Mila Haugová

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.

© international literature festival berlin

Nostalgia
Slovenský Spisovatel
Bratislava, 1993

Alfa Centauri
Drewo a Srd
Banská Bystrica, 1997

Kahlfrieren
BONsai-typART
Berli, 1998
Übersetzung: Ursula Macht

Das innere Gesicht
Edition Thanhäuser
Ottensheim a. d. Donau, 1999
Übersetzung: Zdenka Becker

Sandatlas
Editon Korrespondenzen
Wien, 2001
Übersetzung: Angela Repka

Orfea alebo zimný priesmyk
Slovenský spisovateľ
Bratislava, 2003

Körperarchive
Edition Erata
Leipzig, 2006
Übersetzung: Slávka Porubská

Übersetzer: Zdenka Becker, Ursula Macht, Angela Repka