Notes The Undertaker’s Tale of the Notebook Measuring 1 x 2 cm Cf. Viktoria Schweitzer, Tsvetaeva (Harvill, 1993), p. 375. Pilinszky at the Tenshi no Tobira Tenshi no Tobira means ‘Angel Gateway’. It is the name of a massage parlour in Tokyo, where the young girls specialise in ear-cleaning while dressed as French maids. The phrases ‘lie down full length’ and ‘obedient and good’ come from János Pilinszky’s ‘Under the Winter Sky’, trans. János Csokits/Ted Hughes. The line ‘what exactly did you do?’ (spoken here by Chan-Lii) is taken from a letter sent by Ted Hughes to János Csokits in 1974, when Hughes was preparing to write his introductory essay to their Pilinszky translations. Hughes sent a list of questions to Csokits, asking about the reception of Pilinszky’s poetry in Hungary and some details about his life. One of his requests was: ‘Perhaps you can tell me exactly what he did during the war.’ The question was never directly answered at the time, so Hughes ended up writing about it obliquely – causing some reviewers to see his essay as misleading. Studying the Fresco of St Nikolai of Myra In her study of the final days of Marina Tsvetaeva, Irma Kudrova tells the story of a ten-year-old boy who went into an empty church in Yelabuga to look at the frescoes. He saw a woman with cropped grey hair squinting, examining the paintings on the walls, and studying the one which showed St Nikolai of Myra restraining the arm of an executioner who had raised his sword over the condemned. The boy said, ‘He will save them, they’re not guilty of anything.’ ‘I know that,’ the woman answered. The woman was the great Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva. This event took place only days before Tsvetaeva was found dead, having hanged herself. See Irma Kudrova, The Death of a Poet (Overlook Press, 2004). Stag-Boy Cf. ‘The Boy Changed into a Stag Cries Out at the Gate of Secrets’ by Ferenc Júhasz, in various English translations by Ted Hughes, Kenneth McRobbie, Pascale Petit etc. It was during my PhD research into Ted Hughes’s translations of the Hungarian poet János Pilinszky that I first came across Hughes’s version of Ferenc Júhasz’s poem. I was struck by the fact that Hughes had made this version based solely on an English one by Kenneth McRobbie, and began to make a close comparison between his and McRobbie’s version, in an attempt to find out what Hughes’s alterations told us about his own poetic sensibility. During this work I happened to take 59