Szirtes originally trained as a painter at universities in London and Leeds. During this time, he also began exploring his poetic voice and publishing his poetry in literary journals. His first book, The Slant Door (Secker and Warburg, 1979), won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. After several more successful poetry collections, he published Reel (Bloodaxe, 2004), which Ann Stevenson described in Poetry Review as “a major contribution to post-war literature.” In Reel, Szirtes uses the poetic forms of the sonnet and terza rima to memorialize the past and the way it reverberates in the present through cinematic imagery. The collection won the 2004 T. S. Eliot Prize, and since then two more of his poetry books have been shortlisted for the same award. Szirtes returned to themes of photography and diaspora in his 2016 memoir about his mother, titled The Photographer at Sixteen (MacLehose), which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography. With poetic language and an unflinching gaze into the past, Szirtes uses family photographs to trace his mother’s life backwards, from her premature death in 1975 in England to her imprisonment in concentration camps in Germany to her birth in Romania.
It was this same curiosity about his family’s past that prompted Szirtes to return to Hungary in 1984—his first visit since fleeing as a child. In Hungary, Szirtes rediscovered his native language and began translating Hungarian texts into English. He has translated writers such as Magda Szabó, Sándor Márai and Ottó Orbán. Szirtes is also well known for his translations of the novels of László Krasznahorkai, whose writing, characterized by long, twisting sentences, has been described by Szirtes as a “slow lava flow of narrative, a vast black river of type”. Szirtes’s translations of Krasznahorkai’s novels include: The Melancholy of Resistance (Quartet Books, 1998), War and War (New Directions, 2006), and Satantango (New Directions, 2012). In 2013, Szirtes’s translation of Satantango won the Best Translated Book Award. László Krasznahorkai was awarded the Man Booker International Prize in 2015, which he shared with Szirtes and another one of his English translators, Ottilie Mulzet.
Szirtes currently resides in England with his wife, the painter Clarissa Upchurch, with whom he collaborates on creative projects. With more than twenty books of poetry published, Szirtes still writes, often posting his poems on Twitter. His newest collection of poems, Fresh Out of the Sky, was published by Bloodaxe Books in October 2021. It is a six-part meditation on country, identity, Judaism, belonging and political upheaval. In a world that seems to be growing ever more divided by borders–both physical and ideological—Szirtes brings beauty and humanity to the experience of migration. He reminds us why translation and art are essential in understanding one another and imagining worlds beyond our own. I had the honour of interviewing Szirtes over a series of emails in which we were able to discuss how poetry can act as the catalyst for finding truth and liberation in our daily lives.
—Rose Bialer
What was your relationship with the Hungarian language growing up? I understand that you had to “relearn” it when you returned to Hungary in 1984 for the first time since childhood.
I spent my first eight years in Hungary, where we spoke only Hungarian. I was very quick both to talk and read as a child and had a substantial collection of books, including classics adapted for children. I didn’t know it then, but my father had learned English to school level and had some German and Russian too through his time in forced labour behind the Russian front. On arriving in England (we had intended to move on to Australia but could not do so), my parents decided we would learn to speak English more quickly if they spoke it to us (my younger brother and me) exclusively. This entailed my mother learning English very quickly too and, once we went to school, all our conversation was conducted in English so we neglected our original Hungarian, which, in effect, went to sleep—in my case, for twenty-eight years—and even longer for my brother.
In an interview with Hungarian Literature Online in 2009, you brought up the disproportionately large amount of texts being translated from English into Hungarian, rather than vice versa. You write about the spirit of translation in Hungary: “Almost every writer I knew was engaged in translation. That is far from the case in England: in fact, it is very rare indeed. I think it is admirable that Hungarian translation culture is so active and serious. I wish the corresponding English culture had half the energy or commitment.” Has this sentiment changed at all in the last decade?
I still feel the same. The status of translators has improved in recent years, but they are still too often thought of as drudges doing menial work. I am currently reading an enormous novel translated from Polish by an author whose previous book, as translated by the same translator, contributed to her winning the Nobel Prize as well as the International Booker Prize. The translator’s name does not appear on the cover of the new book. That is a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of translation as well as an insult to those who translate. The enormous historical and cultural status of English assumes that translation into English is a natural process, like a waiter bringing drinks on a tray.
It was different in Hungary. The completely isolated nature of the Hungarian language meant that books in other languages were of great importance in locating the country on the cultural world map. Important Hungarian writers translated as a matter of course, often from several languages, and were never regarded as mere drudges.
