Mónika Mesterházi

Mónika Mesterházi graduated in English and Hungarian Literature and Linguistics, and after a few years of grammar school teaching, took on freelance jobs. A favourite short time assignment was to lead poetry translation workshops for the British Council (2002–2003), with poet friends participating in turn. She has organized literary events for the Hungarian Translators’ Association where she was a member of the board (2006–2013). But she has mainly lived on literary translation.

Mónika has published four books of poetry (Visszafagyó táblák, 1992, Hol nem volt, 1995, Nem hittem volna, 1999 and Sors bona, 2007), and is working on her fifth one. She writes essays on contemporary Hungarian poetry, from 20th century classics to young contemporaries, and is putting together a book of essays.

The poets she has translated include Irish authors like Seamus Heaney (selected volume, with other translators), Jean Bleakney, Ciaran Carson, John Hewitt, James Joyce, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, Sinead Morissey, Paul Muldoon, Matthew Sweeney, W. B. Yeats; British poets like Simon Armitage, Ken Cockburn, Robert Crawford, Antony Dunn, Tom Hubbard, Ted Hughes, Kathleen Jamie, Jackie Kay, Philip Larkin D. H. Lawrence, Liz Lochhead, Norman MacCraig, Louis MacNeice, Kevin MacNeil, Don Paterson, Richard Price and George Szirtes; American poets like Elizabeth Bishop, William Carlos Williams, Jorie Graham, Denise Levertov, Ogden Nash, Ron Padgett, Sylvia Plath; and the Caribbean poet Derek Walcott.

The books of fiction she has translated include The Gathering by Anne Enright, Troubles by J. G. Farrell, So I am Glad and Day by A. L. Kennedy, Tenderwire by Claire Kilroy, The History of Love and Man Walks Into a Room by Nicole Krauss, Thorn in the Flesh by D. H. Lawrence (with Éva Balázs), Letters and Journals (sel., trans., intr.) by Katherine Mansfield, Runaway, The Love of a Good Woman, The Lives of Girls and Women, Too Much Happiness and Dear Life by Alice Munro, John Saturnall’s Feast by Lawrence Norfolk and Redemption Falls by Joseph O’Connor. She has also translated poems by Lars Gustaf Andresson (Swedish), Miloš Ðurđević (Croatian), Cateřina Rudčenková and Ondřej Buddeus (Czech), via English translations but also checking the original.

Her poems have appeared in Swedish in a booklet, together with poems by Anna Szabó T. (Två ungerska poeter, translated by Anna and Per Svenson, Art Factory, 2009). English translations were published in anthologies: In Quest of the Miracle Stag: The Poetry of Hungary Vol. II. (Ádám Makkai ed., Atlantis-Centaur, 1997); An Island of Sound: Hungarian poetry and fiction before and beyond the Iron Curtain (translated by George Szirtes, Harvill Press, 2004); New Order: Hungarian Poets of the Post 1989 generation (George Szirtes, ed., Arc Publications, 2010).