Szilárd Borbély’s poetry often operates with the concepts of body and language, especially regarding trauma experiences and mourning. My paper examines these concepts in two of his volumes (Halotti Pompa [The Splendours of Death] and A Testhez [To the Body]) and tries to show how the relation of body and language creates the notion of the self. The meanings of these notions constantly change and are extremely volatile in Borbély’s poetry, therefore I attempt to highlight how they occur through some examples rather than giving a dictionary. At the same time the paper aims at presenting the main characteristics of Borbély’s poetry and showing how these poems transform the innermost personal experiences to more general (social and cultural) problems. Interpreting the “legends” of A Testhez, my paper also introduces relevant theories of trauma, and focuses on the relations between trauma experiences and fragmented language, and on the poetic tools that make the “wounds” of the texts visible.