Slovak Literature in English Translation

Mila Haugová (1942) is a Slovak poet, essayist, and translator, author of more than twenty volumes of poetry, spanning almost forty years. Born in Hungary, she moved to Czechoslovakia with her family after the war. She is also highly regarded as a translator, and has translated the poetry of, among others, Sylvia Plath, Anne Saxton, Ingeborg Bachmann, Georg Trakl, Paul Celan, Else Lasker-Schuler, and with F. Kuwahara, the old Japanese poetry of Manjoshu. Her poetry captures everyday events, tragic moments, love relationships and their fragility, as well as break-ups. Her poetic style is a mixture of the rational, intuitive, and instinctive. Haugová is the recipient of numerous literary awards, most recently, of Zlatá vlna 2024, Slovakia’s main poetry prize, for her collection Dokonalé zviera(nie) (2023), the Tatra Banka main literature prize 2022, for the collection Z rastlinstva (2021) and in 2020, the Vilenica International Literary Prize, awarded by the Slovene Writers’ Association to a Central European author for outstanding achievements in the field of literature and essay writing.