The vital reverse task of bringing important works of Hungarian writing into the international arena is far from easy to accomplish, partly for lack of translators and partly for lack of interest.
Does this isolated nature of the language mean that Hungarian literature must be more ambitious in its subject matter and scope?
This looks like a simple question but it is a very complex one. Briefly (and crudely), until the collapse of the Soviet-style state in 1989 there was little or no space in Hungarian literature for a whole range of books that might be considered “trivial”. There was little romance, sex, or crime, or light social fiction. That market opened up after the change. Literature, before then, meant “serious” literature. If you wanted romance, you would read Jane Austen or Charlotte Brontë in translation. Once the worst of Stalinism was over, that seriousness included modernist and avant-garde work too.
In terms of ambition, Hungary has a dramatic history of lost, regained and once again lost empires, lost wars and occupations. The conditions of its development are an important factor in that ambition, which is, partly, an ambition to break through the bounds of a small country with relatively few people and an isolated language.
I wouldn’t argue that this characterizes all Hungarian writing because there is a good deal that is intimate and small scale. But even when that is the case, there is, I believe, a consciousness of the scale of things—from the point of view of a small, linguistically isolated nation with a tumultuous and tragic history—in articulating its experience on whatever scale.
I am thinking about your response as it relates to Krasznahorkai, whose work reflects larger themes of societal decay in Hungary and those who are left dispossessed as a result.
People have referred to Krasznahorkai as the modern master of the apocalypse. Krasznahorkai does not write about apocalypse as such but he perceives the tendency towards apocalypse in contemporary society and in general consciousness. His hugely long sentences carry that air, as do his scenarios. Events in small insignificant towns or villages take on apocalyptic significance on a private, individual level in a landscape that is tilting ever more into chaos.
You began your career as a poet before you started translating Hungarian literature. As you immersed yourself more in the language and began to translate, did you notice it having an influence on your English writing?
I had published two books and was about to publish the third when I first returned to Hungary as a poet. My concern at that time was to discover the nature and potential importance of my birthplace and to see how it would impact on my own writing. The answer was: dramatically and lastingly. It was on the last day of that first visit, courtesy of the Arts Council of England, that I was first asked to translate. Various Hungarian voices crept into my writing over a period, some in the process of translating them.
Tell me about these voices.
Thinking about Hungary, visiting Hungary, taking up residences in Hungary, recovering the Hungarian language, translating Hungarian literature, and so becoming familiar with voices and concerns that I recognized in some ways, finding the language into which they might be translated into English—all these have left their traces on my own work, often as subject matter, but more frequently as a way of perceiving the nature of things in a historical context.
There were writers whose voices and concerns immediately spoke to me and seemed within my reach. I suppose they were characterized by a certain range of sensibilities: a mixture of complex perception and clear imagery including elements of surrealism.
I am impressed by the various poetic structures you have explored throughout your career: from haiku, to sonnets, to terza rima. I also understand some of the short poems in your collection Mapping the Delta (Bloodaxe Books, 2016) were born out of the character limits on Twitter, where you had been sharing poetry. How does working with constraints inform your work? Do you find any similarities between this and translation?
I have always found constraints useful: they turn you around and lead you to places you might not have thought of going. They make you invent and explore. Twitter’s original constraint was 140 characters; then they doubled that. The haiku-based forms arose out of those limits. Through repeated use one learns what specific forms can do. With received forms there are the echoes, both near and distant, of their previous use. They become an aspect of you as you drive them with and against the grain. I am not sure how far this relates to translation except insofar as I have undertaken experiments in the translation of poetry by producing multiple variants, pastiches and inventions.
I found the poetic structures to be especially effective in your newest collection, Fresh Out of the Sky, which was published in October 2021. The collection is expansive in subject matter, with poems that explore national identity, family and the COVID-19 pandemic. How did this book come about?
The two main sequences of the book are the terza rima sequence about early childhood in England, which is in fact a continuation of earlier similar sets based on childhood in Hungary (in Reel, 2004) and on early adulthood in England (in An English Apocalypse, Bloodaxe, 2001). These all consist of twenty-five terza rima poems arranged into five sections. I may, at some time, write one more such series about life here and now, wherever here or now happen to be. I think of it as a migrant history.
The second sequence is composed of an edited selection of daily poems, written throughout Covid, each consisting of three consecutive haiku with an extra five-syllable line. These are brief dreamlike reports, mostly under lockdown.
