Bettina Simon: Four Poems
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.
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