George Szirtes was born in Budapest in 1948, and came to England as a refugee following the Hungarian Uprising in 1956. He has published over fifteen volumes of poetry, and in 2005 won the T.S. Eliot Prize for his collection Reel. In the mid- 1980s, Szirtes began to make return visits to Hungary, which resulted in a stream of translations into English, including work by Ottó Orbán and Ágnes Nemes Nagy. Szirtes is now one of Britain’s leading translators.
Described as one of the most consummate formalists of our age, Szirtes’s poetry combines a mastery of poetic construction and arrangement with what Sean O’Brien once called “a genuine strangeness.” (The Sunday Times). Having originally trained as a painter in Leeds and London, Szirtes regularly makes use of his
knowledge of the art world in his poems, yet always by converting it thoroughly into the world of his own poetic language:
My horses are braced in their cool rooms, framed and gazed at, hearing the crack of dawn like whips, dreaming of courses where thunder builds. I build myself into their hooves and fetlocks.
(Horse Painter)
In March 2009, George Szirtes delivered the Bloodaxe Lectures on Poetry at Newcastle University, and it was during his visit to Newcastle that I conducted this interview.3 We met in the Tyneside Cinema Café, some hours before his poetry reading that evening. His willingness to give over this time, and his attention to the detail of my questions, both during our talk and afterwards by e-mail, is indicative
3 See George Szirtes, Fortinbras at the Fishhouses: Responsibility, the Iron Curtain and the Sense of History as Knowledge (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 2010).
not only of his kindness and professionalism, but also of his commitment to discussions of poetry and poetry in translation.
Szirtes’s three Bloodaxe lectures were set around the theme of the ‘historical consciousness’ of poetry, and in his second lecture, ‘Life is Elsewhere,’ he referred directly to the reception in Britain of post-war poetry from Eastern Europe. It was a mistake, he suggested, for poets here to try to appropriate the situation over there. This was a point highly relevant to my own study of Hughes’s translation of Pilinszky, and is something which I bring up in the interview below. Szirtes’s reaction to Hughes’s translations of Pilinszky is tantalising: on the one hand, he praises them but on the other hand he is openly wary of Hughes’s interest in foreignizing technique. Perhaps most revealing is Szirtes’s view that the voice Hughes gives Pilinszky in English is unmistakeably Hughes’s voice. This is
significant in that it suggests a discrepancy between what Hughes said he wanted to do with his translations of Pilinszky, and what he actually did. Most encouraging, is Szirtes’s enthusiasm for trying out a whole manner of translation techniques, and for the creative possibilities this can offer a poet.
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TB: The translator Francis Jones recently showed me a translation he made of János Pilinszky’s ‘Ravensbrück Passion,’ in which the central figure was not a man, as in Ted Hughes’s version, but a woman.4
GSz: Oh the famous ‘Ravensbrück Passion.’ Yes Ravensbrück was a woman’s camp. My mother went there. “She steps out from the others. / She stands in the square silence…”. Yes, it could certainly be that.
TB: Can the lack of gender in the Hungarian language cause problems for translators?
GSz: I was translating the poems of András Gerevich. They were love poems. After a certain amount of time, when I learned a little more about this poet’s life, it became
clear that he was gay, and that the love poems were to a man. Then I did have to go back and change some things in my translations.
TB: I was told that János Pilinszky was gay, and that he died not from a heart attack as is commonly thought, but by committing suicide. Is this true?
GSz: Pilinszky was gay, yes, but suicide? No.
TB: Could the lack of gender in Hungarian help a poet such as Pilinszky hide his sexuality do you think? To what extent could we re-write all the Pilinszky poems translated by Hughes, replacing ‘her’ with ‘his’ etc.? For example, in the poem ‘Epilogue’ (‘Utószó’) there is a verse about undressing and I wondered if it could be a man instead of a woman:
Lélekzet nélkül vetkezel éjszakáján a puszta háznak. Inged, ruhád leengeded. Mezítelen sírkő a hátad.
Catching your breath, you undress in the dark of the bare house.
