Tóth Krisztina: Szeleknek fordít

Krisztina Tóth: Translating for the Winds

- New poems 2021-2025 -

Where is our past and where are we going in the present? Reading the poems written by Krisztina Tóth between 2020 and 2025 and arranged in a volume, we encounter life situations where the familiar and the foreign are not the opposite of each other, but follow from each other. Nothing can be more distant than what or who was once within reach. We can glimpse the unknown in ourselves and the familiar in the other. Krisztina Tóth is a great poet of memory and remembrance. "If you write this poem, listen carefully: / this poem already exists. In your home / we found it on the shelf in a volume. / Maybe you just forgot it was there." Memories and dreams, photographs and objects, misreadings and realisations, monologues and echoes alternate in the extremely rich formal range of poems that Szelek translates, from rhyming poems to haiku, which are important and arranged in a separate cycle. An elementary, lively, cathartic volume, Translating for the Winds stays with the reader for a long time: 'the past is still there, nothing passes'.