Győző Ferencz
The In-Between Poet
George Szirtes: The Budapest File. Newcastle-upon-Tyne/Budapest,
Bloodaxe Books/Corvina, 2000, 208 pp.
Some years ago, Victor (Győző) Határ, the Hungarian poet, novelist and thinker who has made England his home since 1956, advised George Szirtes to "stay an Englishman, you know full well / that there's no earthly reason to change."1 Indeed he went on to directly charge his much younger compatriot and fellow poet with the romantic moral imperative of Vörösmarty's 'Appeal': "be an English poet —live / anywhere—destiny heart-tone passion // to the island home to which you've faithfully / bound yourself cleave immovably / the home-tongue of your being—English." Határ, who has had abundant experience of what it means not to be a Hungarian poet in one's native country yet to remain just that in England, was almost certainly uneasy that Szirtes, in looking for his past—his 'roots', as it has become customary to call such searches for identity—-would start writing in Hungarian and find himself consigned to the history of Hungarian poetry.
For those purposes, the quarter-century between 1956 and 1983 was lost irretrievably. From the time that he settled in England with his parents as an eight-year-old boy, Szirtes gradually forgot all about the Hungarian language right up to the point when, an adult and with his third book of poems in print, his interest was awakened in his birthplace and his family's past. Since then he has made regular trips to Hungary for shorter or longer periods, and the forgotten language has acquired new life in him—in the first place, thanks to commissions from Hungarian and English publishers to translate the works of classic and contemporary Hungarian writers. Still, translating a few books into English does not make one a Hungarian poet.
More than likely, Határ was warning Szirtes away from letting Hungarian become some kind of calling-card, his permanent critical epithet in English poetry. There are nations which come into fashion, like the Irish in the last few decades, but being Hungarian has not been fashionable anywhere for any lenght of time. There was more than a dash of provocative intent in non-Magyar-speaking Ferenc Liszt's openly professed Hungarianness, and though it amounted to more than the flashy gesture of a Lord Byron having his portrait painted in Albanian costume, it was still a manifestation of Romanticism's interest in the exotic and, as such, wore the elements of fashion on its sleeve. Liszt did not set a transitory Hungarian fashion, on the contrary, he was exposed to ironical remarks in the West.
If Szirtes were to place undue stress on his Hungarian origins, he will become a one-track poet and himself deliver a label for future historians, which, although not stigmatizing his verse, will narrow it. By avowing his Hungarian roots he limits his own role in contemporary English poetry and will become unable to do without this idiosyncrasy. And not just in the eyes of critics either, for the greater the space won in his poetry by childhood memories and travel experiences the more he becomes a Hungarian within English poetry, a Hungarian who writes in English.
Such apprehensions are not unwarranted, but if they have surfaced in George Szirtes, not a trace of them is to be found in his poems. Yet the issue is touched on in the preface to his latest volume. Speaking about the sequences in which he has worked up memories of the family in Hungary with touches of the historical background—and there are a good few of these, to mention only 'Metro', 'The Photographer in Winter', 'The Courtyards', 'Travel Book', and 'Portrait of My Father in an English Landscape'—he says:
I did not set out to 'write' either Hungary or England. These national (let alone nationalistic) concepts are incidental, and often, to my mind, harmful. Becoming aware of places as background subjects inevitably brought them into the foreground, but their advance into fuller consciousness was accompanied, for me, by a growing realisation of a third, and possibly more pervasive theme, which threatened to negate both places. My greatest difficulty with nationality or culturally rooted notions is that they inevitably exclude those who are migrants, floaters, drifters and shadows. I may envy the rooted but I cannot enter their territory. What sense would it make for me to write like W.N. Herbert, or Tony Harrison, or Seamus Heaney, or a Liverpudlian or a Londoner or an East Anglian? I cannot even write as a Budapester. Writers like me cannot intrude into such specificity... It is not Hungary or any other place that is the issue. It is the inbetweenness. The synthesis is its own voice" (p. 15).
The poets whom Szirtes identifies in this passage are readily localizable: W.N. Her- bert is a Scot, Tony Harrison is from Leeds, and Seamus Heaney is (Northern) Irish. Szirtes is not Hungarian, and his region, as he discerns so aptly, is inbetweenness, which of its very essence is unlocalizable.
