In the second paragraph of his introduction, George Szirtes offers a jaw-dropping overview of Krisztina Tóth’s prolificity and creative drive:
… [she] has written nine books of poetry, ten books of prose including novels and collections of short stories, and over twenty books for children as well as a couple of stage plays. She has worked with stained glass, translated French poetry, curated exhibitions, won numerous top honours, Hungarian and otherwise, and been translated into at least eighteen languages.
I quote this at length because it makes unambiguously clear the artistic importance of Tóth’s work and the regard in which she is held on the world stage.
And yet, to the best of my knowledge, only a novel, a couple of volumes of short fiction, and a play (included in a volume featuring four other writers) have been translated into English. This meagre selection is now joined by My Secret Life, and while it’s heartening to finally have some of Tóth’s poetry in English, a Selected Poems that taps out at just 58 pages of poetry (Szirtes’s introduction pushes the volume as a whole past 70) – drawn from just five of her collections – seems miserly. Unless this is merely a taster and Bloodaxe are planning a more substantial volume, perhaps a Collected. Such an offering would be more than welcome.
Still, 32 poems across those 58 pages are all we have for now. There is some mitigation to be had from the fact that the selection is made by the author herself and from the off it’s obvious that there’s no exaggeration to Szirtes’ introduction: Tóth is indeed a major literary talent. ‘East European Triptych’ opens proceedings, the voice of experience (Tóth is a reluctant exile from Orbán’s Hungary) stark even as it achieves an abraded poetry. Here are the opening lines of each of its sections:
We spring to our feet when they call our names
on the loudspeaker. Our names
are misspelt and mispronounced,
but we smile enthusiastically.
We’re carrying soap from hotels,
we leave too early for the station.
…
I know where you live. I’m familiar with the city.
I’m familiar too with the black rain.
Your mother would lie and sunbathe on the roof,
in summer you’d swim in the gravel pit.
I remember people who’d lost their legs
who made their home in shelters and doorways.
…
My name is Alina Moldova.
I come from East Europe,
I am 170 centimetres tall,
my life expectancy is 56 years.
My mouth is full of amalgam fillings,
my heart full of inherited anxieties.
A sense of foreignness hangs heavy over the collection:
I saw your eyes on the Metro in a stranger’s face.
There are days when everything reminds me of something else.
[‘Send Me a Smile’]
I remember nothing of Maribor,
nothing that I should remember.
All I know I have learned from others:
I don’t remember those three days.
I remember nothing of Ljubljana either
only that you promised you would come.
Ljubljana is just a hotel to me.
Ljubljana means simply: you’re not there.
[‘Tyrannosaurus Rex’]
Family, dysfunctional relationships and the diaspora emerge as major themes, Tóth using provocatively grim imagery to interrogate these themes.
It’s the way the unsuspecting seventh
generation of the family gives birth
to the lion-faced, skin-blotched infant,
the way the obscene graffiti still shows
through the freshly painted outside wall …
[‘How Are You All?’]
You can’t tie the past to a tree.
It will chew through the strings …
There have been odd moments of
relaxed and intimate silence
but then it squirms, howls, bites the earth
and wants to come home. But where’s home?
[‘Homeward’]
It was a hall in any country of the world and I stood
in front of the grey monitor with its gentle hum
and gazed at my grandmother’s face, made up
as if for a journey …
[‘Any Country in the World’]
‘Any Country in the World’ arguably represents the synthesis of this Selected. It is specific in its evocation of the experience of one exiled from Hungary, yet universal in its harrowing depiction of grief exacerbated by petty bureaucracy. It foregrounds the figure of the grandmother – she appears in several other poems and is seldom a cuddly or comforting presence – even as the narrator has to make her premature departure from the crematorium to attend to the world of the living.
As subtle as it is powerful, the quotidian always seeming to be on the verge of offering a glimpse of the metaphysical, ‘Any Country in the World’ also demonstrates Tóth’s facility with the longer line and the lyrical phrase which unfurls through half a page or more.
Firework displays of technique are plentiful, from ‘Sleeper’ (consisting of a single sentence worked through a rising ‘Bolero’-like development of image and political subtext which becomes increasingly intense and makes you wonder if Tóth can sustain it; spoiler: she does) and the astoundingly focused ‘River of Sounds’ to the sneaky and quietly unsettling variations of ‘Song of the Secret Life’. The book’s final poem, ‘Rainy Summer’, another sustained work of imagistic brilliance that makes a virtue of the long line, is also a standout.
Indeed, there is nothing on offer here that is subpar, let alone weak or disappointing. It’s just that there’s precious little of it in terms of the poet’s career-long output. A decade ago, Bloodaxe published Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s New Selected Poems in a substantial 400-page bilingual edition. Krisztina Tóth deserves similar.
Neil Fulwood
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