Anna Szabó T., poet and translator, was born at Kolozsvár (Cluj, Romania) in 1972. She has been living in Hungary since 1987. After graduating in Hungarian and English at ELTE Budapest University, she wrote her PhD thesis on Lőrinc Szabó’s translations of Shakespeare. She has published four volumes of poetry (the last one, Rögzített mozgás [Recorded Motion] in 2004) and numerous translations of novels, short stories and poetry. At present she is working on her fifth book of poetry entitled Elhagy [Leaves Me]. Her husband is novelist György Dragomán (author of A pusztítás könyve [The Book of Destruction] and A fehér király [The White King]). They have two children.

As a translator, do you get to chose what you work on or do the books find their way to you?

Usually it is the jobs that find me. Three months ago my second son, Palika was born, so I cannot take on as much as I used to. I had to reject several jobs: there is no way I could translate a novel at this stage. But I am working on some poems and I am also translating Shakespeare’s sonnets.

As far as contemporary English poets are concerned, who are the people you keep track of and translate?

There is a group of five British poets who used to travel around the world together, and I have done translations from most of them. I am sure I could not do what they did: after their first books of poetry they used to travel around together giving poetry readings. Polly Clark, Antony Dunn, Matthew Hollis, Clare Pollard and Owen Sheers also came to Budapest in 2004 as part of the British Council’s programme called Converging Lines. We here have never done that kind of joint reading tour, but we have followed each other’s poetic development and sent poems around to each other. I am also working on one of Clive Wilmer’s long poems – György Gömöri and I once translated a whole volume of poetry by him. At the British Council translation seminar we worked on a number contemporary British poets from Carol Ann Duffy through Douglas Dunn and Tony Harrison all the way to Robert Minhinnick from Wales. If I knew I would find a publisher I would be glad to translate enough for an independent volume from any of these authors, as I know several of them personally.

Could you define the contemporary Hungarian poets who were your coevals as you started out on your career? Are those people still in touch with each other?

Sadly, we do not meet as often as we used to. There was a circle who used to convene regularly at Mónika Mesterházi’s place, then for years Kriszta Tóth gave home to our get-togethers. The poets who would meet regularly were András Imreh, András Gerevich, János Lackfi, Gábor Schein and István László G. But everybody’s life has changed since then. And perhaps we do not feel the same need to meet on a regular basis, either.

The poems in your forth volume, entitled Recorded Motion, very often capture some sort of a visual image. You describe small elements, you observe motions, areas, as if you attached some special importance to concentrated attention, to directing and fixing one’s gaze. Is this a conscious attitude of inventorying?

In the volume you talk about it was certainly the case, even if not completely consciously. In my new volume, however, which is nearly complete, I am trying to go in an utterly different direction: I am concentrating on emotions.

Yes, it is particularly interesting how in Recorded Motion the image of the Other, the loved one is missing, there are no poems addressed to him; while in your fifth volume now in progress there is almost a whole cycle devoted to this subject…

Yes, I would have liked to do the same in the previous volume but it just did not work out. I have always been very reserved on this topic. In my first book of poetry I was testing my voice: it does include a few love poems, but the most private, most intimate love poem I ever wrote was written absolutely on commission. When I took my entrance exam to Eötvös College I also sent in my poems, and Professor István Géher asked me to write a sonnet. Thus this poem, although for a long time it has been the most intimate love poem I had written, is also cold, as it was written on commission.

These voices were absent from my second and my third volume: the second one, Nehézkedés (Gravity) is rather a dark, bitter volume: at that time I had lost three relatives within one year, and the loss can clearly be felt in the book. Fény (Light) is a book recording the tracks of my thinking and a few visual experiences. But by the time I wrote Recorded Motion I had been changed by childbirth: I had gone through a totally different period, different experiences. Once you had lain spread out to your ultimate depths on the birth bed, you are no longer that bothered by uncovering yourself. You realise that even in the two greatest mysteries, lovemaking and childbirth there are no real secrets at all: they are our most universal and collective experiences.