That, then, is Szirtes's response: he could not be a Hungarian poet if he wanted to, any more than an English one, at least in the sense that, for example, Ted Hughes is. When he writes in English, in a formal language schooled in the traditions of English poetry, about—besides much else—the layer of identity which binds him to Hungarian history, the Hungarian language and Hungarian landscapes, he is not in any sense taking his bearings retrospectively. He is not searching for sharp distinguishing contours for himself with his Budapest subject-matter, nor is he a belated epigone of an earlier generation of confessional searchers for identity. Unlike the American confessional poets Robert Lowell and John Berryman, Szirtes does not reconstruct a lost personality through poetic devices. The Hungarian subject-matter is not programmatic; it is only when he happens to be writing poetry that he is unable to do so except in this odd state of simultaneous consciousness.
He grew up in an refugee family that considered the move to their new homeland final. They opted for full assimilation and so spoke English, even at home, from the very start. Yet as a poet Szirtes has had no option but to place his fastidious English in the service of deconstructing his intellectual Englishness. One of the paradoxes of his poetry, and perhaps its most compelling tension, derives from this.
It is also part of this paradox that, in the wake of his two decades of work, Hungary seems to have begun to gain visibility on the map of English poetry—and, moreover, in a way that no translated work has yet managed to imprint itself. The Hungarian language is a sort of semi-permeable membrane, and despite the efforts of some outstanding minds, not even a Sándor Weöres or János Pilinszky, or anyone else for that matter, has succeeded in joining the living stream of Western culture. For all its traditional receptivity, Hungarian literature has had a one-way connection with world literature. No Hungarian writer has yet become a genuine influence or point of reference and orientation. Hungary hardly crops up even as a subject, apart from the odd crumb that a reader is more surprised than anything to spot, as with the word 'puszta' in piece XIV of Douglas Dunn's 'Europa's Lover' sequence: "In my house built of noon night in the mountains / And in my house built of noon on the puszta".2 Or one wonders how a Hungarian coffee set found its way into the 'Waiting Lists' section of Jackie Kay's long poem: "I pour coffee / from my new Hungarian set."3 And it is hard to think of anything to match the likes of Ken Smith who, with no Hungarian background, dips into Hungarian history, folk customs and countryside in the volume Wild Root,4 its cover illustrated with pictures of the spectacular Carnival-tide parade of wooden-masked mummers at Mohács.
The Budapest Files, Szirtes's twelfth book of poems, is unusually bulky by British standards—almost twice as thick as his earlier volumes and even his selected verse. In its thematic arrangement it collects those of his poems which relate to Hungary in some manner, through family history or personal experience. Furthermore, it is precisely this old, unrealized dream of Hungarian literature that has garnered critical acclaim for the volume and the entire Szirtes oeuvre, because, from an English viewpoint, Szirtes is one of the poets who is helping to break down British isolation, as one of Peter Porter's reviews of an earlier book for the Observer newspaper emphasises: "George Szirtes has made a unique contribution to the debate about the insularity of contemporary English poetry. He has taken England into Europe." That quotation was already used by Oxford University Press in 1988 on the back cover of Metro, and it reappears on this latest volume, jointly published by Bloodaxe Books and Corvina.
As far as Hungarian literature is concerned, Szirtes is a real godsend as he is ideally placed to know what to take from the language of a Kosztolányi or Krúdy, and how best to present it, whilst he has also supplied an English voice to a host of contemporary Hungarian poets for a string of by no means obscure publishing houses, indeed, putting several of them out in volumes of their own, in the Anglo-Saxon tradition. Yet inconceivable as his poems would be without the Budapest background, the Hungarian connection is an incidental element in his poetry. He happened to be born in Hungary to end up over in England, but it might equally have been otherwise. The unchanging essence of his poetry is not what with others is expressed by the metaphors 'rootedness' or 'bridgehead' but that 'in-between' character. The titles of his verse collections, when not alluding to a visual concept, as with
(1986), Blind Field (1994) and Portrait of My Father in an English Landscape (1998), utilize means of traversing and transmission as metaphors already quite early on, before he had found his true role, as with Short Waves (1983), or as with the later Metro (1988) and Bridge Passages (1991).
