dumbfoundry

Ágnes Nemes Nagy (George Szirtes in the Guardian):

At the end of the second world war, there was a brief moment when younger Hungarian writers began to assert themselves before the communist takeover. At this time, a young woman called Ágnes Nemes Nagy, and her then husband, the critic Balázs Lengyel, launched a magazine called Újhold, meaning New Moon. The best of the old and new writers flocked to it, but the new regime considered it too individualistic, too bourgeois, and took appropriate steps not only to close it down, but to ban its contributors from publishing.

So it was that the young Nemes Nagy found herself excluded from the literary life of the country. She taught in schools and Lengyel was imprisoned. [...]

I started translating some of her poems, the clearer, shorter, more epigrammatic ones first, since they seemed more cloudy in Maxton's translation than I thought they needed to be. Their ambiguity lay in their apparent clarity. They were rhymed, often in quatrains, with a firm metrical hand and the occasional line left almost orphaned, hanging like a thread into some other darker territory. I was certain the poems' power lay precisely in their formal structure: in the iron coincidence of rhyme, in the tight-fitting metre.

Two poems here.

This entry was posted by eeksypeeksy on Monday, May 17, 2004 at 9:42 AM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.