Guest of the ilb 2003
The poet and translator Mila Haugová was born in Budapest,
Hungary, in 1942 and raised in Slovakia. Daughter of a Hungarian
mother and Slovakian father, she grew up speaking two languages.
Her father, a qualified farmer, was imprisoned as a so-called “class
enemy” and consquently the author was prevented from taking her chosen
study path in Slovakian and German Language and Literature. From
1959 to 1964 she studied Agriculture and then worked as an agronomist
and thereafter as a teacher. She stopped teaching, and from 1986
to 1996 worked on the editorial staff of the literary magazine
'Romboid'. In the early 70s Haugová started to write her own
poems, which she initially published in 1980 under the pseudonym Mila
Srnková. But it is the book of poems 'Premenlivý povrch' (1983,
Engl: Changeable Surface(s)) that she regards as her true debut.
From the start her verse has been characterized by themes related
to naturalness and intimacy, particularly in the relationship between
the sexes, but her poetic language – which grew increasingly radical –
was not received well by the mainstream literary critics.
Starting in the early 80s, the author also began to make a name for
herself as a translator of numerous poets, including Ingeborg Bachmann,
Sylvia Plath, Sarah Kirsch, Friederike Mayröcker, Else Lasker-Schüler,
Paul Celan, and Georg Trakl. The breakthrough finally came for
Haugová with the book of poems 'Èisté dni' (1990, Engl: Pure Days), in
which a female first-person narrator expresses herself in an
uncompromising way; at the time such a stance was still unheard of in
Slovakia. In addition to contributions to international poetry
magazines and anthologies, Haugová has so far published more than ten
collections of poetry, which have been translated into English, French,
Polish, Russian, and German. Jaroslav Šrank praises the “cathartic
openness” of Haugová’s verse, which “in mapping mysterious gardens and
wastelands [explores] the most basic and the most intimate questions of
our existence.” Here, language is freed from its syntactic contexts and
through intertextual references to classical modern verse, polyvalent
layers of meaning are opened.
Today Mila Haugová lives with her partner, the Austrian artist, BHX
LOHMER, as a freelance writer in Bratislava and Zajacia Dolina Levice
in Slovakia.
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