Where by Krisztina Tóth

Where

Not there, on the tight bend of the paved highway,
where cars are occasionally prone to skidding,
chiefly in winter, though no one dies there,

not there where streets are greener and leafier
where lawns are mowed and there’s a dog in the garden
and the head of the family gets home late at night,

nor there in front of the school where every morning
a man is waiting regular as clockwork,
nor inside the gates on the concrete playground,

nor in the neglected, dehydrated meadow
where a discarded dog-end hits the ground and glows
for a moment, it doesn’t begin there

but at the edge of the forest, in rotting humus
where somebody once was buried alive,
that’s where the poem begins.

Krisztina Tóth translated from Hungarian by George Szirtes

From My Secret Life, Selected Poems by Krisztina Tóth

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 her poetry in English translation.   This retrospective is translated by George Szirtes, winner of The King’s Gold Medal for Poetry, 2024. – via Bloodaxe Books. *

This poem moves like a slow pan of a camera: not there, nor there. Each place is ruled out until all the familiar scenes of ordinary life have been peeled away. It’s a journey through absence – from the safe, orderly world of highways (cars sometimes skid but nobody dies), leafy suburban streets (with mowed lawns, gardens, dogs and work routines), and schools (but who is the waiting man?), across a dried out field (where a dog-end flickers and dies), toward something older and darker, buried in the ground. Ordinary life is taken away until we reach the edge of the forest where history has been hidden.

It’s a horror story of what lies beneath the safe surface. The last  line – “that’s where the poem begins” –  is like a sudden and shocking revelation. Poetry only begins once the pretend world has been stripped away. Only then – out of the rotting forest floor – does the truth emerge. The present is built on the horror and decay of history . No matter how  much of it is paved and grassed over and forgotten – it remains.  

Knowing the poet is Hungarian changes things. What could have been abstract becomes history: All the dead of WW2, the crushed hopes of the 1956 Revolution, the long years of silence.

All those unspeakable crimes and mass burials at the edge of the forests of Eastern Europe. The “buried alive”  points toward the mass murders in the forests around Budapest. Those quiet and civilized suburban scenes suddenly suggest the post-war compromise of comfort and stability in exchange for forgetting. Even the “man waiting regular as clockwork” outside the school seems sinister, a reminder of surveillance and quiet obedience.

At the forest’s edge, the dead lie unacknowledged but not erased. The “rotting humus” is the sediment of memory. This is where – the poet says – the poem  begins: not in suburban comfort, but in confrontation with history, with what has been buried.

Back in March, Nicholas Casey wrote a remarkable piece for The New York Times called “Unburying the Remains of the Third Reich.” It explores all the moral contradictions  of memorializing the German war dead – the tangle of guilt, mourning, and unease that surfaces when history is disturbed. 

Poems like Tóth’s suggest that the past is right there beneath our feet however much we might try to move on and forget it. Nicholas Casey shows us just how morally and politically fraught such excavation can be.