The Living

translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet

It would have been better had I perished with them,
than living like this, so crowded with their deaths.
Swooping down upon me like vultures,
ripping out their parts from within me.

They are right to do so. My body exists instead of theirs.
For sixteen years, I have carried
their final moments. As on the cross,
they hang upon my ambivalent heart.

I would carry them with me further still,
let their weight ferment within me,
let them, like the trees outside,
be ever growing, with renewed strength —

The living grow weak. Perhaps in the end
it is not their final minute I shall carry,
but that moment when, standing on the ditch’s edge,
they recalled the taste of a good piece of bread.

Home

translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet

The lands would disappear forevermore,
forevermore the sea would vanish,
like ebbing water, leaving me to myself,
villages never seen floating away.

Here from this wood, my shelter is built,
the corners and the walls about to be made.
Let not these columns collapse
but grow tall, become my safe abode.

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Magda Székely (1936–2007) was born in Budapest to an assimilated Jewish family. At the age of eight, she witnessed her mother being dragged away by a gendarme and a member of the Arrow Cross, the Hungarian fascist movement during World War II. Székely was hidden in a Catholic monastery and then placed with Swabian peasants until the end of the war. Székely attained her degree in Hungarian and Bulgarian languages in 1959 at Eötvös Loránd University. From 1969 to 1991, she worked as an editor at the prestigious state publishing house Európa Könyvkiadó, then at a new publishing enterprise launched after 1989, Belvárosi Könyvkiadó. She published her first volume of poems Kőtabla (Stone tablet) in 1962. Her second volume Átváltozás (Transformation) appeared in 1975. Altogether she was the author of nine volumes of poetry, and was the recipient of numerous prizes, including the Kossuth Prize in 2005. She also translated from English, Czech, Bulgarian, and French. The final years of her life were spent in relative seclusion, devoted completely to her writing.

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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