(UTVALDA DIKTER)
translations by Thomas Cooper
(Bizonyos képletek)
He massaged his grandmother’s legs,
as she lay sprawled, and I spoke of space,
and he now knows what man is: the molecules
which bind compounds together
come together to form what they form.
but the essence of things always frays
and becomes visible on a single stamp,
and that’s perhaps the most important thing to know
about stamps: that they make everything seem
understandable, and that’s why I taught him
what makes the different series
and the stamped surfaces different
—the occasional
mistakes and misprints one finds
on the commemorative stamps
reveal the meanings and tie them together,
because what has passed is on them,
and still, what only could be there, like when
God, the typist, misses a stroke,
and time starts to slip from the closets—
the pillow remains without a cover for years
and scents are freed, or when
grandmother’s legs no longer work,
and of the little grandchild, only a touch remains,
and a fading voice on the far side of a blind eye.
(Begyűjtés)
My smallest grandchild, poor thing,
had just been born and had to have surgery
because he couldn’t digest mother’s milk,
and one of his legs was in a cast,
so later, we taught him how to walk, and he stumbled,
saw something colorful in our garden — a red beetle,
ivy on the wall — and as I mowed
the grass on the lawn, he often just stood
with a downcast gaze, listening to the crowded sky,
the whispers of branches, and how the weak ones
cracked and snapped on the ground, and in the outdoor kitchen
I told him about the Russians, showed him
how the soldier searched through everything, and then
he came to the well with a whip to crack it,
and he brought buckets too, and counted the chicks
and the eggs under the hens, and picked fruit from the tree,
and watched grandpa climb up the tree even
though he was weak—his legs were spent—
and since then he was only getting weaker, every joint tired,
and a few months later, he bid farewell
like everyone wants to someday—falling
a winter night from one dream into the next.
translations by the author
Our energy is not of cooling coals:
it’s still a spark; it can’t be satisfied.
The petrol engine that drives us controls
our combustions: it all remains inside.
We’re over–pressurised, and can’t relax
with all the alcohol and oily rags.
A beam of light descended from above,
a discharge reaching thousands of degrees.
By striking, it assumed the shape of love:
now we can ground whatever is between
the two of us; we use this uncut wire
which can conduct our everyday desires.
A jet of water coming from a tap
is seemingly a stationary pillar,
but touch your knife to it and you’ll see a gap,
and streams that are more flexible and finer:
our relationship might never fit the norm,
but conforms to the principle of form.
Gas, electric & water—hold my hand,
and start the meter with me. Now it’s time
we turn into a resource of the land,
a public property. It’s time we sign
this service contract so they’ll send the bill.
Our fingers proudly bear the meter seal.
From the nightstand, I watch
the breathing shapes.
They lie next to each other
with their end pieces
loosely touching
under the lamplight.
In tandem, their middle
bulges and sinks, they gather
and scatter the light
in the warmish room.
A bar of care
bridges their frames,
the outside layers
showing signs of wear.
A kiss fogs them up
as they wipe the dust
gently from each other,
smudges sharing
themselves until it’s done.
They sink into
what contains them.
I watch how they warp
the outside stimuli
into blueish reflections
and mirror these
into each other. And then
morning lights up outside.
He rises, sets me on his nose,
and begins to work.
translations by Owen Good
As a teenager I fled to London,
because in Germany, due to my parentage,
I wasn’t allowed to compete. Luckily, the International
Olympic Committee still allowed for Jews
to attend the Olympic Games. But the Nazis
threatened to assess my family if I did.
I had to go back to the training camp
to practise for the games.
At first, I thought about intentionally
messing up the jumps, but I showed them
what a Jewish girl could do—I broke
the national high-jump record.
At the training camp I lived in a room
with Dora, but I never saw her naked;
she never used the communal showers.
She was very young, so we thought
she was shy, but she was afraid.
I got the last letter from the Committee
on the 16th of July, 1936. They wrote that they regretted
to inform me that I couldn’t partake in the Olympic Games.
By then all the competitors were on route
to Berlin, they’d been told I was injured.
Despite that I was the better jumper,
Ratjen was chosen to compete in the Olympics instead.
Last time, she wore a grey two-piece dress
and skin-tone tights when she travelled.
A few days earlier at the Vienna
European Championships, she had taken gold
as an athlete for the Third Reich—
she broke the high jump
world record. Before the run-up, she thought
of her father, who gave sinister
looks like no other.
