Mostly About Anna Terék

So. greenlight BOOKSTORE (which you can find here: https://www.greenlightbookstore.com/event/evening-continental-literary-magazine) is going to do 

An Evening With The Continental Literary Magazine 

on Monday, February 21, 2022 - 7:30pm. (Registration is required, btw.) They're going to have Editor-in-Chief Sándor Jászberényi and contributors Lance Henson, Anna Terék, and Tomáš Zmeškal in attendance. I'm thinking about signing up, but (1) 7:30 pm on a Monday night is not a very good time for me and (2) I'm pretty gun shy vis-à-vis putting my face onto a Zoom (or whatever Zoom-like platform they are using) meeting even with family members, let alone strangers. And I fear that this is going to be a low-attendance kind of thing, which just makes it worse. (If I knew in advance that I be one of one hundred, I would be less intimidated. But a new Hungarian-centric literary magazine online event? I wouldn't be surprised if only a dozen people showed up. 

But I'm trying to get my courage worked up for it, as I'd really like to be a witness to what these people have to say.

I'm slightly familiar with Sándor Jászberényi, since I read his Introduction and his Interview With Noam Chomsky in the first issue of The Continental. (Highly recommended.) I know nothing about the other three participants, so I thought I'd check them out a bit. I started with Anna Terék, partially because her name made me think of Anna Trebanko, the superhot opera singer I've been listening to for a couple of years, partially because she's a poet, and I like poets.

It only took a minute to find her blog, Anna Terék Anna (https://annaterek.wordpress.com/about/), and I started looking through the entries posted there. They seemed to come in only two varieties: images and poems written in languages I unfortunately do not understand: Hungarian and Russian (I think)...at least. Maybe others. I gave up after looking at a few. But some of those images...

Well, that was my kind of stuff. Which only made me want to read her poetry even more. 

So I had a thought: what if I just ran the Hungarian words through Google Translate? It probably wouldn't work...but it was worth a try. And it certainly beat the hell out of me taking some number of years to learn Hungarian. 

Here's what came out when I picked a relatively short poem:


Snow

I step out the door naked, 

touching the colored nylon stripes hanging 

in front of the door with my fingers. 

The window was already overgrown with icicles. 

I walk in, 

the snow bites my feet, 

my two legs slowly reddening upwards, 

as if some poison had started from them 

towards my heart, 

on sharp lines. 

I want to lie on my stomach, 

but I was afraid of my breasts. 

It hurts the cold. 

So rather, lying on my back, 

I press my neck into the snow 

and sweep the snow on my stomach with both hands. 

My body is slowly cooling down. 

It melts the snow around me for digging, 

I think I can hear the tiny cracks in the blood vessels as my blood freezes to crystalline. 

From then on every other day, 

I step out the kitchen door and dig myself into the snow, 

naked. 

Ivan comes after me all the time, 

looking in glasses at the snowball I lie under, 

always waiting for thirty-two minutes, 

giving the snow a chance. 

Then he digs out. 

He doesn’t swear, without a word 

he breaks the icy snow, 

sweeps away, 

lifts my blushed body, 

rubs it a little, 

then wraps it in a sheet 

and takes it back to the house. 

Every day, 

under the snow, 

I regret something. 

This is how I prepare for heaven, 

seeing if I can open it slowly, 

with this cold grief,

making my way into impossibility for myself. 

I’m always a little scared 

that one day Ivan will break the icy snow with his shovel 

and he won’t take care of me 

and break my face pretty slowly.

https://annaterek.wordpress.com/2014/08/10/gaspar/

Of course I have no way of knowing where Anna Terék put her line breaks, so I just did what seemed right to me. And you know...I think this reads well. And it certainly got me interested in Ms. Terék's poetry. Unfortunately, so far as I have been able to discern there is no book length English translation of her poetry...despite the fact that she has published several books. I thought that that kind of shit didn't happen in the 21st century? Well...note to self: next lifetime learn Hungarian at a young age and get a job translating Magyarian poetry and prose into English. 

With a little digging, I found a few other Anna Terék poems which had been translated into English online, though:

"Back On The Sun" can be found at https://www.1handclapping.online/post/anna-terék-a-poem

"Rain in Skopje" can be found at 

https://hlo.hu/new-work/anna-terek-rain-in-skopje-poem.html

There's also an article on Anna Terék's poetry entitled "Suffering, Trauma, and Death in Anna Terék’s Poetry Book Halott nők [Dead Women]" by Magdalena GARBACIK-BALAKOWICZ which can be found at https://sciendo.com/pdf/10.2478/ausp-2021-0008

and an interview with the Divine Ms. T. which can be found at https://hlo.hu/interview/anna-terek-in-order-for-an-attitude-to-become-poetry-i-have-to-process-it-for-myself-first.html

I guess that's it for now...but I'm still on the trail. News as it happens.