My Secret Life
Krisztina Tóth
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From the publisher
Translated by George Szirtes
Krisztina Tóth is one of the leading Hungarian poets of the generation who began publishing in the late 1980s. The recipient of many awards, she is also renowned for her fiction which has been translated into many languages including English.
My Secret Life is the first book of Krisztina Tóth’s poetry in English translation. The poems were selected by her from five of her nine published collections, with the addition of some new or previously uncollected poems.
‘Her work has the nervous energy of the times but is shaped by a deep and disciplined intelligence. Her subjects are invariably human. They are concerned with love, family, friendship, loss, and a kind of existential disaffection. Tragic in one sense but ever inventive, full of life’s minute yet highly resonant particulars, they seem to extend into an almost cinematic narrative about the cruelties of factory farming, murder, ageing, the treatment of women as sex toys and death itself. She is a bravura formalist when she needs to be. Her vigour and scope are enormous.’ – George Szirtes
‘Tóth is part of the generation of Hungarian writers who came of age in 1989, as the optimism of post-communism gave way to economic crisis, alienation and political viciousness. Tóth’s selected poems, potently translated into English for the first time by George Szirtes, communicate the regretful atmosphere of melancholy that permeates a damaged society … These wide-ranging, droll poems always seem to come back to the knotty discomforts of a changing self existing within a broken world' – Rebecca Tamás, The Guardian (Poetry Books of the Month)
'Poems pulsating with sensual power, deeply painful poems, about everything that is regarded as very personal.[…] Not with her themes, not with her tone does she prove to be an innovator. In this respect she remains faithful to the great, intellectual current of Hungarian poetry, a current that is not very old. It can be traced back to the beginning of the twentieth century […] Krisztina Tóth proves herself to be an innovator within this important tradition through the stirring rhythm of her poems. She wraps her persona, ready for any change of form, in rhythm. In other words, she makes herself impersonal in the most personal of ways and ready for confessions that are relevant for everyone; through her changing tone, through her surprises. […] Krisztina Tóth's composition sets her apart from all the others. She has the strength of a buffalo and the weightlessness of a butterfly.' – Péter Nádas, afterword to Barcode