SOURCE: Szirtes, George. “Being Remade As an English Poet.” New Hungarian Quarterly 30, no. 113 (spring 1989): 149-59.

[In the following essay, Szirtes writes about his youth and writing poetry in a new language.]

At the age of twenty-seven I felt “I needed to be remade as an English poet.” It was of course a form of groping in the dark. What does it mean to be remade? If I ask myself this question now I am immediately led back into that odd twilight world in which the past becomes an unwitting liar, the clear conclusions that spring from it fade like mirages, and even the apparent certainties of what has come to be begin to lose their definition. Now I travel regularly to Hungary, have good friends there, read Hungarian poetry (still with some, though decreasing, difficulty), write about Hungary, and am less concerned about having to be remade as an Englishman. My language is naturally English—I have (I tell myself) written five books of English poems to prove it—and even though the last two books have, in curious ways, fed on Hungary, nobody has suggested that I have become something other than I was in earlier books. It is true that in one or two places I have been billed as a ‘Hungarian poet’ and that one of the terms in which I am sometimes praised is as an introducer of foreign flavours into English verse, but the first of these I have put down to ignorance or possibly an opportunistic eye for what might seem exotic. The second proposition, if true, would please me. I notice I have twice employed dietary metaphors above: feeding, flavours. The idea of ingestion is obviously important.

And it is the less intellectual senses—taste, smell, touch—that suit my theme here, which is the overlap between English and Hungarian experience in so far as I can comprehend it. They are the most fugitive senses, the most haunting. Of course we begin with vision and with words, or the music of words. Perhaps I could start by describing two landscapes.

First, my experience of England. We arrive at the seaside. It is cold but the sea is loud, and so is the wind. Somewhere overlooking the sea, in the dark, is a hut where I am taken to join in the activities of the local cub scouts. A dog chases me, an English boy fires a waterpistol at me. Somewhere there is a boarding house with trees outside. This is only for a short time, then we are in London, in a north-west suburb. The railway runs close by. We can stumble down the embankment towards it. At night a bee flies into my ear and stings me. Just a little way away there is a big road with a 1940s cinema. My parents' Hungarian friends live close by. One is a photographer. His wife is buxom and dark and has two very pretty little daughters. Did she once pose half-naked for him? Was something said about this once, in another room? Another couple, much more bohemian. He is an artist, and his slim red-haired wife likes dancing to trad jazz. He wears leathers and rides a motorbike: she has an electric presence, deeply attractive (I am nine or ten at the time). Later they will separate, and he will stop being an artist, a fact which still strikes me as very sad.

Changes of address. Sitting in the front room of our small terraced house, listening to the Goon Show on radio. My parents are out and have not come back when they said they would. I begin to panic. At the end of the road (it is a cul-de-sac) lives my scoutmaster, Mr Larkin. We live at the summit of a steep hill. My mother can hardly get up it, because her heart is poor. On the other side of the hill are some odd, turreted semi-detached houses. In a flat at the top of one of these lives Mr Shane who plays the violin in Mantovani's orchestra. Sometimes we see him on the small grey television (our proud new possession), a small moustached courteous man, like a reverent waiter or undertaker. He teaches my brother the violin too. A little girl I am secretly in love with lives in one of the nearby smaller houses. There are two girls down our street too.

The next few years are clear enough. A new address once more. Grammar school. Operations on my mother. My father has an accident on a building site. This is a quiet area, but on Saturday evening the children of the wealthier neighbours roar off in their fathers' cars. I am more than indifferent to the place. I begin, quietly, to hate it.

Now Leeds—a blessed change. Love, marriage. The city is rough, broad, romantically decayed. The smell of rotting in a tiny house. Two schizophrenic women upstairs. In the Chapeltown district, blacks, Ukrainians, a few remnant Jews. Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, murderer of several prostitutes, as well as of normal women, is about my age. Later he will walk down these same streets with his hammer. An aged poet slumps drunk in his dark chaotic room full of books. Then, briefly, London again. My wife has a miscarriage, a cat gone crazy has to be put down.

