"Hungarian Roots,
English Traditions"

George Szirtes on Becoming an English Poet

George Szirtes, born in Budapest in 1948, left Hungary with his family as a child in 1956 and settled in England. So far he has published 13 volumes of poetry, the most recent of which are The Budapest File, Bloodaxe/Corvina, 2000, a collection of his poems on Hungarian topics, and An English Apocalypse, Bloodaxe, 2001. He has received numerous prestigious Bristish awards, including the Faber Prize and the Cholmondeley Award. He returned to Hungary for the first time in 1984 and has come back every year since then. He has translated many literary works into English, amongst others The Tragedy of Man by Imre Madách, selections from the poems of István Vas, Ottó Orbán, Sándor Csóri and Zsuzsa Rakovszky, and novels by Dezső Kosztolányi, Gyula Krúdy and László Krasznahorkai. The British Council chose one of his poems for an international poetry translation competition which attracted 118 entries from Hungarians. The selected Hungarian translators were invited to attend a seminar by Lake Balaton.

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A.G.: You lived in Hungary until you were eight years old, then, with your family, you found a new home in England. What was it like growing up in England as a Hungarian child?

G.Sz.: I went to an ordinary English primary school and was immediately accepted. I made friends with the local English boys, and I suppose all I wanted as a young child was to fit in with them, be like them-an English schoolboy. We never lived in any Hungarian community, in England such a thing doesn't really exist. My parents wanted to start a new life, and my younger brother and I, to some extent, personified that new life. We spoke English at home, and so I largely forgot what Hungarian I had known. At secondary school I was interested in natural sciences, but I went on to study at art school; I trained to become a painter, though even then I was doing an awful lot of writing. My poems at that time had nothing whatever to do with Hungary, nor indeed did any of my first three published volumes.

Didn't your parents have any relatives, or maybe friends, with whom they stayed in contact?

My parents had friends there, but virtually all our family was wiped out during the war. In fact, there were only two who remained in Hungary afterwards. On that score, I might just as well have visited Buenos Aires, Sydney or Cluj-Kolozsvár, though I only got to know about the relative in Kolozsvár much later on. As a result, Hungary had no part in those first three volumes. In 1983, however, it suddenly became extremely important to me. It dawned on me that there were undiscovered areas of my life, and that I had no idea how I could broach them, nor indeed what it was that I needed to discover. During a holiday in Scotland I started reading about Hungary. By the following year I had already made my way here with a bursary, and I have been back virtually every year since. My first visit, though it only lasted three weeks, was decisive: for the first time in ages everyone around me was speaking Hungarian-it was as if I were hallucinating. And I recognized streets, the sounds and smells of the city, everything. Everything I wrote about for many years was changed.

Your mother came back from a concentration camp; most of her family had been killed. Didn't you have any prejudices, antipathies, fears?

No, I had no idea what to expect, what to count on. My mother had already died by then, in 1975. I didn't have a coherent picture of the country, no feel for the political and social developments.

And the past didn't disturb you?

By that token I could just as easily have felt the same about almost any country in Europe. But it is a lot more complex than that: I only learned that my mother was Jewish after her death. She had told us quite a different story.

So at that point you had no idea even about her own life?

I knew that she had been deported to a concentration camp, but others were also deported. And she never wanted to speak about it; she didn't want us to know. Consequently, we didn't keep up any Jewish traditions; in fact, we were brought up in a completely non-Jewish manner. In 1970, when I was 21, I had myself baptised by full immersion, as a Baptist-not for the sake of appearances, I hasten to add, but out of genuine conviction. Last year I was confronted with a serious dilemma. A publisher approached me with a request to allow my poems to be included in an anthology of British Jewish twentieth-century verse. I agonized over it for quite a long time as it would mean acting against my mother's wishes. But what was I to do when it is very clear on reading my poetry that at least some of those who are very close to me are Jewish, and I have no wish to deny that. I am aware, of course, that what I think is one thing, and what others regard me as being is another. So I had neither fears nor antipathies when I first visited Hungary, and as a matter of fact I couldn't have had a better reception. A small delegation from the PEN Club was there to meet me. A fair number of the people I got to know then are still friends to this day. After 1984 I wrote a surprisingly large amount of poems relating to Hungary.

You have now published those poems as a separate volume, even though they appeared in previous collections.

