For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you a captivating short piece by Anita Harag, translated from the Hungarian by Walter Burgess and Marietta Morry. Although our narrator is immersed in the bliss of romance, she finds herself relentlessly questioning the foundation of her happiness. Does her partner truly love her, though he appears to be drawn to other women? Does she genuinely love him in return? More fundamentally, how can she even be certain of her own feelings? Her efforts to impose a logical structure on the messy, unpredictable nature of love disrupt the lushly intimate moments she shares with her lover. With its playful linguistic twists and staccato rhythms, “I Wonder Whether” masterfully captures the sensation of being both within and without, suffused with pleasure and unease.
His hands are warm, my thighs cold; I’m chilly. It’s autumn, the AC is on. The cinema is full, I’m sitting on the aisle; the cool air is blowing on me. He asks me whether we should switch seats. I like to sit on the aisle; I don’t want to switch. I would like his palm to be bigger, to warm a bigger area of my cold thighs. I like it when he doesn’t only touch my thigh, but my shoulder and my behind, too. When he takes my hand on the street, in a store or on the bus. He takes my hand anywhere and at any time. Mine is cold; he warms it. His is always warm, mine always cold. At the bus stop he breathes on my neck, so that I won’t be cold. Women stare at him. When I look at them; they turn their eyes away.
There are handsome men. This sentence is declarative. “Handsome” is the adjective attached to men. Not to all men, that would be “men are handsome”. Not all men are handsome; for me only the ones with prominent noses and muscular calves. In this I differ from my girlfriend, who likes men with strong arms and blue eyes. Those are also handsome; yet I don’t like them. I should say: I like some men, and some I don’t. The ones I don’t like, my girlfriend might. It’s also possible that we both like the same man, with blue eyes and muscular calves; that’s a problem. Fortunately, my girlfriend doesn’t like men with prominent noses. They repel her; I think the reason for this is to make sure we won’t end up liking the same man, even by accident. Sometimes, I find a man with blue eyes and strong arms attractive. That makes me feel bad, and I try to find fault with him. Some of them can look at me with those blue eyes and make me forget to speak. Him, too, he hasn’t got a prominent nose nor muscular calves, yet I like him. He likes women with brown hair and brown eyes, like me. He also likes women with green or blue eyes, with large or small breasts. He finds something pretty in each of them. I can see myself falling in love with several women at the same time, he says. This is a declarative sentence. It doesn’t contain “perhaps” nor “maybe”, nor anything conditional. “Perhaps” and “maybe” are modifiers expressing uncertainty and possibility. Perhaps I could fall in love with several women, at the same time.
I wonder whether you like green pea soup with sugar. I wonder whether you love me. I wonder whether you love anyone else. “Whether” or “I wonder whether” always precedes the verb in a sentence. I don’t know whether I’m in love. I do know where these words must appear in a sentence. This is the topic of my thesis. That’s what I should be thinking about, instead, I’m thinking about him. He doesn’t ask me whether I love him. He doesn’t question it. I do, but he doesn’t understand it; he says he does yet he doesn’t, he only thinks he does. I also used to think that I wouldn’t be able to sleep in the same bed with anyone. If I move, I will wake him, and perhaps he won’t be able to go back to sleep. If someone puts his arms around me, I freeze, I don’t dare to budge all night long. When I get up my thigh hurts. I can sleep in the same bed with him; I put my head on his chest. I don’t know whether he wakes up at night when I turn on my belly and he strokes my back and leaves his hand on my waist, or he does it by instinct while half asleep. He puts his head on my belly, the room is cool; the heating is not yet on. I’m shivering, but I don’t cover myself. I let myself shiver. He listens to the gurgling and rumbling, slides higher up, listens to my heartbeat. I have arrhythmia. It means it skips a beat. He doesn’t hear that it skips, to him it seems even. Then, he says that he’s never been with a woman who has had silicon implants. Just once he’d like to shag a woman with implants; he’s curious about what it’s like.
Handsome men are unfaithful. This sentence is false. To make it true: the handsome men I know are unfaithful. I wonder whether there are other sorts than those I know. I cannot state that they’re not unfaithful, because I don’t know any handsome men who aren’t. I’m cold, it doesn’t matter that his hand is warming my thigh. He turns to me and gives me a quick kiss on my mouth. His mouth is salty. He asks whether I like the movie. He told me that he didn’t like talking during a movie, yet he talks to me and even when he doesn’t, I can see from the corner of my eye that he’s watching me. I don’t turn toward him; I let him watch me. There’s a blond woman sitting on the other side of him. I’m waiting to see when he’ll put his warm palm on her thigh.
Translated from the Hungarian by Walter Burgess and Marietta Morry
Anita Harag was born in Budapest in 1998. After finishing her first degree in literature and ethnology she completed graduate studies in India Studies. Her first short stories that appeared in magazines earned her several awards and prizes. In 2020 she was the winner of the Margó Prize, awarded to the best first time fiction author of the year, for her volume of short stories “Rather Cool for the Time of Year”. Her second volume of stories, including “Ticklish” and “I Wonder Whether”, came out in September 2023.
Walter Burgess and Marietta Morry are Canadian; they translate fiction from Hungarian. In addition to stories by Ms Harag (twelve have been published so far), they translate fiction by Gábor T. Szántó, Péter Moesko, Zsófia Czakó, András Pungor and Anna Gáspár-Singer; many of these translations have appeared in literary reviews, including The Stinging Fly, The New England Review, The Southern Review, and Ploughshares. Gábor Szántó’s book “1945 and Other Stories”, in which six out of eight stories were translated by them, was published in August, 2024.
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Read more from the Asymptote blog:
- Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Gyula Jenei
- Translation Tuesday: “The Toothpick” by Mari Klein
- Translation Tuesday: Immortal by Miklós Vámos