Where I sit now I overlook the tops of low trees. We have a long walled garden, beyond which lies a children's playground. I can also see the dull brown roofs of a recent estate with its cluster of television areals. A garage workshop is to my right, the car park of the local Crown Court to my left. Behind me, at the front of the house, a busy road and the white library and museum. I know that if I go out of my front door, turn left and left again down a small alley, within ten minutes I will be out in the fields. The fields slope down into a gentle valley, and a small river trundles silver grey beyond some further trees. In autumn the mist hangs above it. Dogs and their owners suddenly appear. I don't in fact walk out here very much. Of the town itself, I know its details well enough; its market, its church, its quaint roofs and windows. It has a mild open-faced handsomeness. I have lived here for fourteen years, but it is not my home. Hertfordshire—however long I continue to live here—will always seem like an interlude, even though it is where I have written almost all my published work.

Such sounds and sights add up to a flavour of some sort. Of course I know Oxford, Cambridge and other places too, but they don't register very much. They belong to other people, richer, more educated and more purely English than me. I suppose they still frighten me a little, though I know how to walk among them, and how to comport myself in their company. Their public schools are a mystery, their love lives imponderable. To say objectively, I like England, suddenly makes the whole country seem very small and clear, as though I were looking down on it from a low-flying aeroplane.

Now the second place. I am not quite sure why I have come to Budapest. I wander round in a dream. Later I rationalise: there is an architecture of the exterior and an architecture of the interior. I am now walking down the streets of the interior. This is a simplification. It is hopeless making simple statements about the past, the best we can do is to state facts as barely as possible. “She had a red skirt,” for example. Or, “He died in that house.” If you lie about these things they will fade away completely, and you will find even your interior architecture nothing but air and tantalising smells. The smells are there anyway, but suddenly they have a home. To look into a courtyard, walk through the gateway and suddenly recognise that warm wash of domestic sound, is not to know anything about history, but it is a form of communion with the lively dead. Every cherubic head, every caryatid, every florid bas-relief is the spirit of some unknown inhabitant. The buildings themselves are bodies in shabby clothes. The higher you go the warmer and brighter it gets. Looking down feels precipitous but familiar. You have forgotten the sensation of standing above these cobbled yards, but you know that this is a kind of food, and that somehow you have got to eat it if you want the strength to go further and explore individual rooms or open cupboards. And this is a compulsive act: as in a dream you know that there is something you must do, even though you cannot remember too precisely what it is, or why you are doing it. If only I can twist my words round this room, or get them to scrape the façade off that building, I will have accomplished something. And who knows—ridiculous though these dreams may be—perhaps if I walk down enough streets and open enough cupboards the dead might wake up and all the buildings become a mass of brilliant faces. And I might be one of these faces too.

But the words are English: the air that clings to them is that of the first place; railway embankments, sea-spray, grey skies, Oxford, Cambridge, thick ploughed fields. Then again, the voice of Mr Shane, the schizophrenic women, the yells in the playground, something rotting in small rooms, the anaesthetic smell of hospitals. Perhaps if nothing else the worlds of here and there could infect each other. Eating, smell, infection: “Hearing music is like contracting a disease, / a beautiful infection.” I put that speech into the mouth of a censor in a poem called ‘Cultural Directives’. Let us eat each other a little (if only in a theological sense), and hope to catch each other's infections.

A poet has to reconcile personal experience with the literary tradition and practice of his tribe. He has to consume these things before he can serve up anything of his own. Having grown up with the English tribe I will try to give the Hungarian reader a rough description of the bill of fare.

