The first thing one notices about Ottilie Mulzet’s substantial volume of modern Hungarian poetry—focused on ten women born between 1922 and 1972—is the unfamiliar word “Pannonian” in the title. Not “Hungarian”; not “Magyar.” Pannonia was the name given to a province of the Roman Empire that included present-day western Hungary and parts of Austria, Slovakia, and the Balkans; the Pannonian Plain is another name for the Carpathian Basin, watershed of the Danube River embraced by three mountain ranges. “Pannonian” has the effect of estranging us from what we think we know about Hungary, an enigmatic, landlocked nation whose history since the early Iron Age has involved a spectacle of warrior tribes, invasions from the east, occupations, kings, and emperors, and whose language is native to only 13 million people. It is a Uralic tongue not cognate with Indo-European; on the entire continent, only Finnish, Estonian, and a handful of other Baltic dialects share common roots with Hungarian.

Perhaps “Pannonian” is meant to underscore Hungary’s place in Europe—despite its strangeness—as a legatee of the Romans, whose ruins undergird so much of the continent. (Budapest was then known as Aquincum.) In any case, “Pannonian” seems to throw us so far back in time that we are forced to reconsider what we know of a country whose recent century of war, partitioning, and multiple regime changes has culminated in today’s infamous “illiberal democracy,” celebrated by the far right in the US and Europe.

What we think we know about a place is always, in any case, troubled by the poets—and Hungarian poets, with a few exceptions, have not gained much purchase in English translation. According to The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics,Hungary’s literary tradition goes back to its founding as a state around AD 1000, preceded by innumerable centuries of tribal folklore and shamanistic songs. In the roughly five hundred years before the Reformation, poets wrote in Latin, but even when Hungarian poetry in the vernacular established itself as a source of national identity and pride, it took the ravages of two world wars to bring it to the notice of the wider world. Attila József and Miklós Radnóti are two of the likeliest names an American reader might recognize, both born in the first decade of the twentieth century and both dead before the end of World War II. József lost his parents at a young age, suffered from mental illness, and took his own life. The Jewish Radnóti was shot by a firing squad of the Royal Hungarian Army during a forced march and buried in a mass grave with drafts of poems in his pockets; they were published after his body was exhumed.

I can’t deny that the Hungarian poetry I’ve read in translation has been, though masterful, scarifying. This impression was further cemented with the publication of Mulzet’s translations of the great Szilárd Borbély, born in 1963, who died by his own hand in 2014. Final Matters (2019),a selection of his poetry, addresses the savage murder of his mother in a home invasion in 2000; his autofictional novel, The Dispossessed (2016), is so disturbing that I could not finish it. Mulzet, the translator of most of the Nobel Prize winner László Krasznahorkai’s novels (notably inclined to apocalypticism), has now collected these ten poets, working with six other translators, partly to correct the impression that the country’s female poets are few and far between.

But the book also serves as a welcome corrective to some aesthetic biases of English readers. Far from being confessional, the women of Under a Pannonian Sky present a poetic idiom that cultivates silence and irony, one that is haunted by history and personal tragedy without being beholden to identity. It is an idiom that explores what it means to be a soul on earth enduring the tyranny of circumstance—what Yeats called “the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast.”

There is no question that most of Mulzet’s poets have witnessed and experienced extreme suffering. Six survived World War II: the preeminent Ágnes Nemes Nagy, who stands at the head of the anthology, was active in the Hungarian Resistance. Zsuzsa Beney, who was a practicing pulmonary specialist in addition to being a woman of letters, lost her husband and son in her thirties. (My Internet sleuthing with Google Translate could dredge up no more than this; unlike us, Hungarian critics, interviewers, and obituary writers shy away from divulging much about the private lives of their subjects.) Ágnes Gergely was haunted by the deportation and death of her Jewish father. Gizella Hervay survived the war but suffered the suicide of her estranged husband in 1976 and the death of their fifteen-year-old son in the 1977 Bucharest earthquake. (She took her own life in 1982.) At the age of eight Magda Székely watched as fascists marched her Jewish mother away; she herself was subsequently hidden in a convent for the duration of the war. Mulzet notes in her introduction, “She spent the last part of her life, devoted to her writing, in relative seclusion.”

Poets born after the war shouldered the burden of their families’ nightmares; some were penalized by the Communist Party’s campaign to cleanse literature of anything perceived as bourgeois; some were marked by their status as an ethnic and linguistic minority stranded in Romania after the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire into separate nations. The youngest poets in the anthology grapple with several layers of cultural erasure enabled by the two world wars, Hungary’s alliance with the genocidal Nazis, the Soviet takeover, the failed resistance of 1956, the cold war, the fall of the USSR, and the rise of Orbánism. They are the scribes, Mulzet suggests, of phantom borders and obsolete regimes.

