The revolutionary tradition could only be continued outside Hungary. Along with so many other revolutionaries George Gömöri, who was then a university student and already a poet (his first poem was published in 1953), was forced to leave the country, never forgetting what real liberty should mean for Hungarians. By leaving his homeland, the young poet took upon himself the burden of exile. ”At this stage we suspect and yet should know / there’s no way back” (“Christmas 1956”). He knows that what follows is ”in our case Oxford, for friends who stayed behind / the wellknown prisons, semi-skilled employment”, and shoulders the responsibility for those left behind, translating their poems, writing about them in both Hungarian and English, and later, as a teacher of Hungarian and Polish at Cambridge, inviting them over to Britain for readings, trying thus to establish small islands of freedom for his countrymen.
In an essay in his book on 20thcentury Hungarian poetry that bears the telling title Freedom, Come!, Gömöri meditates on the use of the word ”hazám”, trying to find a good translation for it that fits a poem (”my fatherland”, ”my land”, ”my country”, ”my native parts” are some of the possibilities), but concludes that

the word has such a rich tradition in Hungarian poetry that one cannot find its precise counterpart for an English translation without quoting the relevant stanzas in full. “Hazám” is also the title of a poem by Attila József that Gömöri recited in public during the revolution, and a key word in Gömöri’s oeuvre. “Homeland”, for him, does not only mean the country and the city of his origins, but even more that decisive moment in October when Hungary and freedom meant the same.
Leaving one’s birthplace means losing security for ever. The Hungarian language is able to distinguish between a first home, itthon (”here-home”) and a second home, otthon (”there-home”); the word hon on its own means homeland. Gömöri’s life-work shows that one can create a homeland of one’s own which includes both versions of home. In a similar way Gyula Illyés, in the poem “Haza a magasban” (Homeland on High), suggests that one can create a magic circle out of poems and history which then becomes a homeland. Illyés’s poem is about how to survive a dictatorship, but it takes no less determination for Gömöri to find a home in another land, however pleasant it is, while knowing that one’s own country seems to be lost.