Since first becoming actively conscious of poetry I have lived through almost three decades, which can, in effect, be divided into three characteristic periods. As a schoolboy of the sixties I was naturally attracted to the phenomena of the sixties. I bought the cheap Penguin books of poetry, English, European and American. I also listened with a brief intensity to the lyrics of popular songs. My first loves were heterogeneous: Donne, Prévert, Appolinaire, Ginsberg, the so-called Liverpool poets (very brief loves these!) and a dozen others. It was a period of discovery. I had no idea of tradition, or of craft, but I did have very strict standards of honesty and labour. I had to write a lot, and it had to be true. True in what sense, I would find it difficult to say. No one taught me, since I did not study English Literature in my senior years at school, but my friends passed on books that they liked, and we had something of a secret society. I don't suppose our critical judgment was particularly acute or even articulate. Perhaps poetry was just an alternative way of life that appealed to us. If, for me, it was more than that, it was perhaps a fascination with the sheer oddity of words and a long suppressed desire to speak (even if only to myself) about what I felt. The poets I should have read then, had I been sophisticated, would have been the confessionals: Lowell, Berryman, Sexton, Plath on the American side, and Hughes, Walker and Wevill on the English. As it is, I found these later by which time, with the exception of Lowell, they seemed irrelevant to me. Hughes wrote about nature, and nature was, and probably remains, a closed book. I felt the imperious violence of his poems, but pigs, hawks, foxes and crows had no physical substance. Stones, pebbles, grass and cracks in the earth were all I knew of nature.

I should of course have also read Philip Larkin. The Whitsun Weddings came out in 1964, but I see from my copy of the book that I must have bought it after 1973. Larkin, along with other fine English poets of the time—the members of the Group or the Movement—probably did not seem glamorous enough. Librarians, college lecturers, schoolmasters. What could come of these? asked the eighteen-year-old boy. These were just the people one had to get away from. The end of the sixties for me, as for many others, meant escape. But escape also meant Keats, Rilke and Rimbaud (particularly Rimbaud). They were our stolen fruits and stolen minutes.

This reading is necessarily indiscriminate. Not surprisingly it favours the romantic, the dramatic gesture over the calm utterance, the realm of frustrated action over the realm of ironic contemplation. There was nevertheless a strong speculative, philosophical streak in my own writing, and I think it even had a still centre somewhere. When I went to art college the horizons widened. I brought with me a new enthusiasm for the French surrealist poets, and found at Leeds a real poet to share it with me. This was Martin Bell.

After twenty years, and ten years after his death, his newly extended Collected Poems arrived through the post today. Bell was a maverick. Leeds to him was a kind of spiritual exile from the literary world of London. He was probably the most erudite, most mischievously ironic yet romantic poet since Eliot. Eliot was indeed his master, and behind Eliot, Laforgue. He revered Pope and Rochester, adored Baudelaire and Wallace Stevens. He introduced me to his heroes, and to others too: to Yeats, to Norman Cameron, to John Crowe Ransom, to William Empson. In short he showed me the power of irony. His own use of it was flamboyant, paranoid and deeply moving. In his kind, helpless, alcoholic omniscience he was as lovable and dangerous (chiefly to himself) as any man I have met. He ran a poetry group where those few of us who were interested in writing could gather on the third floor of the hideously brutal college building which overlooked an uncompleted motorway (and some ravishing sunsets), and discuss each other's work under his leadership. My new enthusiasms were Blake and the King James Bible. He gently directed me to Herbert and to Marvell too.

I still had no clear idea of what Eliot called tradition, but I was becoming more interested. The Great Tradition of Leavis completely passed me by. I read D. H. Lawrence and while realising his power found him unsympathetic. Conrad was marvellous of course, and Jane Austen admirable. I was bored by George Eliot. The idea of reducing one's reading to what an ascetic university teacher thought was essential to life was, in so far as it permeated to me at all, quite ridiculous. Nevertheless, after Leeds I began, consciously, to learn my craft. What my contemporaries—the other poets of my own generation—were reading I don't know, but the early seventies were a period of reaction to the sixties. It was the period of the “steely trimmers.” Their poems were short, taciturn, cut to size. The so-called “minipoet” took over from the voluminous, visionary or joky bard of the expansionist sixties. Form was returning: the universities were fighting back. Tight, compressed, intelligent poems appeared in the pages of The New Review, in The New Statesman and in The Listener. This was not the ebullient irony of Martin Bell but the intelligentsia's brief civilised Schadenfreude.

