Snowqueensnowking
When I was beautiful with hate and around-around / When
I was beautiful with hate and the implanted heart of the Snowqueen and I still
wasn't absolutely his / When I was beautiful with joy and around-around
then I wasn't scared or I was very scared / He had
a blonde voice and melodic hair / white, tasteful, unscented we flickered
out above our unrestrained red-sticky orgy / Quietly marched through
our own red-sticky bodies and I felt how the braided fairies untied
themselves in my hair, flew around and filled the room / I felt that
from the outside I didn't look alive / With superior confidence I thought
that now I should live and a Salingerish Zen koan came to mind / this /
Which way do the sunflowers turn in the night / His stiffness reflected an
unmeasurable tenderness in me and his tenderness reflected unmeasurable
stiffness / I knew that I loved him and my body filled up with body and
my eyes with eyes, and at the same time I was crying inside and downward
but I couldn't find tears / They transformed into evil mirror-drops gleaming
like icicles sarcastically, threateningly, with the silence of killers /
not expressed but experienced, joyful and raw hard final devotion screaming
laying low inside me / I felt
his intensity radiating through his poetry, radiating through his body,
but it didn't have, couldn't have realism only I imagined but an
internal emptiness bringing the machinery in motion
that was impossible to unplug /I was interested only in his motion and I would want to say that / . . .
But already it wasn't possible.
This poem was previously published in Swimming in the Ground, an anthology of contemporary Hungarian poetry, translated by Gabor G. Gyukics and Michael Castro, Neshui Press, 2001
Kinga Fabó (November 1, 1953–March 4, 2021) studied in the Hungarian-English department of Eötvös Loránd University from 1972 to 1977. From 1978 to 1980, she belonged to Eötvös Loránd University’s humanities faculty. From 1981 to 1986, Kinga was on staff at the Research Institute for Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, within the department of general linguistics. She was a candidate for the Academy between 1986 and 1989. Since the 1980s, she has published a number of poetry and essay collections, among them a bilingual Indonesian-English poetry anthology released in Jakarta in 2015. That same year, she received first prize in the 2015 Free Poets Collective International Poetry Contest in Middletown, Connecticut. She was the poetry editor for Diaphanous, an American journal of literature and the arts.
Gabor G Gyukics (b. 1958) is a Hungarian-American poet, jazz poet, literary translator born in Budapest. He is the author of 11 books of original poetry, 6 in Hungarian, 2 in English, 1 in Arabic, 1 in Bulgarian, 1 in Czech and 16 books of translations including A Transparent Lion, selected poetry of Attila József and Swimming in the Ground: Contemporary Hungarian Poetry (in English, both with co-translator Michael Castro) and an anthology of North American Indigenous poets in Hungarian titled Medvefelhő a város felett. He writes his poems in English (which is his second language) and Hungarian. His latest book in English is a hermit has no plural (Singing Bone Press, 2015). His latest book in Hungarian was published by Lector Press in May 2018. Photo by Sándor Gyapjas.
