Anna T. Szabó: Three poems translated from Hungarian by Ági Bori

Read these poems on the Modern Poetry in Translation website: https://modernpoetryintranslation.com/poem/three-poems-4/

Ági Bori writes in the translator's note:

The poems presented here are a powerful sample of Anna T. Szabó’s oeuvre. Translating her chiselled and daunting poetic voice has been a profoundly moving and humbling experience.

Due to the increasingly strict dictatorship in Romania in the eighties, where Anna was part of the oppressed Hungarian minority, she moved to Hungary with her family at the age of fifteen. She started as one of the late intellectual successors of the legendary short-lived literary magazine, New Moon (1946–1948), and seems to agree with one of the authors in its circle, Géza Ottlik, who said: ‘Existence is my profession.’

Anna presents experiences as if they are empirical observations. Her poems are often anchored in pain and suffering, both physical and emotional, revealing her awareness and responsiveness to the emotions of others. Her writings seem to encompass extreme psychic states. ‘Disgust’ is a case study in what I will call ‘empirical observation of everyday horrors’. It charts the mental state of being lost in the world, hitting against the edges of existence. Disgust is distrust: it is losing the essential sense of security. ‘The Lake’ echoes a feeling that was named in the short story, ‘The Imp of the Perverse’, by Edgar Allan Poe: a compulsion to commit an act against one’s own interests. In ‘Crossing, out’ Anna tries to describe death. She was asked to write an elegy for someone she hadn’t seen in over thirty years. The poem deals with the feeling of worldly alienation in which someone is thrown into an abyss: a place without language or direction, where everything earthly is negated, including logic and duality.