Fabó Kinga (1953–) Works Translations   alb bg de el en eo es fr gl it ro sr hu

Biography

Kinga Fabó, (Hungarian) poet, linguist, essayist.

http://www.szepiroktarsasaga.hu/kinga

Kinga Fabó, Hungarian poet, linguist and essayist has written five books of poetry but I didn’t know her work until someone else asked if 1 would translate a couple of her poems. People do occasionally ask this — so few of us translate poetry from Hungarian after all — and sometimes there is time, and the poems are powerful enough to demand that at least I try. That was the case with these two poems that immediately struck me with their vigour, virtuosity and intensity. Both poems are about the conventional apparatus of womanhood and presentation, mirror and girdle being associated with the process of being appraised. It is actually the girdle that speaks in one of them: ‘This sorry item, all for some man to woo or bride them.’ The promiscuous mirror is born out of the same disappointment and fury at circumstances, but is less gendered and will wipe out any face before it. The poems are in effect dialogues with an invisible other, racy in diction, almost chatty but at the same time metaphysical. It is the blend of fury and wit that determine the emotional key but it is the form and rhyme that lend both the sharp, hard-edged, proverbial, almost Villonesque quality I was trying to catch.

George Szirtes’s introduction to two of Kinga Fabó’s poems translated by him, published in Modern Poetry in Translation, 2017

(Editor of this page: P. T.)