She sat all night on an express train
to Cologne. In the cabin, a man’s eyes
measured up every last inch of her.
The train stopped in Magdeburg.
The athlete got off to stretch
her stiff legs on the platform and to buy
a few cheap bread rolls. Her parents had taught her
a proper lady was always thrifty.
She sometimes imagined she was a national hero whom
even the Führer thought of proudly.
Her father had always envied her that handshake
since the Berlin Olympics.
She couldn’t even have entered the competition
had Gretel Bergmann not been disqualified.
Even the idea of it was absurd—a Jew
couldn’t win; what were they thinking?
Before the long journey, she hadn’t had time
to shave. She was nervous now. She had no powder either;
what if she got caught? The ticket inspector
whispered something to a police officer
who asked her for her papers, then escorted her
to the station, and decided that, whatever the cost,
he would find out the truth.
“Get undressed! I’m carrying out an examination.”
“And if I resist?” asked the woman.
“Then I’ll make an arrest for insubordination.”
The athlete hesitated a while. She was nineteen years old
but people knew her name all over. She set out her medals and
her papers on the table.
In school she had been nicknamed a plank.
Her hips hadn’t widened like the other
girls’. In the factory they let her alone in peace –
she was a good packer.
She only started athletics to escape
her environment, she was surrounded almost
completely by women: her three sisters and her
neuropathic mother.
They had taught her what men
were like. If she protested now, they would strip her
and rape her.
I had read a lot about Dora Ratjen—
the newspapers at the time blown the story
out of proportion. The sports committee hadn’t realise
she was a man, so she deserved
the women’s gold.
I visited her. By then she was called
Heinrich and had started working as an imperial
labourer. The boyish girl had become
a girlish boy, but I still liked her all the same.
She’d gotten idle and, sadly, had given up the sport;
and she wanted to vanish from all sight.
I offered her work in one of my films.
I would happily have made a photo series
of her too, but she turned me down.
She was afraid to come close, afraid of her father,
and afraid of everyone.
Of course, at the time, it just annoyed me—
it was later that I understood, after the breast operation,
when I was taken for a man on the street.
translated by Agnes Marton
While downloading some seasons of ER
featuring the young George Clooney,
I was thinking about how I could contact him,
and after binge-watching the whole show,
I started to do a search. Idris Elba
was on Instagram—what if Clooney was there too?
But all I could find were ten official fake profiles.
I gave up. Then the idea came to me:
I should write a poem to him.
Another poem of mine, ‘Noah,’ had been published
in an American lit mag. There was a roundtable
organized on young authors; this poem
was snarled at there for being too funny
and not fitting in the collection. Family Guy
was brought up too. This is when I got fed up
with TV-series and thought it would be
something—the top of my career—if Clooney could
read my poems in English. Then I could tell mum that
prohibiting me from watching TV had been in vain;
I did everything she worried about, even if I was
afraid—like during the never-ending process
of downloading, ten seasons, almost.
Since then, Clooney has grown quite old,
and so has my mum. A disturbing thought:
does Clooney read poetry at all? Would it make
sense to write to him? Would he get it?
What if he prefers films? The poet, after all,
that’s me.
translated by Kristen Herbert
I visited my mother again.
For fifteen years I’ve been visiting
her. She used to visit me.
I love traveling, but I’m afraid
when I arrive.
Since they tore up our pictures,
we usually just walk and chat about
my work and how things might go.
Mom shows me the way to
the cemetery where she’ll move next,
though she’d rather I take her in
when the opportunity comes.
Then I look at my shoes,
and nod.
I think of the poems
I wrote to her or about her—
it doesn’t matter which ones, I won’t
show her anyways.
Mom says good things; I should record them,
but I’m afraid she’ll become quiet then.
So I listen, and forget what she’s talking about.
When I visit her, sometimes
I write poems—she is the poem.
I copy everything from her.
Like how everything falls into place
next to each other,
or splits in two, which was once one.
This is my mother, who I still can’t see.
translations by Mark Baczoni
Cold as cold cream you were
that’s what I remember of that summer.
Retreating into shadow of your words,
like crawling under the boughs of a tree.
The slight change in pressure
that makes a breath a sigh
and the troubles in your breast
rattling like rusty cans.
Sometimes, I mistake you for your memory.
To touch you now,
I must reach across the mirror of remembering.
You were, back then,
the one I should be telling now.
The prettier the coastline,
the deadlier it is;
so you used to say.
