EXPLANATION

 

It was a beautiful night,

he says, and I say nothing.

For the rest we can share no words,

his English, like mine, being so-so.

I can see how he imagines me to be,

fingers and mouth I mould around him,

since loving in Magyar is so complex

anyhow, let this be a simple,

touristy, Budapest morning.  

Then the first 49 tram, the Danube,

the streetlights going out, one by one.

As the outlines become clearer

one phrase haunts me: sombre absolution,

confining me in words, comforting,

sombre absolution, an impassive threat

that for all this I have at least

a few borrowed words.

 

Translated by Peter Sherwood

 

Szabina Ughy was born in Ajka in 1985. She is the author of two poetry collections, Outer Prosthesis (Külső protézis, 2011) and Walks on the Outskirts (Séták peremvidéken, 2015), as well as the novel The Taste of Pomegranate (A gránátalma ize, 2018), released by Orpheusz Publishers. Graduate of the Pázmány Péter Catholic University, she has published work in various literary magazines since the early 2000s, and is a recepient of the Bella István-díj (István Bella Award in Poetry, 2016) and the Móricz Zsigmond-ösztöndíj (Zsigmond Móricz Scholarship, 2013). Szabina Ughy is an editor at Móra Publishers, which specializes in children’s literature.

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).

HLO HU