You let down your skirt, and take off your blouse. Your back is a bare tombstone.5
GSz: This is a very interesting question. It depends chiefly on two words: inged and
ruhád. Ing means primarily, ungendered, shirt but can also mean chemise; ruha
means generally, ungendered clothes, but it can also mean the specifically female
dress. It does not mean skirt for which there is another word: szoknya. In terms of
the poem, the verb leengeded, does mean you lower or let down or allow to drop. We could imagine a man taking off a shirt and letting trousers drop, but the delicate element in Pilinszky would probably not talk in terms of dropping one’s trousers. It’s not surprising that Hughes opted for skirt, as even letting a dress drop is a slightly fussier business than dropping a skirt. But skirt is distinctly not the word here. And yet would one wear a dress and a blouse? The ambiguity is left in so we can read either.
5 trans. János Csokits / Ted Hughes
TB: In your introduction to An Island of Sound (Harvill, 2004), you talk about the isolation of the Hungarian language. Does this have any impact on Hungarian poetry and its translation?
GSz: This feeling of isolation seems to make Hungarian writers very prolific; I myself seem to be prolific, as was another Hungarian émigré writer, one much older than I am, the late Victor Határ. It may have something to do with the sheer pressure of what is outside. When I first returned to Hungary, I felt a very strong obligation to translate from the Hungarian, partly because there were so few capable of doing it. And that is a product of the isolation of the language.
TB: A moral obligation?
GSz: Yes. That’s when I gave up painting. One hardly ever has a very clearly defined moment of decision-making, but I remember consciously realising that I would have to give something up in order to continue translating and so I stopped painting. I am a better poet than a painter anyway. I do enjoy translating very much, but it is also a serious duty. Regarding Hughes’s translations of Pilinszky, Hughes gave Pilinszky a voice, but it is very much Hughes’s own voice. All translators are present in their translated poems, but Hughes is especially present in his of
Pilinszky’s. Pilinszky’s poem ‘Apokrif,’ for example, is written in strict, generally rhyming pentameter, but you get no sense of this in the translation. You know, Pilinszky was a great reader of poetry. There are quite a few records of his readings, I think I probably have some somewhere. He was very keen on this, he was almost the Hungarian equivalent of Dylan Thomas in that sense. Hungarians consider him to be one of their finest poets.
TB: Have you ever translated Pilinszky?
GSz: Yes, but only one or two poems. I tried to translate Apokrif, but kept hearing Hughes. That was when Hughes was still alive. Then I had so many other things to translate that I was actually commissioned to translate, the idea was abandoned. For all English purposes at the moment, Pilinszky is Hughes. Maybe, now that Ted
Hughes is dead and Pilinszky less often referred to, it might be worth returning to the idea.
TB: Might the Hungarian language be appealing to a writer like Hughes, because it’s so distant from the norm, and the originals would be relatively inaccessible to most English readers? In other words, is this ever a consideration for a translator?
GSz: I don’t know about answering for Hughes. I doubt whether it was a major factor. It might be a small factor for others but I doubt whether it is a major one.
TB: What are your feelings about the kind of translation that Ted Hughes was
looking for in the 60s and 70s, which was a kind of literal translation that captured a foreign, broken English?
GSz: I don’t like it, it is an act, at worst, of exoticizing. What Hughes did was very successful but that was because he was a marvellous poet himself: he transferred Pilinszky into his own idiom. In the hands of others the act of transfer resulted in something far less distinguished. Pilinszky was a very fine poet. Only his later poems were ‘broken.’ They were broken the way glass is broken.
TB: How do you feel about poet-translators or co-translators, who don’t speak the language from which they translate, but work from literals prepared by others?