The dream songs come along at intervals and are assembled here. “Bestiary” is the product of an invitation to work with Guillaume Apollinaire’s poems and Graham Sutherland’s images, alongside a group of scholars. I wanted to include these because they offered a further chance to work with prose (I had done so before) but in a more fantastical key. The fantastical and grotesque side of my work has usually been published by small presses in various collections over the last ten years.
There is also a sequence of poems titled “The Yellow Room”, continued over from my last book, that looks to explore the Jewishness of my family through the figure of my atheist father.
You mention that certain sections are continuations of previous poetry collections you have published, sometimes continuations released after, say, seventeen years in the case of Reel. What is it like to return to these themes and moments in your history at a later point in your life? What drives you to keep returning?
The “return”, most notably in the terza rima sequences in An English Apocalypse, Reel and Fresh Out of the Sky, is partly formal, with the terza rima sequence (after Dante, of course) offering an essentially narrative verse structure within an episodic framework, like a series of vignettes that add up to a journey that I hope might be significant as a whole. Otherwise, poems may be touched off by themes I had confronted before but of which a new, as yet unexplored facet seems to open up. At this stage of my life I am aware that a life’s body of work can amount to a degree of comprehension of both the self and the world it inhabits. The terza rima sequences have explored childhood in Hungary and England, and early adulthood (mostly the 1970s). But, apart from these themes, there are others that continue to haunt me. I am, however, determined not to repeat myself. Hence all those experimental small-press pieces. I believe we are not monoliths but various creatures (I speak for myself but suspect I speak for others too) put together from small fragments of coloured glass that may—with a lot of luck—add up to a stained glass window of sorts.
I think you have such a talent for capturing memories in your poetry, in haunting and beautiful ways. How do you access your memories in your writing and what are you seeking through them?
I don’t trust memory. I think memories are narratives we construct in order to make sense of the world (this subject is explored in the story of my mother in the prose book The Photographer at Sixteen). Nevertheless, embedded in memories are intense moments of what feels like truth.
By referring to “feeling” I don’t mean to suggest that memories are simply subjective stories edited to suit our needs, more that memories may act as photographs did before easy digital manipulation reduced their (never-perfect) reliability. Usually photographs show real people in real places at real moments, it’s just that the interpretation of their actions and expressions is open to question.
In seeking the truth of memory one is seeking a narrative composed of something evidential, like photographs; of something apparently direct entailing a keen personal sense of clarity; and of such part-authenticated moments as other people’s accounts can provide. These are the things of which my sense of “youth” is composed. There are narratives embedded in it, some incidental, some of importance. Pulling narratives together is an act of blind construction, an exploration of the valid.
“Constructions” suggest artificiality. And it is true, in legal prose terms, that poems, as constructions, are artificial and therefore unreliable. But poets should not be afraid of construction: construction is the poem’s natural way of witnessing. The very form of terza rima is clearly a construction, in this case one based on the principle that its antecedents—primarily Dante’s Commedia—have established a form of valid narrative, and that that form is suitable for this kind of recollected event. Now that I am in my seventies I am curious as to how I got here. The poems are an exploration of that. There are key narratives embedded in there that must, I assume, exist in a complex, not-entirely personal realm. They are not so much a sense of me, as of the world within which a figure like “me” existed.
In the section “The Yellow Room”, you experiment with construction, imagining a dialogue between you and your father. The Photographer at Sixteen was at times a dialogue between you and your late mother. I was wondering if writing about your parents—especially in this conversational form—has changed your understanding of them.
Yes, it has changed my understanding of them, the accent being on “my” rather than on “understanding”. I first used that conversational form in the long poem “Metro”, back in 1988. In it I gave my mother a voice to speak about her experience of two things: her removal from Budapest and her frustrated and rejected love for her older brother, who was to disappear in the war. My mother never said those things to me. I am not quoting. The voice is my understanding of what she might have said if she'd had the opportunity. In effect it is an exploration of my understanding of her. I cannot know if it is true. I only know that it is as true as I can get. That is obvious in the poem but had to be more consciously framed in the memoir.
In the poem “Waking in the Yellow Room” you write about visiting your late father in a dusty yellow room:
This is the house of the dead you enter as an adult
and leave as the child still squatting in the corner
What does this “yellow room” mean to you?
