Anyone opening the over five hundred pages that make up a recent volume of the collected and new work of George Szirtes enters an amply flowing stream of poetic consciousness of many hues. This was his fourteenth volume, with the poet reaching the age of sixty last year, which also provided the occasion for a 250-page critical analysis of his writing (John Sears: Reading George Szirtes. Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2008). Corvina Press of Budapest marked it with a bilingual edition of 29 poems selected by András Imreh. The bulky book from Bloodaxe, however, represents just a part, albeit the most significant part, of Szirtes's oeuvre to date. In addition Szirtes is also a productive literary translator, and apart from that has written a continually growing number of essays, reviews and book prefaces. He is a regular voice on radio, holds poetry readings, has been on reading tours in Britain, on the Continent and in the US, edited several anthologies, has been a jury member in various competitions, and teaches a course in creative writing at the University of East Anglia, keeping a hand in with painting and graphic art, in which he received his original training. Also, in recent years he has been writing a daily blog on the internet. He is interested in a wide range of things, has opinions about many, is a quick worker, and gives every sign that it is in writing that he truly lives. All that concerns a leading English poet of his generation, whose efforts have been recognised through his receipt of several important literary prizes, yet who does not put on airs but remains soft-spoken, warm-hearted and good-humoured.
Szirtes is an English poet, but one with a difference. I have heard him referred to as a Hungarian poet who decided to write in English, meaning that he could have written in Hungarian, but since he lives in England, he chooses to write those Hungarian poems in English. From remarks that he has made in the past, and indeed from Sears's book, even in England he is pigeonholed as a "Hungarian" poet, though in point of fact he has not written a line of his verse, or prose for that matter, in Hungarian. Nor was he in a position to do so. He was eight years old when, in 1956, after the crushing of the Hungarian revolution, he and his younger brother accompanied their parents who fled and ended up by settling in England. The parents chose the route of full assimilation, and so kept strictly to speaking only English even at home, which meant that the boy more or less forgot his native tongue. Having been dropped in the deep end at eight, through total immersion in English life and culture, he acquired a second mother tongue. He now thinks in English, grew up on English poetry and to this day has not picked up any demonstrable links with

Hungarian poetic traditions, or if so, these are barely discernible, though he has written somewhere that every translation that he has done has left an imprint on him. While at work on composing a poem though, for him the very state of engagement with the language is still a particular adventure (a number of his poems touch on this) which a native English poet, if he or she chose to write on the subject, would certainly not register as an unusual experience. Right from the outset—maybe owing to a drive to assimilate—the linguistic and formal devices that he used, and now as an accomplished and accredited poet, the subjects he has explored for decades are, as far as I can judge, more individual and varied than those of many of his Englishborn contemporaries. A slight outsider quality, the imprint of a different early environment, an influence of a foreign past and language, is detectable in his very voice, as well as his perspective and the way he shapes his poems, say critics—a sign that his roots go back to the soil of continental Europe, and more specifically, to East and Central Europe. That past only rarely surfaced in his works up until his first return visit to Budapest, in 1984, but the poet has since confronted the past locality that has been buried inside, and its living present, the scenery, the living idiom, culture and literature, all these re-emerge to become one of the main strands in his poetry. That staggering re-encounter has since then flowed like a life-sustaining infusion into the body of English poetry, providing stiff doses of another: the turbulent, less fortunate, ever grim Europe. In the view of some commentators, Szirtes by doing so has had a salutary effect on the not particularly diverse panorama of English poetry of recent years, by setting himself up as the "Hungarian" poet. To put it another way, they have their "Hungarian" poet, whereas we Hungarians have our "English" poet. There is no real foundation in such assertions, but all the same, a fair dash of truth in both.
In commenting on this in-between status in the preface to the volume, Szirtes notes that after the early years of searching for his identity, under the impact of the first return visit to the country of his birth, "I found myself becoming an English poet with a Hungarian past, or, to be more accurate, a fully baptised but increasingly residual-Christian (to use Peter Porter's term) English poet with a Jewish Hungarian past." That is not a programme, he hastens to add, any more than it is an ars poetica, I would rejoin: just a statement of fact, a product of the work of his proclivities, time and circumstances. But to be situated at the juncture of four so very different traditions is poetically exceedingly fruitful.