GSz: It’s perfectly fine. All translation of poetry is an interpretation, just as reading poetry is. In the case of previously untranslated work there is an obligation to stick as close as you can to what you hear of the original, but with those who are already in the public realm there is a chance to experiment, to take the roads less travelled. You can have fun, productively playing when you are translating. I was once asked to translate Mandelstam’s 4-line poem ‘Voronezh,’ and I did eight different versions. Then I took a 2-line poem by Akhmatova, and made 16 different versions. I also translated a Paul Celan poem by doing a ‘Felstiner’ version and a ‘Michael
Hamburger’ version. So a lot can be discovered by playing. This is the other side to writing original poetry too of course, and that’s what I tell my students. You should try to play, to have pleasure.
TB: You suggested in your Bloodaxe lectures that English poets sometimes seemed to have envied and patronised the Eastern European poets for having something ‘real’ to write about. You also referred to Yeats’s poem ‘The Fisherman’ and Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘At the Fishhouses’, and I can’t help but wonder if Eastern Europe is the new fisherman?
GSz: It was, not any more. Eastern Europe is not news now.
TB: Do you think that fashion or news determines a poet’s subject matter then, and can help a poet get published?
GSz: There’s nothing wrong with writing to demand, in fact it can be very good to do this. As with the case of fidelity in translation, the burden of fidelity to something unknown can be dreadfully limiting. The proposition that there is a store of specific feeling that needs only to be written down is not always true, or not wholly true. The poet can just as well discover what he or she feels by entering the arena of poetics where the arena presents a number of givens as a material force. I tend more and more to believe that unless there are certain givens outside ourselves we fail to enter the arena, or at least don’t get very far in it. As concerns news, the news is part of one’s arena. It occupies an important place in our thinking, imagination and feeling, so it is natural that it should work its way through to subject matter. But there is, I suspect, a proper process of working through. Some situations, particularly the great dramatic events of the world that come complete with a tidal wave of quickly processed feeling through the press and other media don’t need a poet’s reaction straight away. Too quick a reaction can, for me, be almost physically sickening, like a betrayal. During the war in Bosnia I was angry about the poems that were being commissioned and published by the Independent about Sarajevo. It seemed to me to invite an intrusion into an arena that belonged to others, to those in Sarajevo. Their condition should not, I felt, be immediately processed according to the state of our safe distant feelings. I wrote a kind of reply to the idea of the commission in the form of a verse, that was not published as a poem but, where it was intended, in the correspondence section [see ‘Letter: Scribbling while Sarajevo burns,’ Tuesday 27 July 1993]. Sometimes the worst thing is to say “I feel your pain.” Imagination is not
capable of doing so without action first where action is appropriate. When a man is dying of thirst the natural thing should be to find him something to drink, not to write a verse about how you feel about his thirst. You can never know everything about anybody else, not a loved one or anyone. Especially not when they are in a crisis. If you think you do, you stop respecting them. You don’t know them fully and should always remember this.
TB: In what way do you think that Bishop avoided envying or patronising the fisherman?
GSz: Bishop does not put words in the fisherman’s mouth nor does she turn him into a symbol or an archetype. In other words she does not ‘use’ him. He is part of a field of work that includes the Christmas trees and the fishhouses but he has no allegorical role to play. The work itself is not elevated to a pastoral ideal or presented as a form of oppression. It has no function as propaganda. The fisherman’s silveriness and his knife are observed as from a child’s point of view – such as we get in the marvellous story, ‘In the Village’ – as part of a field of comprehension that retains its own distinct, authoritative presence. She envies him neither his silveriness nor his knife. She registers it as part of a cold dark deep and absolutely clear whole.
TB: In your lecture, you brought up the notion of song. Some poems which are especially song-like, you said, are difficult to translate, and some songs are frightening. What do you mean by this?
GSz: Certain songs, traditional songs, have a sense of community. They are powerful as such, carrying powerful emotions, referring to common assumptions about
experience. They are about experience turned into myth. The song resolves complexities in one great act of partisanship. It is, in effect, a way of proclaiming that God is on your side. I am very wary of the phrase ‘with God on our side.’ In anything as intoxicating as singing along, it is good to remember that there is always something else outside the closed circle of the singers, that there are circles
everywhere else, a great complexity of song that a poet might do well to hear. Furthermore, that singing is not always about community, but also about solitude.