In this volume you write about the experiences of childbirth, about the hospital and what you saw there, but the title given to the whole cycle is Operetta. Why did you use this title to distance the experience of childbirth and make it slightly ironic?

Because that is what the situation was like. One is always exposed to the protocols of a hospital. You cannot know how things are going to happen: you are in a totally unknown situation and milieu. On the other hand, the experience of childbirth itself also places you into a different milieu. I have often been amused at the way in which when you are pregnant suddenly a “conspiracy of mums” snaps into action: all of a sudden this is all that everybody talks about. It is not just that the normal rhythm of life changes: it vanishes into almost complete nothingness: everything comes down to motherhood. In the hospital I experienced this in an even more condensed form: as though there was nothing else in the world at all. This is what the attempt to distance was all about, because I find this absurd. As if you were on a different planet altogether. In some way the experience was liberating, elevating and amusing all at the same time. I did not have the same experience about my second birth. But hospitals have changed a lot, too, since that time.

Your second book in progress contains a different account of childbirth…

Yes, the first time I was a nervy and ignorant person when I went into the hospital; the second time there was a lot more preliminary experience I could rely on. In one way I liked being in hospital, because it is very rarely that I find myself among a totally random selection of people.

There have been several Hungarian women poets who have written about childbirth. Were you at all influenced by these poems?

Yes, inevitably so. By Zsuzsa Rakovszky, for example. I always keep her books close by. But poems by Zsuzsa Takács and Zsófia Balla have also been influential. I was also affected by Sylvia Plath, but I only read her poem Three Voices, written for radio, regarding the childbirth and hospital experience, years after my own poem. Its influence had reached me indirectly through Zsuzsa Rakovszky’s poem Women from a Ward. Plath has a very loaded connection for me, anyway. When I was in hospital for a few days before the birth of my first son, I was still working on translating a few of her poems. That was how I tried to divert my mind from my fears till the very last moment. In fact, my labour had actually started in a slow, quiet sort of way when I was still on my bed polishing some of her texts. This is how you actually work all the time: objectifying pain.

Is there a conscious decision behind the fact that you worked on a number of typically female topics in Recorded Motion? You talk about childbirth, cleaning, washing up, walking the children, hours at the playground…

I would not do that any more… Or maybe I would, but I think there was some very powerful determination in the background there. The determination to observe. With me that is partially conscious and partially learnt. My father is a biologist, and when I was little he used to point out everything to me. Children always observe things anyway, but not in the same focussed kind of way. The knowledge I now have about plants, the forest, the garden – to be sure, I don’t know plants as well as I ought to, but back then I even used to know their Latin names and I was able to talk about them at length –, this importance of observation, the examinations through the microscope or the experience of developing photographs, all of these are associations with my childhood and my father. His eyes have been sharpened by observation. He once told me that the reason why he became a biologist was that his father, a linguist, was unable to tell him which plant was which and what each was like. I have the same kind of attention as he, and this is also how my son and I work together at this moment: teaching each other mutually. Just one day ago we had left some plates on the table which stood there in the pouring sunshine, projecting some astonishingly beautiful patterns on the tablecloth. He pointed them out to me, and I carried on the game. These glass plates were thicker in the middle, there was a spot of light there and around the rim, where it was ridged, it had a skirt of light. We moved the plate around, and played chases with the light angel, as we came to call it. I had learnt about light modulators and the phenomenon of modulation in fine art, and now I passed it on to my son. So the ability to retain a child’s freshness of vision is partly a family legacy.

This childlike freshness of vision is actually a strong characteristic of your poetry, too. On the one hand, you all but impersonate plants, and describe a field full of thistles as an army. On the other, sometimes the speaker of your poems seems to be  striving to imitate the life of a plant: for its clean emptiness, for the chance to just lull herself into existence. I wonder if it is at all conscious how you approximate these two spheres of life, and how you treat all living things as of equal value.

