Fugue

translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet

To eat grapes in bed, in January.
To stitch and sew what is not needed.
To bid farewell in the melting darkness.
To be reborn as we say goodbye.

To stifle the fever of new beginnings.
To clean, before travelling.
To not believe in God. To live with God.
To hope. To renounce everything.

To not fear death, solitude.
To not be with others. To not break off.
To touch each other with the beam
of a gaze. To remember. To remain.

November 1956 

translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet                                                                            

Autumn shot through with bullets. In place of
the heart, the leaves’ absence
shows through.

*

Their edges did not spin together.
The wound: timeless
time between dying and death.

*

One season on a leaf. Shroud.
The shadow of green silk or
absence white as snow.

*

It died before
it could have fallen. Would it had lived
without the fatal bullet?

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Zsuzsa Beney (1930–2006) was a physician by profession and continued her practice up until the age of seventy. Beney’s first poem was published in an anthology in 1969, her first volume of poetry, Tűzföld (Fireland), appeared in 1970. Altogether, she published nine volumes of poetry, several novels, and four volumes of essays. She also taught at several universities within Hungary, receiving a PhD in literary studies in 1993, and was made associate professor in 1998. She was awarded the highly prestigious Radnóti Prize in 2004.

Ottilie Mulzet has translated over nineteen volumes of Hungarian poetry and prose from contemporary authors such as László Krasznahorkai, Szilárd Borbély, Gábor Schein, György Dragomán, László Földényi, István Vörös, Edina Szvoren, and others. Her translation of László Krasznahorkai’s Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming was awarded the National Book Award in Translated Literature in 2019. Her translation of Krisztina Tóth’s Eye of the Monkey is forthcoming from Seven Stories Press in October 2025.

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These poems will appear in Under a Pannonian Sky: Ten Women Poets from Hungary, edited by Ottilie Mulzet (forthcoming from Seagull Books, December 2025). They are published here are as part of the thirteenth installment of our “Literature & Democracy column,” which presents writers’ responses to the threats to democracy around the world.

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