My own personal contact among contemporary poets was Peter Porter to whom I was introduced by letter by Martin Bell, and to whom I sent poems. He need not have replied to my poems, but he did so patiently, and at length. His advice was to have as clear an eye for material detail as for visionary distortion. His own poetry was rather daunting to me at the time: it seemed to cover the length and breadth of classical culture—music, art and literature—a kind of educated dialogue with God. It was when his wife died and he wrote those simple monumental elegies in her memory in The Cost of Seriousness that I first began to see the poems as fully human, and recognise the dialogue to be emotional as well as intellectual. But that was in 1978, two years after I had begun to cope with my own first family death.

By this time I had read my way thoroughly into the English tradition, and I could hear in people like Isaac Watts, John Clare, Edward Thomas and Thomas Hardy, a voice so indigenous that I could only admire it from the outside. Its most recent manifestation was Philip Larkin. His was a kind of melancholy and marred pastoral, without the adumbration of myth. Human life was short, resonant but final; impoverished, it held remnants of richness. Larkin's unfussy diction and refusal to inflate into rhetoric was astringent but enormously moving. In America he might have been a kind of Robert Frost, but Larkin professed never to look beyond England. To accept the world of Larkin though (an impossible feat for me) would have meant surrendering whole areas of one's experience to a murderous scepticism. When Larkin died it was as if a deep-toned bell that would not let you sleep had fallen from its tower.

I have written before about the change wrought in my verse by my mother's death. The event focussed and chilled the poems. The warmth had to come from within the structure. I began to write formally about the subjects physically closest to me. My first formal attempts were disastrous, as if I had treated life for the sake of some sort of elegance, which anyway seemed to lie beyond me. But little by little the discipline began to yield results. I had started to make cages in which to catch more fugitive, more disorientating experiences.

It would be wrong to leave the impression that I acted in a vacuum. A sort of baroque elegance was returning to English poetry. It was there in Porter of course, but it assumed a donnish-dandyish air in John Fuller, a surrealist and political dimension in James Fenton and an eighteenth-century cabinet-of-curiosities exoticism in a new friend of mine, Peter Scupham.

I met him in Hitchin, where we both still live, and starting from entirely different points our subsequent careers have occasionally moved in parallel directions. I coveted the richness and sprezzatura of the intellectual formalists because it left room for surprise, brilliance, myth, hauntings and pietas, elements banished by Larkinism, yet its structures were solid and unindulgent. I had thought of Scupham primarily as a representative of the group based round the magazine Poetry Nation. I thought—and still do think—of the group as rather dry, but Scupham's inventiveness and grace are quickened with human fears and affections. His influence on my work would be hard to pinpoint, since by the time we met I was just starting on my more assured work, and was soon to publish my first book. If I had to state a debt to him it would be for that element of verbal music or grace that, with his example in mind, and his advice in my ears, I have slowly managed to accumulate in my rougher verse.

The late seventies and early eighties were anyway offering opportunities for more baroque development. Tony Harrison's clanging couplets, Craig Raine and Christopher Reid's visual fantasies, Douglas Dunn's newly formal didactic and elegiac verses, and Paul Muldoon's intellectual arabesques broadened the scope of poetry. Three slightly older masters further amplified the themes and textures available to modern diction: Seamus Heaney. Derek Mahon and Geoffrey Hill. Of the three, Mahon is probably closest to the kind of poetry I feel I want to write. But eloquent American voices also promised wealth beyond the Larkinesque shires. Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht (of the marvellous Venetian Vespers), and someone I had missed earlier, Randall Jarrell. Derek Walcott, the West Indian poet who treats of romance, myth and history with a classical poise and Joseph Brodsky, the brilliant model of alienation, lent their formal weight to this new humanism. All of them, to a greater or lesser extent, spring out of the rib of Auden.

