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- Herausgeber: Arc Publications
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
Mila Haugova has written a moving book about the farewell of loved ones and the slipping away of one's own life. The starting point is a double loss: her mother dies and her lover goes his own way. During her dead mother's childhood and distant past, the loved ones have faced a hoped-for future. Now only a reduced daily life remains, shot through with ever present memories. Haugova overlays the departed, and now recalculated, images of childhood and days spent with her lover. Is it possible to find some memory of lost warmth in this cold world? Re-encounter and farewells are one in Haugova's poetry: there are intimate companions in the absence of loved ones, in the acceptance of their disappearance, which over time develop a cathartic force that makes possible new love.
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ETERNAL TRAFFIC
Published by Arc Publications,
Nanholme Mill, Shaw Wood Road
Todmorden OL14 6DA, UK
www.arcpublications.co.uk
Original poems copyright © Mila Haugova, 2020
Translation copyright © James Sutherland-Smith, 2020Introduction copyright © James Sutherland-Smith, 2020
Copyright in the present edition © Arc Publications, 2020
The ‘Dormi’ poems in this volume have been selected from Biele rukopisy, published by Ars Poetica in 2007, and the remaining poems from Miznutie anjelov, published by Slovenský spisovateľ in 2008.
978 1911469 60 5 (pbk)
978 1911469 61 2 (hbk)
978 1911469 62 9 (ebk)
Design by Tony Ward
Printed in Great Britain by T.J. International Ltd,
Padstow, Cornwall
Cover picture:
‘The Green Heart’ by Igor Krumpal, by kind permission of the artist
This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part of this book may take place without the written permission of Arc Publications.
This book has been published with the financial support of the SLOLIA Commission, Literary Information Center, Bratislava.
Arc Publications Translations series
Series Editor: Jean Boase-Beier
CONTENTS
Translator’s Introduction
fromWHITE MANUSCRIPTS
Dormi 1
•
Dormi 1
Dormi 2
•
Dormi 2
Dormi 3
•
Dormi 3
Dormi 4
•
Dormi 4
Dormi 5
•
Dormi 5
Dormi 6
•
Dormi 6
Dormi 7
•
Dormi 7
Dormi 8
•
Dormi 8
Dormi 9
•
Dormi 9
fromTHE DISAPPEARNCEOF ANGELS
‘Akoby…’
•
‘As if…’
Bez
•
Without
‘Vziať reč…’
•
‘To take hold…’
Levitcia
•
Levitation
Neha dialky je nepriestrelná
•
The Tenderness of Distance
Extáza
•
Ecstasy
‘Nezabudni na nás…’
•
‘Don’t forget us… ‘
‘… chcem aby…’
•
‘… I want you to know…’
Fragmenty jednej…
•
Fragments of the One Language…
Fragmenty miznutia…
•
Fragments … Vanishing Language…
Fragmenty miznúcej
•
Fragments … Vanishing Speech …
Fragmenty miznúceho…
•
Fragments … Vanishing Childhood
Reè z miznúcich…
•
Speech … Vanishing Fragments
Terè pasce reèi…
•
Target of a Speech Trap
‘Ako si zvykám…’
•
‘How I get used to it…’
Piano Nobile
•
Piano Nobile
Priesvitnos
•
Translucency
Plant room I
•
Plant Room I
Plant room II
•
Plant Room II
Plant room III
•
Plant Room III
Plant room IV
•
Plant Room IV
Plant room V
•
Plant Room V
Plant room VI
•
Plant Room VI
Plant room VII
•
Plant Room VII
Plant room VIII
•
Plant Room VIII
Plant room IX
•
Plant Room IX
Canto triste
•
Canto Triste
‘pripravené strieľať…’
•
‘Ready to shoot…’
‘raj je záhrada…’
•
‘paradise is a garden…
V tráve
•
In the Grass
Ako
•
How
‘… akoby…’
•
‘… as if an upturned…’
‘nepatriť len’
•
‘don’t belong only to love…’
Zimný telefón
•
Winter Telephone
Izba
•
Room
Srna za ohradou sna
•
Roe Deer Behind the Fence…
Crimson alzarín
•
Alzarin Crimson
Biographical Notes
INTRODUCTION
Mila Haugová was born on 14 June 1942 in Budapest. Although her mother was Hungarian, Mila has lived the best part of her life in the Slovak village of Zajačia dolina not far from Levice in Central Slovakia. In the immediate post-war years, in common with many other families in Central Europe, Mila’s family moved from place to place. From 1951 to 1953 her father was imprisoned after being found guilty of “economic sabotage”. Mother and daughter were forced to move to very modest surroundings which they only left following her father’s amnesty in the wake of the deaths of Stalin and the Czechoslovak leader, Klement Gottwald. In 1954 her family found a house in Zajačia Dolina, where her mother lived until her death.