I know from my father that cultivated plants have actually benefited, after all, from all the improvement they had undergone, because they have come to rule the earth. But there are other aggressive plants, too. One of my father’s students came to call them “deluge plants”. My father went out with his camera, and I went along with him to map out the weeds by the wayside, these deluge plants which are completely absent one year and appear en masse the next. This must be why I give this question such attention. The poem about thistles (the title is Ökörfarkkóró [Mullein]) is about the battle of these deluge plants against each other. I noticed this hostility while I was travelling, and later I phoned my father and read him the poem on the telephone to make sure there were no botanical errors in it. The specific experience alone would not have done, however, since the poem is, if not a transcript, certainly a relative to Ted Hughes’ poem Thistles, and in a way it is a sequel to that poem, based on its initial image. The naturalist in me became liberated under the influence of the contemporary British poetry that I came in contact with through university and translation. I was happy to see that you can give a precise description of a natural phenomenon or image in such a way that it is simultaneously mythical. There are numerous examples to show this from Hughes through Seamus Heaney all the way to, say, Lavinia Greenlaw. This tendency has been taken to near extremes by now: it would be interesting to count how many people have written about badgers or X-ray images… Clearly, the tendency is there in Hungarian poetry, too. Beyond the ready example of Lőrinc Szabó (who has a very similar poem called Szamártövis [Burweed]), there is Mónika Mesterházi with her upbringing on English culture, the plant-lover Anna Hajnal, there are poems by Ágnes Nemes Nagy like Paradicsomkert [Tomato Garden] and the theme dominates in the whole of László Lator’s poetry, too. But with the Hungarians the description is rarely as emphatically and intentionally specific as it is with the British.

I get the impression that this subject area appears in your poetry not simply on the level of motifs, but is the general underlying theme of your poetic world and your way of vision… As if the whole of life formed a unity and you were trying to place all living creatures on one and the same level…

The things that exist, rather than existence. What you say is interesting and I will think about whether I put things that live and exist on the same level. Because otherwise I hate personification…

…even though you do use it…

…in theory I cannot stand it… except in, say, Gerald Durrell, where I think they really work. Apart from that I do feel a kind of respect for existing things, and somehow I think that a stone can resemble humans in its suffering, just as Sándor Weöres says:  “The rock spoke, I shall move / and stamp you out, get out of my way, [..] The rock spoke / I burn, I suffer like you.” So there is suffering in lifeless things, as well. Still I don’t feel that my images are personifications… I would rather call them similes.

You have a poem in which you describe the way in which a bird devours a worm, ripping it to pieces. Or there is the poem which describes a walk one day before Christmas during which the speaker finds the body of a cat that had been run over…

Yes, I am intrigued by the world. I looked at that cat with the same minute attention as you find in Lőrinc Szabó. This can be quite a repelling feature, too. Gábor Lipták, one time warden of the Translators’ House at Balatonfüred describes that one day he was bitten on the lip by a wasp and on their way to the doctor’s Lőrinc Szabó kept asking him in excitement: “How are you feeling right now? Are starting to choke yet?” Lipták felt his role in that situation was that of being observed. Naturally, when you want to direct this attention at yourself, it is no longer all that easy. At the time of my second childbirth I had prepared myself: I took in a notebook and a pen, I lay down on the high birth bed, and put the pen and pad next to me, saying I shall write down, I must write down what I feel. But in the event the experience itself was so stormy that, of course, I did not manage to write down anything: but the pen and paper were there. I had done my bit. At the first birth I had not been prepared in the same way. I am sure I learnt the method from Lőrinc Szabó who described his heart thrombosis in this same way. I don’t know whether something like this is any use at all, because we are not doctors. A poet is not a doctor. Maybe she is a dissector, from a certain point of view, but the focus of attention is still life, all that moves and carries you along.