The main reason is entirely practical: I am with a new publisher, Bloodaxe, and they were keen to put out my earlier work as well. The idea for the volume came from Bloodaxe, who felt this was the best way of presenting my work as a whole. I was initially very doubtful about it myself, though I have since beeen won over. Since 1984 I have often had the odd experience of being introduced as a Hungarian poet at poetry readings in England, even though I have never written a line in Hungarian. This meant that I was not regarded as a fully English poet in any case. And then I was rather averse to making a selection of my verse on thematic grounds, but since the notion had already been put forward, I thought, well let's see if it can be made to work, and I gave in. I ruminated a lot over it; that is why there is a preface, which is very unusual with a volume of poems. The next volume, The English Apocalypse, which appeared this autumn, contains all my poems on English subjects. As far as I was concerned originally, though, this seemed a little artificial because I didn't write in that sort of
programmatic manner. Now I think, it has, in many ways, clarified things. Eventually there will be a third volume, which will be the hardest of the three to classify as it will include those poems which did not fit into the first two. In reality, of course, there are some poems which might just as easily have fitted into either the Hungarian or the English-related volume because they deal with what it is like being a Hungarian in Britain. That in itself is an uncommon condition; it makes you a strange being, and sometimes it is hard to accept being regarded by English readers as an ambiguous phenomenon of that sort. I naturally write in English, and my poems are mostly informed by the English poetic tradition- what other tradition could inform it so directly? Of course the position is by no means as clear-cut as either / or. Nor as unusual.

You grew up on English literature, under the influence of English poets. So is the Hungarian connection only evident in the subject-matter?

If you do a lot of translating, and I only translate from Hungarian, then you absorb a lot in the process, you learn all sorts of things. Several Hungarian poets have had a strong influence on me, both technically and creatively. When I translated the sonnets of Ottó Orbán, for instance, I found the near-Classical quantities of his metre fascinating. Classical metres are not much used in English poetry, so I was keen to try out whether I could make them work. I wrote a whole cycle of my own poems in this fashion, and I now use them as a matter of course. They have helped me a lot. The register is also important, since one of the major differences between two poets is that they employ different voices. Certain kinds of voice are more characteristic of one culture rather than another. In the process of self-discovery one tries various tones. In all probability, every poem that I have translated has left some sort of imprint on me.

Do you think English readers sense that difference in your poems, the fact that a non-English tradition also has a profound impact on your work?

As far as the style and vocabulary goes, they occasionally come across something unusual or outlandish. When criticizing my poems, though, they have had more problems with the language being too polished, too English, rather than too foreign. A lot of people positively enjoy it if a poem's voice departs from the standard literary range, but I have no control over that; I can't play the foreigner. In 1993 there appeared the highly influential Bloodaxe New Poetry anthology which, as part of its programme, divided up the mainstream of English poetry into various contemporary "regional" literatures each with its own specific racy idiom. As a result I was left in a difficult position as I don't belong to any English region. I speak a neutral, "standard" English. Just as I can't play the foreigner, I can't adopt the role of a regional writer either.

But then you have individual experiences; you can write about a history that no other British poet can lay claim to.

There are both gains and losses. You gain a certain curiosity value, but you lose detailed attention, as indeed happened in certain quarters with The Budapest File. The book received considerable and favourable publicity, but the accent in the more prominent papers was less on the poetry than on the singularity of the phenomenon of the author. It was rather like praising a dog for being able to go about on its hind legs.

Trinity College in Dublin last year invited you, a Hungarian English poet of Jewish descent, as writer-in-residence, to give a series of lectures about nationalism. How did that come about?

They had inaugurated a new post which entailed inviting a foreign writer every year, and I was the first one they chose. On my arrival I still didn't know exactly what I was supposed to be doing; indeed, since I was the first, I don't think the university knew either. In the end, I ran a series of seminars on the subject of literary translation for post-graduates involved in writing poetry or fiction and gave also some poetry readings. I was, at the same time, asked to give two public lectures about the association of literature with nationalism. The question of nationalism is, of course, a highly vexed one in Ireland, so I was well aware that my coming from England had various profound implications. I suspected that they had invited me precisely because I was both Hungarian and English (such invitations are one of the interesting aspects of complex identity). I tried to speak about the uncertainty and fear that attach to my own understanding of nationalism. I said something about literary identity, that is to say, about the difference between what you hold yourself to be, and what others hold you to be.
I spoke, albeit tangentially, about nationalism in Ireland, which is a very powerful force drawing on a persuasive version of historical memory. Hatred of England is deeply imbedded in it. I myself had grown up in England, and had no grounds for complaint on that score. I used the situation of Hungary as a point of reference, as indeed they would have expected me to. I argued that the intensity of Irish nationalism was amplified because Ireland has had just one historical enemy: England. Ireland is a small island next to a bigger island which separates it from Europe. Compiling a roster of Hungary's historical enemies yields a much longer list. The hostility is therefore more widely directed. The real question was why historical antagonisms should play such an important part in our contemporary life at all? To displaced people such as myself, I suggested, such antagonisms always presented serious problems. Furthermore, ever more people were displaced. Displacement was in fact the basic condition even of those who imagined otherwise. That was the essence of my lectures. They were received with some enthusiasm, so I imagine there may be sufficient desire to leave the old vexed issues aside, and so to improve matters.