Szirtes was helped to forge his poetry in this manner by a process which started to gather pace in Britain from the late 1960s, which is accurately signalled by the title that Robert Crawford, for one, gave to his 1992 survey: Devolving English Literature.5 That process was not restricted to Great Britain but was a world-wide phenomenon, its outcome being that the focal point of attention within the English-speaking world shifted from English and American literature to the periphery—first of all, perhaps, to Northern Ireland, then the Republic of Ireland, later to Scotland, Wales, the West Indies, India, Asia, and Africa. As a result, the three stars of the Boston literary élite by the turn of the 1980s were the Irishman Seamus Heaney, the St. Lucian Derek Walcott and the Russian exile Joseph Brodsky. That was why V.S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie came to assume such indisputable significance, and why, more recently, the place of earlier figures such as R.K. Narayan has been re-evaluated. This is not the same as the process by which exiled Eastern Europe writers have reached a wider public for political reasons. More than just politics, it is the act of literary self-determination of an age which professes to value cultures in juxtaposition, not hierarchically. The plural 'English literatures' is used, and that plural no longer signifies Irish, Scottish, Indian, etc. peripheries under the direction of the literary centres of England or America—at least, not in principle.
Szirtes's poetry plays a peculiarly potent role in this new situation (which it has become customary to call the postmodern age) because it does not come from the earlier peripheries of the British empire but from beyond even these—from outside the English-speaking world. His vernacular is not dialectal, but, not least because Szirtes grew up in London, a received English without a distinctive regional stamp. His polished versification, his richly stratified vocabulary, and his linkage to English poetic traditions make him a distinctively English poet. The aloofness with which he handles his subjects, the restraint of the voice, and the formal hallmarks of his poetry show parallels with that cast which the world sees as so English and which became so dominant in British poetry of the post-war years. It can perhaps be linked with the protean creativity of poets of the Movement in that it does not show the marked stylistic of any organized 'movement' at all. This poetry is not characterized by bold formal experiments; that is to say, its formal experiments are not directed at breaking down form but at uncovering further possibilities. Szirtes shows a preference for closed structures, the terzina and sonnet. Although English poetry for centuries has been restrained in the employment of rhyme, Szirtes doggedly rhymes, cautiously expanding its potential in the direction of dissonance. There is good reason why the American poets whom he admires are John Crowe Ransom and Anthony Hecht, or, amongst his own contemporaries, such technically brilliant writers as Derek Mahon or Peter Scupham—poets who could not be further from stridency, including the stridency of formal virtuosity for its own sake.
Szirtes's diffidence springs from deep within. In 'English Words' (p. 118) he writes: "I cannot trust words now. One cultivates / the sensuous object in a locked museum: / their sounds are dangerous and must be heard / voluptuously, but behind thick glass. / Their emptiness appals one." This is no abstract, Wittgensteinian suspicion of words drawn from linguistic theory; Szirtes's qualms are experiential in nature. In the twelfth sonnet of 'The Looking-Glass Dictionary' sequence (p. 178) he evokes the linguistic misgivings that he took with him from his birthplace: "This tiny world, part Hungary, part England, / is the macaronic my parents speak— / my dad especially. There is no bland / unbroken stream. The words seem to leak / in drips, wearing away all sensible matter, / making minute impressions, exhausting them." He picks this up again in the fourteenth sonnet (p. 179): "The language here blankly refuses to mean / what it's supposed to. The signs are lost. / If you could only read the space between / or babble in fiery tongues at Pentecost," and he closes the sequence (p. 180) on this note: "Hungary, England are verbal shadowlands / of spotless glass where all may sit and preen, / blank languages whose words refuse to mean."
These doubts and experiences do not induce Szirtes to dismantle the relatively intact remnants of linguistic constructions, perhaps because they reached him in an already dismantled state. It can be no chance that the above sequence is dedicated to the Irish poet Gabriel Fitzmaurice. Szirtes takes just as much an outsider's view of the English language as the Irish do, and he is similarly an outsider in his view of his native tongue. From that position, he is obliged to create an English-language poetry of his own. There is nothing more to be stripped down; further deconstruction of the language is senseless from his viewpoint, but equally he cannot reconstruct something that never existed for him. He is left with constructing: his poems are constructed from linguistic elements handled with due suspicion. They fit deceptively into the English tradition, only they accentuate the very fact of fitting in from every single line. If they were unreflective utterances, there would be no need for them to fit in.
