An award-winning translator presents selections from the haunting final volumes of a leading voice in contemporary Hungarian poetrySzilard Borbely, one of the most celebrated writers to emerge from post-Communist Hungary, received numerous literary awards in his native country. In this volume, acclaimed translator Ottilie Mulzet reveals the ful

An award-winning translator presents selections from the haunting final volumes of a leading voice in contemporary Hungarian poetry

Szilárd Borbély, one of the most celebrated writers to emerge from post-Communist Hungary, received numerous literary awards in his native country. In this volume, acclaimed translator Ottilie Mulzet reveals the full range and force of Borbély's verse by bringing together generous selections from his last two books, Final Matters and To the Body. The original Hungarian text is set on pages facing the English translations, and the book also features an afterword by Mulzet that places the poems in literary, historical, and biographical context.

Restless, curious, learned, and alert, Borbély weaves into his work an unlikely mix of Hungarian folk songs, Christian and Jewish hymns, classical myths, police reports, and unsettling accounts of abortions. In her afterword, Mulzet calls this collection "a blasphemous and fragmentary prayer book ... that challenges us to rethink the boundaries of victimhood, culpability, and our own religious and cultural definitions."

"Extraordinary, masterful, and tragic. . . . Ottilie Mulzet is one of the very finest [Hunagrian translators]. . . . [Final Matters] as a whole partakes of the darkest and truest apprehensions of humanity. That is its remarkable power, a power that runs through the translations, the work of translation devoting itself to something of great importance and value. Nothing in either contemporary Hungarian or contemporary English compares with it."---George Szirtes, Translation and Literature