You are not only a poet but also a literary translator. Is there a readership for Hungarian poetry in England?

I suspect they would all fit into a single large hall. For the English to read a foreign poet there has to be a "story" of some kind over and above the poems themselves.

Hungarian culture falls outside the purview of the English; there are few historical or cultural links between the two countries.

There are links, but not important ones. One interesting consequence of The Budapest File that was not the result of any conscious premeditation is that Budapest has now found its way onto the map of english poetry. In earlier volumes too I had included selections from my translations of Ágnes Nemes Nagy and Ottó Orbán, along with renderings of Attila József and Miklós Radnóti. I felt that there were two main ways in which I could be of service to Hungarian experience: by establishing Hungarian places and events in my own English writing, and by translating Hungarian authors. In lucky moments it seemed as if I had been given the key to a side door of English literature and could therefore let in those I admired.

One of your first translations was Madách's verse-play, The Tragedy of Man. Did you intend that as a symbolic gesture, or has the play actually been staged since in England?

No, at least my translation has not been performed. The Tragedy is a very important work: to my knowledge, as we speak there are at least five Hungarians living abroad who are working on translations of it. When I set to work on it, to be honest, I was not really aware of its significance. Sadly, though, it was very hard to find a British publisher for it. They were not enthusiastic about publishing a nineteenth-century piece, and one written in verse at that. It would be hard enough selling it even if it had originally been written in English, they argued, let alone in Hungarian! Still, it was eventually published and was fairly well received by the critics. Mine was a literary translation, not intended primarily for performance: if there were a question of performing it I would probably have to redo the whole thing from the very beginning with a different attitude.

Do you reckon there is any chance they would perform it in England?

Yes. In an appropriate translation. All sorts of things appear on the English stage. There would have to be an element of luck in it, but much more of the play would come across than people imagine. I am quite certain that belief, hard work, enthusiasm and an adequate measure of promotion can go a long way, but people have first to be persuaded to give it their attention, and, of course, their financial support too. Very few Hungarian plays do make it to England, of course. Hungarian culture is represented much more by music, film, photography and science. For obvious linguistic reasons Hungarian literature is an unknown quantity, and there are few of us who are capable of translating it to English at a level that can be published-maybe six or seven in the whole world.

Right now you are working on a novel. Can you give us some clue what it will be about?

The model for the main protagonist was a real person, a Hungarian wrestler who emigrated to England at the same time as we did and quite quickly made a name for himself there. He was often on the TV, a genuinely likeable figure and a real favourite with the public. He was twenty years older than me, and I only met him on one occasion. Indeed, I only once saw him live in the ring, at the very start of his career.

What was his name?

Tibor Szakács. He'd won a silver medal at the world championships and in England he turned to professional wrestling, which is a very different sport. He led a remarkably interesting life, but in the book there are two other major perspectives beside the biographical. The first concerns social history. The action takes place during the period when I myself was growing up in England, the England where I still live, but the novel seeks a standpoint different from my own (of course it includes my own as well). The second concerns psychological experience and its relationship to dream. Professional wrestling is virtually a form of circus in which the wrestlers adopt a persona, put on symbolic masks and costumes, and develop vivid carnivalesque roles. Lately I have been attending a lot of pro-wrestling bouts, chatting with wrestlers and making friends with some of them. What the novel means for me, more than anything else, is that I can become someone different, and adopt an identity rather as wrestlers themselves do. After all sport hasn't played any part in my life as a writer. Mine has become a life of the mind and heart. It's as if I had discovered another self that I could only exist in in dreams. The parallels with my own life are magnified. The most fascinating aspect of Szakács's career is that he was able to remain an outsider in a world of increasingly grotesque characters: he never put on any disguise and always stepped into the ring in plain wrestling strip. He was always himself when he fought; he had a remarkably developed technique, and the public admired him. His career followed the kind of highly coloured tragic arc that can serve as myth. Wrestling is theatre, and as time went on he found that he was increasingly asked to play the loser's role. In 1978, he lost the sight of one eye during a bout with another well-known wrestler-one of the major masked figures of the time-and on his return to the ring he failed to achieve the same success. He died not long after that.

András Gerevich