These are exercises of the imagination based on my experience of him and on my own sense of what Jewishness entailed for him then and what it entails for me now. His childhood memories speak of specifically Jewish, story-telling grandparents and aunts but almost entirely secular parents. There is no talk of synagogues or ceremonies in his early life. Nevertheless his milieu is clearly Jewish, and becomes ever more so as the persecutions multiply and intensify. His Jewishness is defined for him by hostile others. “The Yellow Room” title is taken from Marc Chagall’s early paintings of Jews in Vitebsk. I note how claustrophobic they are. I see those small intimate spaces as something occupied by my father but without religion. The yellow room is the house of the soon-to-be dead. I see him as the child squatting in the corner. But I don’t know enough, so the whole sequence is like walking down streets of yellow rooms while being blindfolded. My parents were atheists, or became atheists shortly after their experiences in the war. They brought up my brother and me entirely without religion and almost entirely without any awareness of our Jewish roots.
“Dotage” explores the idea that our lives are a series of doors (phases, milestones, and moments) that we pass through but which we don’t close behind us. This makes it possible to go back and re-enter moments from our past. How do you view your open doors now that you are in your seventies?
It gets harder to close them and to keep time out. The more distant the doors, though, the clearer the images seem to be. That may be because distance resolves them. They are not pressingly present problems with too many discernible present effects. It is a matter of practical experience to many older people that they remember the distant past better than they do what happened the previous day. So my father used to wake up remembering proverbs and words of songs he had heard in his childhood and had made no conscious effort to remember. Those unclosed doors lead to hallways beyond and echoes beyond other doors. There are, no doubt, all kinds of neurological reasons for this. All I know is that it happens. Which is not to say the images are reliable, but their very clarity offers a powerful take on reality at the edge of loss.
Your poems often grapple with questions about mortality. Where does this preoccupation stem from?
There are increasing reminders of mortality as one grows older; in my case the death of friends, the pandemic, my own state of health (I had a quadruple bypass in 2016 and am on medication now), my mother’s early death; and how one grows to resemble one’s parents, repeating their gestures and grunts, etc. I have been sure from the start that the apprehension of mortality is what drives the whole artistic project. We are working between the brackets of life and death. That is what gives work its vigour and urgency. Lacking that apprehension, our work grows slack.
The collection’s dedication reads: “For those who leave.” What did writing this inscription in 2021 mean to you?
I have been very aware of the position of migrants in both England and Hungary, particularly over the last ten or twenty years. I wrote the text for a new Christmas carol about them in 2015. Even beyond the specific cause of this or that migration we live, and will increasingly live, in a world of mass migrations. People who migrate leave their homes. “Those who leave” in the dedication, for whatever reason, are migrants, like my own family.
I think my favorite poem from this collection is called “Migrant,” where you write:
He woke to find himself next to himself
or it might have been herself, it was hard to be sure.
His face was dissolving, or it might have been his eyes
or her eyes or even his skin, and he couldn’t remember
his name or anyone else’s, such things being dreamlike
right from the beginning, and the bed was snow or an image of snow
and the sound outside was of something completely outside
any outside of which one might once have been sensible.
This poem details the dissolution of individual identity and the merging of “him” and “her”. Nothing seems familiar and there is a pervading sense of loss. In your eyes, how does this poem reflect the experience of migration?
There has been a lot of discussion of identity and many claims attached to it. We generally regard migration as the loss of one potential identity and the assumption—voluntary or involuntary—of another. But all my instincts and senses tell me the matter is not so simple, and that the whole personal sense of “identity” is an evolving, unstable mass of shades and contradictions. We are normally—and crudely—ascribed identities by others and have, to some degree, to accommodate ourselves to them for very practical reasons. I can understand the process but don’t feel it with any sense of certainty. I have written previously about changing and morphing identities when we cross borders. But that identity isn’t merely national, or ethnic, or cultural, or what people call racial. It has other dimensions, as related in the poem.
Let me illustrate this with an incident a few years ago. I became the corresponding friend of a gay American poet. Eventually we met and he wanted, very charmingly, to seduce me. He argued that sexuality is not fixed, and I agreed but answered that I had committed myself much earlier to the woman who is my wife, whom I loved, with whom I had had children, and that I did not want to risk that through the forming of a new relationship, whatever the gender. Besides, I did not feel any passion for him. I think he understood. We remained friends. There was no sense of loss in that for me. But the idea that everything might have been different at some other time is confusing. There are so many unpredictable turns in our lives and we come upon ourselves partly by chance. I happened to become an English-language poet through living in England. Had we stayed in Hungary I might have become someone quite different. It would have been a different history altogether.
