Posts by Owen Good

Translation Tuesday: ‘So Long, Adolescence!’ by Réka Mán-Várhegyi

We’ll leave our mum and dad behind, we’ll leave their poverty and their slothfulness, their gestures and their misery all behind.

Full of dark humor and vibrant details, today’s Translation Tuesday, by Réka Mán-Várhegyi and translated by Owen Good, shows the inner workings of a Hungarian family. Dealing with obesity, sibling relationships, and emerging sexuality, this gripping story captures that uncomfortably liminal time known as adolescence.

‘It’ll be beach weather at the weekend,’ our mum squeaked. ‘Get your swimming costumes ready, we’re going to the lake. Dad, have you checked the batteries in the cooler bag? Does it still work? We’ll not miss it if we don’t buy a new one. No point in wasting money.’

Panni was staring at her hand. I was counting the strips in the rotting wainscot on the dining room wall. We didn’t put up any protest but we didn’t want to go to the lake and they knew it. We didn’t want to lie in the sun in swimsuits, we didn’t want to soak in the water, and, most of all, we didn’t want to gawp at jet-skis. Every summer, jet-skis tore up and down the puddle-sized lake with pornstar-esque girls and boys on them, our classmates, but at least in school they didn’t shriek all day long.

I was born into a fat, hemorrhoidal family as the younger member of fraternal twins. By our teenage years, Panni and I had turned into sluggish potato sacks, we’d become our own parents one size smaller. Later on it became clear that our features weren’t overly similar, but the differences between us were hidden by the fat, just like our parents. When I was seventeen the spare pounds didn’t hurt so much as the fact that I didn’t have any distinguishing features. After class Panni and I often went to the wood, we sat on our coats at the foot of a tree, smoked a cigarette each and scratched our faces with thorns. We both wanted a proper scar. But these were just pathetic thin scratches. They healed in half a day. Especially on my skin—which was positively brown compared to Panni’s milky white—when I wiped the blood off you couldn’t even see them.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: BALLERINA by Kinga Tóth

in the hole is the wire / the wire coiled / around the girl / like a lace collar

“BALLERINA” is a poem from Hungarian writer Kinga Tóth’s book, ALL MACHINE. Tóth is not only a poet, but a visual and multimedia artist, some of whose visual work was featured in the Summer 2016 issue of Asymptote. The sound poetry Tóth produced for ALL MACHINE can serve as a fitting prelude (or accompaniment) to reading “BALLERINA.” We hear a whirring, disjointed medley of voices surrounded by the squeaking of an unoiled machine, much like the rotating figure in the music box of the poem. 

Also included here are some illustrations from ALL MACHINE and photos from Tóth’s live work. Of them, Eva Heisler has written, “While the typed phrases in Tóth’s visual poems are a mix of English, German, and Hungarian, the poet insists that translation is not necessary, that legibility is not the point; words in her poem-drawings shake their signifying function and border on visual stammers, the line spacing often squeezed, the lines tightly stacked, and the pages factory-tuned.”

Kinga Toth, cover, 1._balerina (1)

1

the object’s shape material
regular 10×10 wood
top and bottom parts
joined with metal hinges
rotating a cylinder
in the centre a hole where
sharp fixings
are screwed
its internal design
delicately lineated
including curves
in the centre of the cylinder
(and opposite too)
is wire knotted
to hooks inside the object
the other end
positioned on a platform
onto a turning rod
wound to 2/3
with the opening and
closing of the lid the taut
rod scrapes against
the object’s inner wall/border
upon lowering against
the opposite the aim
of the first phase is to scour
the girl out from within

READ MORE…