Réka Borda

- Hungary -

Réka Borda was in born in 1992 in Szeged, and currently lives in Budapest. She is a poet, writer and design theorist. She has published one volume of poems in 2017 and a novel in 2022, and was nominated for several awards and prizes in Hungary such as Margó Prize and Horváth Péter Literary Scholarship. Translations of her poems were published in international anthologies and papers (Versum Online, Helikon Review, etc.). Member of the Society of Hungarian Authors and represented the Hungarian literature in the Society’s BE(p)PART educational project and Versopolis on international level.


“Réka Borda's first volume was published in the l!ve series of Scolar publishing house, with a plethora of messages, both terrestrial and galactic, from which it is impossible to choose what is a hoax and what is not. [...] Hoax is characterised by round, closed, strongly structured texts, but within the textual world there is a process of dismantling and construction. The author guides the reader with a confident hand and a remarkable technical skill towards dozens of dead ends: subject-maze, space-time collapse, Pythagorean theorem, overall uncertainty. [...] Hoax is a highly artistic and elaborate volume, the pieces of which deserve to be examined in more detail individually.”

Éva Horváth. A megmagyarázhatatlan történetek szivattyúként vonzzák az űrhajókat (Inexplicable stories attract spaceships like a pump). Jelenkor: 61/5. 

 

“The author often makes use of one of the most promising post-modern poetic techniques, the so-called “diffusion of meaning”, i.e., the multiplication of meaning. The essence of this is that, instead of a linear conveyance of meaning from one sentence to the next, the tone of the poem is mediated by the kaleidoscopic network of relationships between the sentences and the aura that is created here. In the case of the author, the voice of the poem, which is thus self-fulfilling, is further individualised by the bizarre use of language.”

Gábor Bereti. Az elválasztás játékos gesztusa (The playful gesture of separation). Tiszatáj: October 2019

 

“In the case of Réka Borda’s Hoax, only two of the above are important here, one is its hopeful virality and the other is that we should pay attention to it in time. It has all the makings for the former, since, as with really big and unexpected successes, word of mouth can spread about how good the volume is. [...] It is a rich, strong and important volume, and I must stress that I think it is the best first volume of 2017.”

Sándor Attila Pál. Képzeld el (Picture it). Élet és Irodalom: LXII/15.

 

“In Borda’s first volume, the poems are in a predetermined place, (also) interdependent in the web of interpretation, and a certain degree of background knowledge is required for their creation as well as their reading. Traces of over-writing or over-aestheticisation occasionally crop up, but in a compact, established poetic world and a way of speaking like that of Borda, they do not distract the reader from interpretation. The multiplicity of themes, materials and settings, the movement and the interplay of public and private life in the poems, leave no room for monotony. For me, has been quite a leap - for those who do not agree, the lack of it will be a leap instead.”

Júlia Kustos. Építsd újra a világod (Rebuild your world). Új Forrás: 2018/3.

 

“Besides the composition of the volume, the use of images is perhaps the most remarkable feature of Réka Borda’s poetry. It is natural that a concept that draws on motifs of the holographic world, deception and illusion, also opens up the possibility of creating new and strange metaphorical webs.”

Ádám Sebestyén. Egy megtévesztő világ újrateremtése (Rebuilding a deceptive world). Ambroozia: 2018/2.