MyLifeandMyLife

Melinda Mátyus

Translated by Jozefina Komporaly

FICTION, TRANSLATION  |  $20 $18

December 2023

Delicate and shocking. The most remarkable poetry of the last few years.

András Visky

MyLifeandMyLife is one of the strongest pieces of experimental fiction published in Hungarian in recent years, proposing to talk about emotions through visuality. The book’s protagonist is desperately in love with a mysterious male figure, and this emotional dependency not only leads her to give up her agency but also gradually paves the way to her suffocation and ultimate demise. MyLifeandMyLife can be interpreted as a reversal of sorts of the Biblical episode whereby the holy prophet Hosea is ordered by divine appointment to marry Gomer, known as a ’promiscuous woman’, a ’harlot’ and a ’whore’, so that their scandalous marriage-cum-performance can act as a warning against idolatry. Viewed from the perspective of the canon, this work is also readable in the vein of La Fontaine’s fables, and in this sense it is a non-moralising morality tale that is borderline unbearable yet devastatingly gripping all the same. Melinda Mátyus writes in bold and deeply touching ways about contemporary women and her protagonists examine womanhood in a variety of manifestations and configurations. Mátyus zooms in on the loneliness of socially ostracized women, and is preoccupied with the psychological makeup of those experiencing confinement and forced captivity.



About the Author

Melinda Mátyus (born 1970) is a theatre critic and author of fiction, writing in Hungarian and based in Romania. She studied theology and comparative literature, and is active as a Calvinist pastor. Her deeply original voice has garnered important professional recognition and catapulted her to some of the most important Hungarian literary journals, such as Litera, szifonline.hu, Jelenkor, Pannon Tükör, Látó and World Literature Today. She was a recipient of the Látó Award for fiction in 2020, and co-authored the volume Az ember tragédiája (The Tragedy of Man), edited by András Visky (Koinónia). Her first standalone volume of fiction is forthcoming in 2024.

Praise

Delicate and shocking. The most remarkable poetry of the last few years.

András Visky

MyLifeandMyLife is a most poignant and painful text, written in a mature style and in a manner than can initially baffle the reader. The way in which the narrator impassively details the events in her life, on a tone of apparent detachment, is particularly impactful, seeing that her emotional involvement is obvious all along. Communication by way of tapping into the language of visual arts introduces an additional and unique intellectual quality into the text, enhancing its vitality and organicity.

Görföl Balázs

Reading Melinda’s writing one can imagine a lively fragile germ that sprouts from the cracked barks of our austere and bigoted upbringing.

Láng Zsolt

About the Translator

Jozefina Komporaly is a senior lecturer in performance at the University of the Arts London and a translator from Hungarian and Romanian into English. She is editor and co-translator of the drama collections How to Explain the History of Communism to Mental Patients and Other Plays (Seagull Books), András Visky’s Barrack Dramaturgy: Memories of the Body (Intellect), and Plays from Romania: Dramaturgies of Subversion (Bloomsbury), and author of numerous publications on translation and adaptation, including the monograph Radical Revival as Adaptation (Palgrave). Her translations have appeared in Asymptote, Baffler, Hungarian Literature Online, Index on Censorship, Modern Poetry in Translation, Poet Lore, Words Without Borders, and World Literature Today, and have been staged by Foreign Affairs in London and Theater Y and Trap Door in Chicago. Recent translations include Mr K Released by Matéi Visniec, shortlisted for the 2021 EBRD Literature Prize, The Glance of the Medusa by László F. Földényi, The Magnificent Boar by Péter Demény and Story of a Stammer by Gábor Vida. She is a  PEN Translates grant recipient and a member of the UK Translators’ Association.

Publication Details

ISBN: 978-1-946604-19-4
140 pp, Publication Date: December 01 2023
Distribution: Asterism Books