Yet in Szirtes' work this language issue does not turn into the infinite self-reflexiveness of a hall of mirrors; the hesitancy of language does not destroy the work, nor does the writer evaporate in it. At times he comes close, as in the last sonnet of the 'Travel Book' sequence, in which language and person eat away at one another (p. 188): "The ego grinds and grates like a machine / producing tiny slips on which is written / the nonsense it feeds upon." Despite which it ends on a note of hope: "The question is where you go. Come hope. Come home," which is justified within the text by nothing other than that in-between state, which can switch at any time from existing nowhere to existing somewhere, though admittedly it can straight away lose its temporary home. One can well imagine that Szirtes, to begin with, turned to his memories of Budapest in the first flush of a search for identity, but he probably quickly realized that he was not going to find it there. There were many other things to be found, though, such as the traces of what he might have become and did not become in Hungary, which he can compare with what he has become or has not become in England.
This in-between existence makes his voice at once intimately homely and unattainably aloof. That is why cropping up so often between the lines are the figures of his parents through whose fates he is able to come into proximity with his own. But only into proximity. 'The Photographer in Winter' sequence is a memorial to his mother, who took her own life. Irony still mingles in the soberly descriptive sentences of his disciplined stanzas: "...Please / Co-operate with me and turn your head, / Smile vacantly as if you were not dead / But walked through parallel worlds" (p. 85). Yet the poem captures just as much elemental pain as any passionately confessional kaddish. At the end of the poem, the writer photographs his mother, who was herself a photographer: "...I am exposed / And doubled. I have grown two-faced, split skins, / Become a multiple. Something begins / To bother me—I think it's my own voice" (p. 91). The son, who now has his own voice, thus appears in the photograph that he has made of his mother.
That is why these poems are tied so often to places and memories, the memory of places, even when he can expect nothing from them. Szirtes pursues the great journey to its end. The poems are arranged in three sections. The first set of poems works up childhood memories and the history of the family's vicissitudes. In 'Metro' he takes a time journey to conjure up the horrors of the war years, the hiding, his father's spell in a forced labour camp, his mother's in a concentration camp. The second section makes another attempt to assemble a picture of his younger years from the different stance of an English present. Here a bigger place is given to poems taken from the earlier books, published before his return visits to Hungary. The third section sets out the poems of the real city that he found. In this way he has constructed from poems a Budapest of his own which is more than a sliver of memory and more than a mere travel experience. Construction. The edificial quality is given visual force by the illustrations that adorn the cover and section heading papers: atmospheric, beautifully executed pastels of Budapest streets, a courtyard, and the façade of an apartment block by Clarissa Upchurch (the author's wife).
The last poem bears the title 'Soil'. With the volume spanning an arc from memory to experience, it would not be surprising if the metaphor of soil, earth, clod, signified that the poet has perceived his home, found his way home. Szirtes would have every justification for lulling his readers and himself with that. Yet why would he do that? The words lead us off part way down that path: "there is nowhere to go / but home" (p. 207). And were those his final words, the book would certainly close on a massive banality, but for the fact that the assertion is negated in the very next breath: "which is nowhere to be found". What follows, for this is only the start of the final cadence, is thoroughly typical of the gentle obduracy of George Szirtes's verse. With a witty rhetorical flourish, he confronts the duality of that assertion and negation with a fresh duality: "and yet / is here, unlost, solid, the very ground / on which you stand but cannot visit / or know." It is not the mirroring of contradictions that makes this ending so marvellous, though it is partly that too, but much more that by this mirroring of contradictions the positive assertion of the verb set in a line by itself (know), with which he ends the poem and the volume, has already been negated by the auxiliary verb of the previous line (cannot).
The knowledge Szirtes has acquired is 'unknowing'; his home—the bit of soil on which he happens to be standing right now. If he has nowhere to set his foot down, then he makes poetry of that. His poems have left an enduring imprint of that evanescent state of in-betweenness on the history of modern lyric poetry.
NOTES
1, 'Szirtes Gábor Györgynek (To Gábor George Szirtes)'. In: Halálfej (Death's Head), N.p., Aurora, 1991, p. 233. Back
2, Selected Poems. London, Faber & Faber, 1986, p. 228. Back
3, The Adoption Papers. Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Bloodaxe Books, 1991, p. 15. Back
4, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Bloodaxe Books, 1998. Back
5, Now in a second edition (Edinburgh University Press, 2000). Back
Győző Ferencz
a poet and translator of poetry, teaches English and American poetry at the English Department of Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest.
