like that and so is poetry. It reminded me how often I was jolted by a thought about some poem of mine that I was either working on or had already published in a book and now struck me as being in need of an additional word or two to bring it to life more fully. He said it was the same with him. We were just a couple of short-order cooks who kept trying to pass themselves off as poets.

Mark had a terrific sense of humor. It didn’t leave him even in the final weeks of his life when he was in great pain and still went on teaching and giving poetry readings. I saw him five days before he died. He was in a hospital waiting to be released so he could go home and die, since his case was hopeless. When the time came for him to dress, he didn’t want any help, but being so emaciated and weak it was taking him a long time to put on his shirt and button it, so I went over to give him a hand. As I was doing that, I couldn’t help telling him what a beautiful shirt he was wearing. And it certainly was! It took him a while to answer, but he finally said with a mischievous little smile: “I always dress my very best when I go to the hospital.” He didn’t add “to die,” but his smile and the look in his eyes told me that’s what he meant.

January 24, 2015, 10:30 a.m.

THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

Portrait / Krisztina Tóth

Krisztina Tóth - a portrait

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.

Owen Good 

8 December 2016

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

 

Gergő Korsós: Imagine

We continue our series of excerpts from A Bay of Megaphones, the new anthology of young Hungarian poets. Gergő Korsós' poem bristles with irony and sci-fi references, while betraying poignant, human hurt, in Anna Bentley's translation.

19th April, 2023

Korsós’ oeuvre to date consists of a single volume’s worth of poems. Even on a first reading, it is striking that the majority of these have been inspired by the countless worlds of sci-fi and fantasy: those written about, and those presented in images and in film. In the consciousness of those who consume them, these virtual worlds can come together to form a real fantasy universe, one which is so large, so powerful and complete, that the actual, workaday world seems, by comparison, unsophisticated and less than satisfying. On a first, superficial reading, then, Korsós’ poems, filled as they are with aliens, time warps, and witchcraft, exist within this enormous, shared fantasy universe, and do not look beyond it. They have no need to (just as the bucolic poets and their readers had no need to leave Arcadia).

And yet, we barely find a Korsós poem which is “merely” a fantasy poem, because they continually refer back to our contemporary, everyday society, to our families, our lovers, and our circumstances. Like, for example Prophecy, which, of the poems provided here, seems the purest sci-fi text: the speaker is a space-traveller who is always moving on, but the closing lines of the poem are clearly about human concepts and emotions and about love for the Other, who is left behind. Imagine is like this too: an unsuccessful date is presented in satirical, ironic fashion, but there is also tangible hurt. The two characters talk past each other, trapped in their own fixations (the speaker’s is sci-fi, the girl’s is feminism). While The Pets Set Off does not make use of concrete sci-fi elements, it nevertheless takes place in the kind of fantasy space which tends to be permeated by an apocalyptic, posthuman melancholy (a 21st-century space, if you like); it is a quiet farewell to all that is human.

István Kemény

 

 

Imagine,

 

I met this girl once,

nothing came of it in the end

though it started out really well:

 

we sat in this place,

I ordered two lagers,

and another and another,

 

and all of a sudden I found myself

calling her a sweet-lipped milky way girl,

which she objected to,

she wasn’t a doll to be played with, she said,

 

and anyway.

 

Then I got started on

the increasingly concerning proliferation

of smuggler colonies on the dark side of the moon.

 

I was just laying into those

legal paragraphs that are shielding criminals,

without which we’d be able to simply

blast the vermin with plasma guns,

 

when she suddenly said

did I know how many statues of women there were in Pest,

ones that were not just nudes.

 

No, I say,

then guess, she says,

25, I say

35, she says,

while there’s a statue of a man for every street.

 

Then she asked me

to name some women poets,

she bet I knew fewer than male ones.

 

I came back with, who cares anyway,

 

then she stood up,

said I wrote men’s stuff,

and walked out.

 

Translated by Anna Bentley

 

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.

Translators: Anna Bentley, Owen Good, Edmond Kulcsár, Ágnes Márton, Austin Wagner.

Photos: Balázs Som, Levente Vigh.

Copies are available in Hungary from the Budapest-based bookshop Írók boltja.

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.