Mila studied in the Agricultural College in Nitra until 1964, and it was actually at this time a refuge for kindred spirits, people who had not been chosen by other colleges. The eventual fates of her fellow agricultural students who marched to manual labour, pulling turnips, mucking out pigs and milking cows, were film, opera direction, house design, literary journalism in Brno, Vienna, California and so on.
After college Mila was employed in an agronomics organisation gaining an expertise which informs her poetry as can be seen in this translation. Later she had a position teaching in an agricultural technical school in Levice. In 1967 she married and for a short period she emigrated to Canada, but returned after finding it impossible to write. She worked as a teacher in Levice and Ivanka pri Dunaji, and then moved to Bratislava in 1972 following the birth of her daughter. She worked in an elementary school and immersed herself in literary work until her first collection, Hrdzavdá hlina (Rusty Clay) in 1980, which she published under a pseudonym, Mila Srnková. This pseudonym is recalled both in her 2016 collection, Srna pozerajúca Polárku (Roe Deer looking at the Pole Star) and in a key poem, ‘Priesvitnost’ (Translucency) in the current selection when a doe is killed by a car in which the poet is a passenger. Throughout her writing life Mila’s poetry has moved in a universe parallel to, but not converging with, her life.
An increasing commitment to literature resulted event-ually in her taking unpaid leave from her school, engaging in intensive translation from Hungarian and German, taking evening classes in English, and forming lasting friendships with a number of writers including the poet, Ivan Štrpka. She published two further collections resulting in the growth of her reputation, and the leading critic, Valér Mikula, observed, “We should prepare ourselves for the fact that from now on poetry will not be important for Haugová, but that Haugová will be important for poetry”. From that time she has been a prolific and dominant force in Slovak poetry with almost thirty individual collections of poetry to date. She has been translated into a number of languages with significant selections of her work in French and German and in 2003, the present publisher brought out a selection in English, Scent of the Unseen, devoted to her work in the 1990s.
From 1986 to 1996 Mila was editor of the important literary journal, Romboid. She became dissatisfied with the anecdotal nature of her work and her fourth collection, Cisté dni (Pure Days), did not appear until 1990, signalling not only artistic but also personal changes in her life. Although this collection, too, was well-received, Mila’s mature style is not fully evident until Praláska (Ancient Love) in 1991 when she began to delve deep into the history and prehistory of humankind, resisting the obvious attractions of a newly available west. Praláska introduced the persona of Alfa whose presence dominates that collection and who recurs throughout subsequent collections. Other elements that this collection introduced include motifs derived from the classical world and biblical worlds: Oedipus Rex, Pompeii, Salomé and Cassandra, the last as the prophetess destined not to be believed and an important identity in Mila’s work.
Mila’s later collections from the 1990s consolidated the gains made in Praláska. Syntactically, most of her work moved away from the standard sentence towards the juxtaposition of fragmentary phrases becoming paratactic in utterance. Her poems, although carefully constructed, have something of the character of notebook entries, often dated or dedicated to an individual.