I haven't yet mentioned Auden, but now, since I have reached the present day, I must. The whole question of the alternative to Modernism is answered in his terms, rather than in Larkin's. Not that Modernism was an issue for any of us: we read and admired (perhaps even venerated) Joyce, were dazzled by early and middle period Eliot, surveyed the glass mountain of Ezra Pound and turned away from the Black Mountain of Olson. Modernism had become absorbed, its shock value diminished. It was part of history, part of the furniture. To make a Futurist gesture one would need a Bugatti and such a faith in machines as we had long lost. When we were told that the iambic measure was suitable to the age of the horse (clip-clop, clip-clop) but unfit for the age of the jet aeroplane, we remembered we still had feet that walked or skipped, and that when all the aeroplanes were shot down there remained the ultimate form of escape—running. All this is implicit in Auden: he can be abstruse and proverbial at the same time; his diction can be arcanely modern or arcanely archaic. He is playful yet deadly serious. The political ghosts of the age haunt his buildings and streets. If he cannot give us ecstasy or passionate love, his wisdom offers the possibilities of these. He is a world citizen in the English language, while Pound, in some way, will always be the ambitious boy from Idaho. Of course one can experiment, but one does not claim to change the world by so doing. One can be as eclectic as one likes: the imperatives are those of responsibility for the preservation of the world, rather than the creation of a new one out of the old one's ruins. We have seen too many ruins. We have lived under the permanent shadow of permanent ruin. History has become precious. Human lives and human courtesies are more valuable than dogma.

Auden then has been the pointer—and occasionally the danger—for me in recent years. Poised precariously as I am between two formative experiences, the Audenesque tone, veering inclusively from the colloquial to the distant, has tempted me like it has others. If I look at the above list of the poets I admire, I notice that Hecht has a Lithuanian background, Walcott an English classical education, and that Brodsky is a political exile—and that, of course, Auden himself straddled two cultures. Perhaps in this situation a poet has to take certain things on trust: international form (rhyme, metre, etc. as agreed on the European model), and the common store of European imagery from history through to art and myth. This, to some extent, is his currency. He has to spend this as he thinks most appropriate in order to accommodate his personal demons, since there is no given house for him, there are only hotels and rooms to let.

For me, returning to Hungary was more important initially for the establishment of a sense of native landscape (a very urban one in my case), than for directly literary reasons. My Hungarian was practically non-existent in 1984, and is just about serviceable now. To make literary judgments would be an act of presumption: I can only hazard guesses tempered by personal taste. However, though it will be some time before I can pretend to a clear historical view of Hungarian poetry, it may perhaps be interesting for a Hungarian reader to see what kind of an early impression his literature makes. I think that in the long run it will be important for me too.

The first most commonly expressed sentiment one hears is that, but for the difficulties of language, Hungarian poetry would be seen to be of the first importance in world literature. On this, as yet, I can pass no judgment. I read Petofi and Arany as a child in Budapest, and probably others. I remember the copy of Madách at home, with the Zichy drawings. I cannot really think back beyond the nineteenth century and I have not read enough even of that for my views to have any genuine validity. The fervency and folksiness of Petofi's lyrics I naturally compare to Burns, and relate broadly to the Romantic movement, though in England Romanticism never took such a nationalistic form. Why should it? There was rarely any danger of national annihilation, and during the early part of the Napoleonic Wars there was much sympathy for Napoleon among English poets. English patriotism is a very different creature from the continental kind. The natural defence of the sea has bred a more eccentric, defiant, imperial sense of identity. To be sure there were reactions against imported literary models, and a Wordsworthian commitment to the voices of the national landscape, but in serious literature there was never that desperate struggle against foreign assimilation so familiar to Hungarian readers. Neither do we find the subversive irony and myth-making that is characteristic of the oppressed. Where there is irony, it is the irony of the superior against the inferior. But I don't believe that the Hungarian claim to literary eminence rests primarily on the achievements of the nineteenth century. Madách is clearly a provincial writer—of enormous historical and local importance for a variety of reasons, and understandably loved and quoted—perhaps he is even a great writer, but his greatness is of a provincial kind. The Tragedy of Man seems to me a remarkable and vigorous pioneering work.