These things are beautiful and melancholy, yet oddly joyful too. We migrate because there is a part of us that is migratory, but each migration marks the loss of some stability. Nothing need be what it is. That is how this poem feels its way around the subject of migration.
How has Brexit impacted you?
I have written a good deal about Brexit—to no effect whatsoever, of course. I understood Brexit as the assertion of something essentially hostile, insecure and exclusive. The term “hostile environment”, as used by Theresa May, is evidence of that. I am pretty sure that the issue was driven by England and that Scotland opposed it, so Westminster deciding for Scotland is a further incentive for Scottish independence.
Whether Brexit has influenced my other writing is difficult to say. It may have added an extra degree of insecurity and cause of concern for the future of my children and grandchildren.
Do you see writers resisting Brexit in their own ways?
I don’t see writers resisting it. What can they do? They say and write what they want to say about it—as do I—on whatever forum or occasion presents itself. I accept that the country voted for it, albeit by a narrow margin. I think they voted on false premises which, I believe, will come home to roost, and are in fact doing so as I write. I have one particularly old beloved friend, a fellow poet, who voted for Brexit. He explained why he did so and did so in good faith. I think he was wrong. That is possible. He remains an old beloved friend.
There’s a sense of futility about writing in these times. I wonder what you see the role of a writer being, then?
What it has always been. For a poet it is to record what Irish tradition (as recalled by Seamus Heaney) refers to as “The music of what happens”. For a novelist it is to record the nature of what happened then and what will happen next. The task of registering the sense of truth in all its complexity is far more important than using writing to fix what seem to be simple things. There is a role for that too but I suspect it is not in literature but in polemic.
There are sentiments of nationalism on the rise everywhere, though it is extremely disturbing to see what is happening in Hungary under Viktor Orbán’s regime. With the dissolution of democracy in Hungary and the government’s creation of policies that limit imagination through the commissioning of patriotic art, how do you feel about the current state of cultural production in Hungary?
The conditions are dreadful and grow steadily worse, but cultural production goes on. Hungary is not a police state—it is a state that enforces its rule through institutions and corporations. It has taken over the vast majority of media, of law, of finance, of education and of culture by filling boards and positions of influence with its own people. It awards grants and prizes; it influences the granting of contracts. It starves institutions it doesn’t like and feeds those—the “patriotic” ones—that it approves of. It is determined to produce a monoculture through a mixture of patronage and hostility to anything outside its own sphere of interest. It regards Putin as a model. It loathes the idea of liberal Europe. It is materially harder—for lack of support—for writers, artists, actors, directors and producers to produce what they do, but they continue to produce excellent work in the circumstances.
Could you recommend some of these writers?
Among the younger poets (young compared to me) there is Anna T. Szabó, Krisztina Tóth (of whose work I am preparing a volume), András Gerevich, G. István László, Virág Erdős, Szilárd Borbély (who wrote poetry and prose, both beautifully translated by Ottilie Mulzet), István Kemény and a number of others.
I was very moved by an opinion piece that you wrote in 2017 speaking out against these autocratic policies. You point to the power of translation to liberate the voices of those who cannot share their own writing freely. Do you see translation becoming an ever-more important tool in fighting against political oppression?
How do we know what others think or feel if we cannot understand them? I don’t mean in the simple political or social sense but in the deep experiential and imaginative sense. Hungarian makes a distinction between forditó (a general, though very important, translator in practical terms of, say, contracts, speeches, scientific texts, etc.) and műfordító (a literary translator). The literary translator has to deal with texts that do not immediately declare themselves, but work their way through the language of experience and imagination. Such texts percolate and establish themselves in other languages as states of mind and conditions of being. To percolate is to find a way through and establish a condition elsewhere, which is, you could argue, a form of solidarity, or at least incipient solidarity. Autocracies look to stifle voices not only of dissent but those that might, at some time, prompt dissent. Nadezhda Mandelstam memorized the poems of her husband, Osip. Prisoners tap out their signals. Political prisoners smuggle notes from prison. To transform experience into speech is to undergo a form of liberation, whether from an autocratic ruler or from the autocratic prison of one’s self or circumstances. To translate is to listen and to follow the words beyond themselves into something outside the translator and yet within. Let’s open these words up and see what emerges.