The reticence of this poetry is at least partly grammatical. As Mulzet writes in her afterword to Borbély’s Final Matters:

The poet makes full use of the elliptical possibilities of the Hungarian language, in which subject and object (and sometimes both) can be eliminated from a sentence, a predicate can be virtually orphaned at the tail end of a statement, or sentences can remain extremely fragmentary. The Hungarian or central European reader (as to a certain degree this is a regional feature and not just a linguistic one) is more tolerant of these lacunae, perhaps more used to them, or more trained in filling in the blanks.

Though translation can’t always imitate these linguistic effects, the imagery in this anthology suggests similar elisions, invoking insomniacs and dreamers, ghosts and atmospheres, absurdist reductions. “My secret life is that of a cat sneaking between parked cars,” writes Krisztina Tóth. “I know that face from somewhere:/one hundred years ago, or this afternoon,” writes Zsuzsa Rakovszky. “It is not only the newborn who have their dead./It is not only the dead who leave someone behind,” writes Zsófia Balla. “To live for a while, or to keep watching until the end./To know which older brother we are meant to replace.”

Magda Székely, the poet who as a child was sheltered in a convent during World War II, offers a case in point. Her “The Forest” is composed of four quatrains, one for each of the seasons, beginning with spring. The tone is light and rapturous, and sustained to a startling close:

Silent is the winter forest.
Snow, snow, on the trees, the ground,
who falls into the snow’s embrace,
shall ever see it falling from above.

Thus is our aesthetic trance abruptly chilled, as with Emily Dickinson’s “zero at the bone.” (Székely has often been compared to Dickinson.) Simplicity suddenly veers into indirection, beauty into shock as she shifts us to the viewpoint of the dead. Meanwhile, in a dialectical reversal of “The Forest,” the poem “Snow” in its entirety reads:

If it snows If the snow falls
onto the ground if the snow falls down
onto the wounded lowlands then
there shall arise a higher formation

A similar compression and indirection can be found in Gergely, whose “Cemetery in Pannonia” is composed of quatrains echoing a refrain, the address of the cemetery, whose significance to the writer is withheld:

Large are the gardens of Rakoskeresztúr,
Kerepes and Farkasrét—
but how small dear and intimate a place is
6 Kozma Street.

Catholic Cemetery
any Catholic will take—
but we don’t know who’s buried at
6 Kozma Street.

At the end of this incantation, Gergely can conclude only with a paradox:

The mere statistic of your being
represents no increase.
Here you lived—even more dead than
6 Kozma Street.

Hervay’s mode of compression is more ferocious, as in “Superior Pink Toilet Soap,” a poem that hammers on the words “superior” and “inferior,” suggesting the indignities of her dire, impoverished childhood:

superior pink toilet soap
on the coal heaver’s pink bathtub
his daughters in white pleated skirts
in state sanatorium
a five-lei bill on the desk
in superior housing blocks
on an inferior village’s edge
five lei in the schoolmistress’ hand
on a superior lorry
inferior unqualified workers
in their inferior village sacks
loaves of superior city bread
inferior five-lei lives
in superior rhythmic clapping
in lipstick stuttering
drafted into the army naked

Some of these poets take on personas or develop allegories: Beney writes through the Orpheus–Eurydice myth; Zsuzsa Takács invents a character named Blind Hope. Rakovszky’s muse is a publicly sourced online archive called Fortepan that was originally developed to store historical photographs of Budapest. Her poem “Fortepan: Forest,” an ekphrasis of one such photograph (“a spring pours out spume onto pipe of rusted iron;/no blue trail markings along this route”), could be contrasted with Székely’s “The Forest” or Nemes Nagy’s ultralyrical “Trees.” (In the latter, “one must learn the unsung deeds/of heroism of the trees.”) Even where these poets address the most mundane subject matter or the most universal imagery, there are telling differences; not even a poem about trees is ahistorical.

It does not always seem that way to readers who balk at the lyric ambition to be universal, to empty out the self. After the war, Nemes Nagy was at the forefront of a movement called Újhold, or the New Moon poets, named after a literary journal they published from 1946 to 1948. The Marxist critic György Lukács condemned it as “the ivory-tower protests of an isolated individual self.” Mulzet writes, “After further condemnation at the First Writers’ Congress of 1949, the doors to publication were slammed shut in the face of its authors, who often returned to print only during the cultural relaxation of the 1960s.” As a result Nemes Nagy, one of Hungary’s most important postwar poets, received scant recognition in her lifetime. But while the Communist campaign to promote proletarian literature—a campaign that banned titles and denuded libraries and, in the case of Czechoslovakia, involved the pulping of 27 million books—belongs to the past, our present has bred its own monsters. In 2021, for the crime of pointing out the gender disparity in the Hungarian literature curriculum, Tóth was subjected to a blitz of hatred on social media. She found excrement in her mailbox in Budapest and subsequently moved abroad with her family.