The wider claims of Hungarian poetry must be based on the poets of our own century; on Ady, József, Kosztolányi, Babits, Kassák, Tóth and Dsida; on Radnóti, Illyés, Jékely and Pilinszky; and on others still living. It is a remarkable constellation, comparable in stature to a British one comprising, say, Hardy, Graves, Edward Thomas, Wilfred Owen, David Jones, Edwin Muir, Auden, MacNeice, Keith Douglas and Dylan Thomas (to mention again only the dead). Many of these Hungarian and British poets are masters in a major or minor sense. Some of them will probably remain untranslateable (Graves and Edward Thomas on the British side perhaps) but I am not directly concerned here with the problems of translation. The Hungarian list is certainly not provincial: the pan-European nature of fate has ensured that. It also has a clubby, cosmopolitan air largely missing from the British one. This is partly a difference of temperament: the British poets are happier addressing only one You at a time, while, paradoxically, being less happy with assertions of personal emotion. The slightly more sentimental approach of the Hungarian poets is balanced for an English reader by the personal and direct nature of their suffering. The English distrust stylised grief or easy camaraderie. Kosztolányi's blend of passion and whimsy in Hajnali részegség sounds coy; his avowals in Marcus Aurelius register as attitudinising; but the brief factual vignettes of Szeptemberi áhítat are immediately acceptable. I suppose the truth is that Kosztolányi, as well as Ady, and sometimes even József, often sound French and lack that shield of irony without which passion can rarely be given poetic form in English. English is a language of substantives: it is touchable, solid, empirical, and symbolism often has an air of feyness and insubstantiality. Unless, that is, it is firmly anchored in observation, and the world of the material. To repeat this is not a discussion of the possibility of translation: it is a rootless cosmopolitan English poet's view of Hungarian poetry, as read in Hungarian.

The interesting thing is that as we move closer to our own day this poetry takes a more English turn. Radnóti may briefly be seen as a tragic MacNeice; Pilinszky as a more mature, sharper, more urban equivalent of late R. S. Thomas, Ágnes Nemes Nagy as a much more muscular Kathleen Raine. But these are games: the only interesting part of it being that we can play them at all, and could indeed continue to play them with a greater and greater conviction. Among the younger Hungarian poets we could enlist Szabolcs Várady, Gyozo Ferencz, Zsuzsa Rakovszky, Ádám Nádasdy, and on a slightly different wavelength, Péter Kántor too. Among the previous generation Ottó Orbán could join in. I think he could play a round of chess with Peter Porter, among others. Perhaps even Petri and Csoóri could be found partners. This remains a game. But I do sense some temperamental convergence. Perhaps the sea is not what it used to be.

It strikes me that there is a much wider range of poetry published in Hungary than in England, but not all of this range appears relevant. Battles of modernism are still being acted out on restaurant tables with salt cellars and pepper pots, with sound poetry and language poetry, with concrete poetry, with lower-case sentences and loss of punctuation. In this context post-modernism means a conscious strategy. In other words, these are political matters as much as aesthetic ones. Personally I am not interested in the world of manifestos. Perhaps one has to be a permanent citizen of somewhere to develop such an interest. I am not certain enough of myself.

But of course, this too is a manifesto of sorts, and I am quite certain of something, though I would hardly describe it as an idea or a method. Iron filings are perhaps certain of where the north and south poles of the magnet are when they are flung out in a pattern according to the lines of force. I think of bodies flung out, in a pattern dictated by the magnet of history. Are they vaguely aware of their position in the pattern, can they feel the pattern running through their own bodies? Perhaps their one certainty is that since there is a necessity there must be a pattern.

I am aware that this is a passive manifesto. But not wholly so. Each iron filing becomes in turn a magnet: perhaps in some sort of iron dream it is even possible to drift a little above the pattern and see it fan out as far as the eye can see. I don't want to become mystical about all this. It may be enough to have a slight taste of iron in one's mouth.

And so we return to taste, touch, smell. The taste of rooms in childhood, the touch of the sea air, the smell of bricks and stones, and the constant movement of people in and out of the light. Do these things hide a secret? I don't know. They are certainly lines of force.