This time of year,
only
the pulmonary patients
from the sanatorium
come here for their
lengthy constitutionals.
It gets cold at night,
cold as the relative tense.
We sit in silence,
as if by the coast;
and then I think of
those water rescue dogs
that stop you swimming.
And how I can’t stand
when something sinks.
There’s safety in knowing, I thought.
Like lying in bed with the radio, listening to the war;
cocooning ourselves in the brutality across the border.
Trying to dodge history
– bloodied, lashing out to protect its young –
we played dead as best we could.
Lie still, don’t make a sound; maybe it’ll leave you be.
I’ve had nosebleeds for years, I said,
and look how even now the blood comes in bursts,
like the crackling transmission
from some Bosnian partisan’s radio.
It is not grief, diffusing through me,
but emptiness; and what the blind see
isn’t darkness, but nothing.
But we can’t imagine nothing,
and in fact even a vacuum
is never completely empty. Just think:
for years they thought there was nothing
around the moon but a vacuum
yet it, too, has
a thin, rare atmosphere. The lighter atoms
are blown away by the solar wind
but some of the heavier ones remain
near the surface.
In dreams, I look for you in the bustling street
but it’s like searching the cosmos for signs of life.
What if you’re one of those civilisations that
destroy themselves before we even know they exist?
But if we did meet, I would tell you
what’s been on my mind:
that the night is nothing but the shadow that our planet casts on us
and that your memory, mother, is like
a thin atmosphere –
just substantial enough to suffocate in.
translated by Anna Bentley
The cut flowers stink of pizza
when there’s mixed delivery, and the packaging
of the COVID test recalls the garlicky
cucumber salad, like how dreams
and waking can get mixed up together.
I wonder, still half-asleep, if I should
mention Wolt1 by name in my book, or
just use the brand’s colour to hint at it.
In the end I dream I’m a horse and
they’re burning a double-U into my skin,
but I don’t feel it, just hear the branding-iron
sizzle. I’m galloping—don’t even notice
I’ve got hooves. By the time I do, we,
the support teams’s darlings, are hurtling
down an empty Andrássy2, Shetland ponies,
Kisber Felvers3, with beers. On our backs
beans and Neapolitan wafers.
For us, the tenements’ doors stand
open; the city smells of stables,
there’s blue rain dying our manes.
Up on the screen, Krisztina and Jocó,
two freshly christened raindrops, are
lauded for their advertising value.
Only the 6th District residents grumble. They
carry manure up the service stairway: proof.
But then they fling it out of the windows to
spatter on our backs. I wake up,
then fall asleep again. The company pulls out of
our contract on account of a poem. I argue
I couldn’t have written it. It’s true. Horses don’t write.
1. A food delivery platform widely used in Hungary which had a blue logo.
2. Andrássy Boulevard, the Champs Elysées of Budapest.
3. Literally half-bloods from Kisbér: a rare breed of sport horse.
Imre Olivér Horváth är en poet från Debrecen. Hans debutdiktsamling, Nem szimpátia (Inte sympati), publicerades 2016, och hans andra diktsamling förväntas komma ut 2025. Han är biträdande lektor vid Debrecens universitet, där han skrev sin avhandling om Thom Gunns poesi.
János Áfra bor för närvarande i Debrecen och är poet, litteraturkritiker, grundare och chefredaktör för den samtida kulturportalen KULTer.hu samt redaktör för skönlitteratur i den konstnärliga och kritiska tidskriften Alföld. Hans senaste diktsamling är Omlás (Ras) (2023).
Zoltán Lesi är poet, programmerare, översättare och redaktör och bor i Wien. Han organiserar och deltar i tyska och ungerska litterära evenemang. Hans senaste diktsamling, Magasugrás (Höjdhopp) (2019), har publicerats på ungerska, tyska, polska, franska och slovakiska.
Bettina Simon är författare, poet och konsthistoriker. Hon bor i Budapest. Hennes första diktsamling, Strand, publicerades 2018.
Péter Závada är poet, dramatiker och musiker. Han bor i Budapest. Hans musikaliska karriär sträcker sig över mer än tjugo år. Hans senaste diktsamling, A muréna mozgása (Muränans rörelse), publicerades 2023.
Miklós Borsik är poet, redaktör och grafiker. Han bor för närvarande i Budapest. Hans diktsamlingar inkluderar Átoknaptár (Förbannelsens kalender) (2020) och Futárlíra (Kurirlyrik) (2024).