While there is scant representation of women in Hungarian anthologies and the country’s Digital Literature Academy—Mulzet notes that only fifteen of the academy’s 179 members are female—it has become somewhat fraught in the English-speaking world to essentialize a single gender. (Early in her career Elizabeth Bishop became notorious for scoffing at women’s anthologies.) Can there be any formal grounds on which to segregate a collection of this sort, especially since the poets themselves have, for the most part, embraced a negative identity, deflecting the self? But the question more likely demonstrates our American complacency; selves may be deflected but not extinguished. Even as pure a poem as Székely’s “The Forest” prompts us to wonder whose ghosts she may be thinking of when she imagines them looking at snow falling.

These women write as daughters, granddaughters, mothers, and sisters: immutable categories whether foregrounded in verse or not. Are family relations not formal categories? Some of the most moving poems in the book are about these relationships—which, given the recent history of mass murder, can’t be dismissed with an emancipatory wave. Anna T. Szabó (born in 1972), in a long poem about the pain and excitement of childbirth, writes that her baby “slides through the eye of the needle.” In her “Persephone,” the queen of Hades speaks like a little girl:

Good Mamika still cooks meals
for Papa and for me.
The sweat still wets her forehead,
glasses mist so she can’t see.

And in Szabó’s “Protocol,” the narrator finds her dead grandmother’s pathology report and suddenly remembers helping her into her bath: “She was beautiful and eighty.” But the poem goes further than just sentimentalizing the scars and seams of the body that gave birth to the writer’s father. It is really about the language we use: the language of the pathologists (“They wrote about the texture of her lungs,/the colour of her liver. Accurate,/in exact sentences”) versus the homely, vague language we resort to when love wants to penetrate, but cannot quite, through appearances to the soul of someone precious to us—someone from whom, after all, we are materially constituted. As it happens, the grandmother herself was a doctor, embodying both kinds of language.

Mulzet’s constraint, ten women poets, can be justified only by how delicious, and ambitious, the poetry is—and on that count I have no qualms. The translators have given us pure lyricism, the little shocks and convulsions that move a reader: vessels of emotion rather than mere representations of them. Mulzet herself is a prolific and versatile interpreter whose mastery of diction gives her translations tremendous compression. And I have boundless admiration for Georges Szirtes’s translations, which incorporate prosody—notoriously a gamble.

Szirtes is an éminence grise of Hungarian translation who has two advantages: born in Budapest in 1948 and arriving with his family in the UK after 1956, he is both a native Hungarian speaker and an English-language poet who has won accolades while staying faithful to a Hungarian’s understanding of poetry as patterned language. He can do amazing things in translation with traditional form, as in “Female Landscape” by Nemes Nagy, the first four stanzas of which read:

A lie of land so yielding, gentle,
you want to stroke it, see it break.
Between its knees the broad stream flows
glittering like a curious snake.

Dense valley, luxuriant hill
gentled under aeons of praise—
this female landscape loses me:
what can I do but stand and gaze?

The Baltic Sea has bathed her feet,
Tyrrhenian foam has washed her hair,
but her smooth navel makes me think
of quite another place, elsewhere,

where tortoises are being taught,
where life grows taller and the dim
heat sucks scarlet flowers from
the giant spiky cactus limb…

Szirtes also works wonders with Tóth’s poems, including “New Year’s Eve,” which benefits from an incantatory meter and rhyme scheme and evokes a spell involving (as in a fairy tale) sleep, a mirror, and the turn of the year:

I see this very room as in a mirror:
as familiar yet strange, a spacious den,
a life I’d entered by some kind of error,
a night I should sleep off and start again

after a millennium of heavy sleep.
Let me forget you, may you sink so deep
that when they ask me for my name, may I
not answer with your name when I reply.

Mulzet’s comprehensive introduction to the anthology does an invaluable service by giving not only biographical information about each poet but brief summaries of their critical reception and, crucially, glimpses into the linguistic devices and strategies that elude any translation: Szabó’s devotion to rhyme, or Balla’s deployment of ballad and chanson forms (she studied violin and earned a degree from a music academy). Mulzet never explains why she chose Under a Pannonian Sky as the book’s title, but on discovering that it’s lifted from Gergely’s poem of that name, I went back to the poem, which imagines her ancestors on this land now called Hungary: “respectable plebians.” The poem pays tribute to “the wine-press house,” vineyards and wine cellars, of an imagined past; the Romans introduced viticulture to the region, and Hungary’s wines are a point of national pride. I can’t help but think of the Hungarian language as another varietal, closely tied to its terroir and traditions, carefully tended by its poets. It is this imperiled but enduring language that expresses these women’s lives just so. In translation we may get only the aroma of the verse, not the taste, but we immediately feel it is sacramental.