Photo by Péter Peti

Zsuzsa Takács (b. 1938) is the doyenne of contemporary Hungarian poetry (see WLT, Sept. 2015, 46­–47). She started publishing in the early 1970s. Her volumes address both private and historical traumas, the impotence of empathy and language when faced with the suffering of the creature—of a beloved person, or one’s own. She lives in Budapest.