The first thing one notices about Ottilie Mulzet’s substantial volume of modern Hungarian poetry—focused on ten women born between 1922 and 1972—is the unfamiliar word “Pannonian” in the title. Not “Hungarian”; not “Magyar.” Pannonia was the name given to a province of the Roman Empire that included present-day western Hungary and parts of Austria, Slovakia, and the Balkans; the Pannonian Plain is another name for the Carpathian Basin, watershed of the Danube River embraced by three mountain ranges. “Pannonian” has the effect of estranging us from what we think we know about Hungary, an enigmatic, landlocked nation whose history since the early Iron Age has involved a spectacle of warrior tribes, invasions from the east, occupations, kings, and emperors, and whose language is native to only 13 million people. It is a Uralic tongue not cognate with Indo-European; on the entire continent, only Finnish, Estonian, and a handful of other Baltic dialects share common roots with Hungarian. Perhaps “Pannonian” is meant to underscore Hungary’s place in Europe—despite its strangeness—as a legatee of the Romans, whose …