This review is taken from PN Review 285, Volume 52 Number 1, September - October 2025.
on Krisztina Tóth
Krisztina Tóth, My Secret Life (Bloodaxe Books) £12
Any country in the world
Considering the fact that around two million people from that part of the world call the UK their home, Eastern European voices are shockingly underrepresented in UK literature, especially poetry. Those reading translated literature might already be familiar with Hungarian novelists such as International Booker Prize winning László Krasznahorkai, Nobel Prize winning Imre Kertész and PEN Translation Prize winning Magda Szabó, but books of Hungarian poetry in translation are few and far between, and awareness of them is even lower.
Krisztina Tóth is one of the most important Hungarian poets of her generation, but this is the first book of her poetry in English, translated by the eminent Budapest-born English poet and translator George Szirtes. The work in this book has been selected by Tóth from five of her collections, published over a twenty-year period (2001–21), as well as including some of her previously uncollected poems.
It is easy enough to read her work as the product of socioeconomic circumstances. It is after all what most British readers will associate with Hungary: post-communist economic crisis, disillusionment and poverty. Tóth is part of the generation of writers who came of age in 1989, and the melancholy permeating these poems is undeniable. However, as Szirtes highlights, there is so much more to these poems dealing with universal themes such as love, desire, loss, ageing and mortality. To a fellow Hungarian who grew up in 1980s/90s Budapest, but then emigrated to the UK in the 2000s, ...
Considering the fact that around two million people from that part of the world call the UK their home, Eastern European voices are shockingly underrepresented in UK literature, especially poetry. Those reading translated literature might already be familiar with Hungarian novelists such as International Booker Prize winning László Krasznahorkai, Nobel Prize winning Imre Kertész and PEN Translation Prize winning Magda Szabó, but books of Hungarian poetry in translation are few and far between, and awareness of them is even lower.
Krisztina Tóth is one of the most important Hungarian poets of her generation, but this is the first book of her poetry in English, translated by the eminent Budapest-born English poet and translator George Szirtes. The work in this book has been selected by Tóth from five of her collections, published over a twenty-year period (2001–21), as well as including some of her previously uncollected poems.
It is easy enough to read her work as the product of socioeconomic circumstances. It is after all what most British readers will associate with Hungary: post-communist economic crisis, disillusionment and poverty. Tóth is part of the generation of writers who came of age in 1989, and the melancholy permeating these poems is undeniable. However, as Szirtes highlights, there is so much more to these poems dealing with universal themes such as love, desire, loss, ageing and mortality. To a fellow Hungarian who grew up in 1980s/90s Budapest, but then emigrated to the UK in the 2000s, ...
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