Shadowgrass

translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet

I set about to put everything in order:
to mow the lawn, but first I had
to disentangle the twenty-five metres of extension cord.
One end I tied to an arbour vitae
(Oh, how the route passes from soul to soul)
with another (there were at least four).
I headed back to the house.
Evening closed in around me and I gave up.
Stay — I stood there — stay as it is,
let it grow ever further and scatter forth,
growing onto the sky, may the shadowgrass
Scatter forth its seeds,
which I myself have cast.

The Mouse

                   for Zsuzsa Beney

translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet

In the book of the poet who lives no more,
next to a verse where he writes of a woman,
(she too lives no more) like a dandelion
is preserved the pawprint of my cat:

stealthily creeping there, for the crack
between the pages was always exciting,
waiting for the mouse at once to come out,
(the cat too has long since gone missing)

and truly there in the depths of the paper’s secret
tunnel, something flutters, incessant:
something we have left between the leaves:
the accidental there impressed.

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Krisztina Tóth (1967–) studied sculpture at the Vocational High School of Fine and Applied Arts in Budapest, graduating in 1986. After working briefly in a museum, she enrolled at the Faculty of Arts at Eötvös Loránd University, spending a study period in Paris, where she began translating French poetry. She completed her university degree in Hungarian in 1992 and was employed by the Budapest French Institute starting in 1994. From 1998 onward, she has been a freelance writer. Tóth has published nine volumes of poetry, eleven volumes of prose, and dozens of books for children, and her work has been translated into eighteen languages. Her novel A majom szeme (Eye of the Monkey; English translation by Ottilie Mulzet, Seven Stories Press, 2025) was a bestseller in Hungary in 2022. Tóth’s creativity includes not only her literary work but her achievements as an accomplished stained-glass artist, as well as her translations of over twenty volumes from French.

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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