Perhaps this kind of attention is akin to a childlike form of vision in that you use it in describing your observations and experiences not only as subject matter but also as a formative force in the poem itself. At the same time, the reader gets the impression that behind the clarity of vision and the happiness of the moment there is always an insight into and even experience of a tremendous amount of suffering. The voice of the poetic speaker seems clear precisely because happiness is measured against the horizon of the transience of life.

This must be Lőrinc Szabó again: he has a poem about a Sphinx, called Sivatagban (In the Desert). What he describes there is something that every child knows very well. They know it but they cannot understand it. This is what I quoted to my son Gábris the other day, “A moment of your joy is worth more to me than all the suffering in the world.” (He describes the experience of writing this poem in his essay Egy marék Líbia [A Handful of Lybia] where he claims that it was indeed there and then, in the desert, that the Sphinx prompted him these two lines. He called it “frightful knowledge”. The attention of children is always erratic: they run hither and thither, they see things with great intensity, but never focus their attention on anything for an extended period of time. Perhaps that is what makes them capable of such pure pleasure. But Gábris had declared at the age of three that God had created the world all wrong because there is death in it. He is absolutely fascinated by why everything has to end. This might be one reason why I am turning more toward a Sándor Weöres type understanding of poetry: Lőrinc Szabó used to concentrate more on particular things and attempted to describe them, finding pleasure in the description itself which is, of course, also a little bit selfish. But the type of attention you find in Sándor Weöres is, in one way of looking at it, a more adult thing, while in another approach it is more childlike, akin to the existence at the base of being a newborn baby. I now tend to think that I ought to rise above particular things and reflect the flow of the whole thing… I now know why Sándor Weöres talks about gods. And I come to think more and more that emotions and impulses have faces, and the world is a toy thing of gods and demons…. And naturally, these are much more difficult to write about.

In the descriptions of Recorded Motion the aim of the poem was not the mere description: they mediate far deeper experiences. You also made some experiments, like that one where you tried to find similes for traffic.

Yes, this was an experiment together with the female topics, a part of an experimentation phase. My poem Március (March) was about washing up, but really I was trying to describe light modulators in the kitchen, the transience of this unrepeatable occurrence. (Just as a funny aside, it is worth telling you that the fee I got for this book of poems was used for buying a dish-washer… it was only just enough.) The childbirth poem was not mainly about childbirth. It would be a real feminine subject if I could write about the world of a baby, that animalesque, weird, partly perfect and partly frightening creature smelling of milk. I have repeatedly declared, in public, that it should be described, but for that you would need to note down the actions of everyday life around a baby, and I am not sure I will ever actually do that. What I am interested in at the moment is how I will be able to shift the descriptions I had worked out in earlier books into shaping these new experiences, trying to mould the Weöres type infant attention into poetry. This is a different view, a different angle. In fact it is not even a way of looking at things, just a bodily experience of life and the soul. An internal perception.

Have you never tried to translate your own poems into English?

It does not work. I have tried, but what comes out is not what I had intended. It turns out clumsy. I have given readings of poems I had translated myself, but I much prefer it if somebody else touches up the translations that I had made, making them more poetic. Clare Pollard had done translations of my poetry from raw transcripts I had given her, and I had also told her what to watch out for. That worked very well indeed. I have translated her work, too. I used to think that mutuality in translation was some sort of a gesture of respect. In fact it is nothing of the kind. It is extremely useful. While you work on the translation you are also in contact with the author. During these conversations you find your place into their world and their vision, and it becomes much easier to get an understanding of their poetry. When you place yourself in the other’s poetic world you really get in tune with them. This can be mutual, which is really a very exciting process. It was during translation that I grew to like Pollard’s poems a lot. There were poets I started to translate convinced that they were great, and found out during the translation process that they were not. You come to stumble upon subtle shifts more easily, and find that things which look graceful from the outside may not be all that well put together, after all.

Interview by Gabriella Györe

Translated by Orsolya Frank

Two poems by Anna Szabó T. on HLO
A poem by Anna Szabó T. in the Hungarian Quarterly