The Interview : George Szirtes

Rachna Singh Editor, The Wise Owl talks to George Szirtes, a British poet and translator. Szirtes is the author of numerous acclaimed poetry collections, including The Budapest File (2000), An English Apocalypse (2001), Reel (2004), winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, New & Collected Poems (2008), The Burning of the Books (2009), Bad Machine (2013), and Mapping the Delta (2016), both Poetry Book Society Choices. His recent collection, Fresh Out of the Sky (2021), continues his exploration of memory, responsibility, and the pressures of history on the present.

Alongside his poetry, Szirtes is a major translator of Hungarian literature. His translations include poets such as Ottó Orbán, Zsuzsa Rakovszky, Ágnes Nemes Nagy, and Krisztina Tóth, and the novelist László Krasznahorkai, Nobel Laureate in Literature (2025). His translation of Tóth’s My Secret Life: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe, 2025) was shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. His memoir The Photographer at Sixteen (2019) won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography. In 2024, he was awarded The King’s Gold Medal for Poetry. His book, Fortinbras at the Fishhouses, is a series of innovative poetry lectures delivered at the University of Newcastle. Now based in Norfolk, George Szirtes works as a freelance writer.

Thank you George for taking time out to talk with The Wise Owl.

RS: You left Hungary as a child in the aftermath of the 1956 uprising, carrying with you a history shaped by survival, loss, and displacement. How has exile functioned in your poetry—not merely as subject matter, but as a way of seeing, listening, and structuring experience?

GS: I am sure exile has been an important factor but it has been a slow process of discovery, a matter of gauging how far I truly belong to England, a stable society with its specific history and set of expectations. Not all the way, I suspect, and the sense of not-quite-belonging has only increased over the years. However, my reading since my late teens, has been chiefly of English language literature and since I write in English, my work must, I suppose, fit into the English canon, since where else could it fit? Joseph Conrad, Vladimir Nabokov and Michael Hofmann (as a poet) must be fellow travellers in that sense. Perhaps they, like me, are Anglo-Europeans, somewhat distinct from anglophone writers from old British colonies or from America. My ear for English is probably attuned to what may still be its residual strangeness. English is the language in which I live but it’s not quite hearth and home to me. At some level it retains a kind of haunted strangeness. Other people have, at times, confirmed that in their impressions of my writing. The way I have described my own work is as a Budapest apartment block in an English town. My love of regular but complex structures, such as these, with their visual rhymes, repetitions and interim stability set in a psychological world far less stable than England, may be an echo of early pre-exile experience. Budapest is still my model city. But this is all guess work, a sum of overweening guesses over seventy-seven years.

RS: Your training as a painter seems to have deeply informed your attention to shape, pattern, and sound in poetry. When you write a poem, do you still “see” it first—as a composition, a balance of forms—before it becomes linguistic?

GS: I was a painter until 1984 when I started translating. Visual images have remained very important to me. However, the architectural analogy I cite above seems to have been more influential in my imagination. My sense of poetic space might be described in those terms. Returning to Hungary in 1984, the experiences that moved me most are associated with Budapest tenements in their post-war and post-revolution state, facades riddled with bullet holes and collapsed stucco. It is a half-wrecked nineteenth century world, each block with its own courtyard of quiet but compromised familiarity, as if the courtyard was not only the interior of the building but also the interiority of poetry. The sense of the poem as a whole may well be derived from that.

RS: Growing up between Hungarian and English, how did bilingualism affect your relationship to myth, fairy tale, and legend? Do you feel that translation—whether cultural or linguistic—became an early instinct rather than a later vocation?

GS: I wasn’t properly bilingual at any stage. Up till the age of eight I spoke only Hungarian, after that only English. It wasn’t until 1984 and my first visit back that Hungarian began to return, first as a half-familiar half-forgotten sound, then in reading rather than writing or speaking: ever since then it has been a matter of re-entering writing and speech until it has started to feel natural. It has been a gradual process in some respects but much faster in terms of translation because once I had apprehended the nature of the poem to be translated my familiarity with poetry in English took over. That happened almost from the beginning. I am closer to becoming fully bilingual now but it has been a long organic process.

RS: In your Poetry magazine essay, you describe rhyme as an “unexpected salvation” that holds the world together while revealing its own artifice. In times of political and moral fracture, what can formal poetry still offer that freer modes perhaps cannot?

GS: There are various aspects of formality. The one I tend to work by is that in which potential chaos begins to resolve itself into a version of order, though the order I like best – meaning devices like rhyme or stanza form, a kind of imposed order – is that which lives at the edge of breaking. I like discovered rhyme, the kind you might not notice at first. It is part of the risk-taking aspect of poetry. I have certainly experimented with other ways of organising poems, as in The Burning of the Books sequence for instance, where the breath-pattern becomes more headlong, but it is the wrecked tenement block I tend to return to. This may well serve for a political or moral model too. The fractures are in there. The building when new was intended to be a model of elegance and power but always with the notion of that close-to-silent courtyard at its heart. It is my instinctive landscape.

There is another aspect to this that may relate to my residual sense of personal foreignness. I have written somewhere that rhyme is an accident waiting to happen in the sense that the phenomenon of two unrelated words coming together and sounding similar is, in itself, arbitrary, furthermore that the ordering of poetry is built on the essential arbitrariness of language itself, that is to say on the experience of a world that is always unstable and vulnerable to chance. It is where my personal sense of foreignness and the strangeness of language itself collide. That is the other accident waiting to happen.

RS: Your translations of Hungarian poets have been widely recognised. Do you see translation as an ethical responsibility—to history, to language, to silenced voices—or primarily as a creative overflow?

GS: Translation is not abstract, it is precise and concrete. Translating silenced voices, if one is in a position to do so, comes with particular responsibilities, but the translator’s chief responsibility is to the poem, not to the silencing. And that responsibility is exactly the same as that owed to any other poem. In any case, the notion of fidelity, which lies at the heart of translation, is far from simple. Meaning is complex, ambiguous and dependent on the reception of the reader. Poems offer themselves to various, sometimes conflicting interpretations. Structures in time and language move: light shifts, the weather changes. I happened to find myself in a position in which translation from a recovered language replete with associations was presented to me. It was exciting and I felt an obligation accept the offer.

RS: Your body of work spans poetry, criticism, radio, theatre, opera libretti, and collaborations with visual artists. What does moving between genres allow you to explore that poetry alone might restrict?

GS: It is a matter of stimulation, I suppose. I have long worked with composers of choral works, musicals, oratorios, Christmas carols and even operas. I loved the challenges they presented me with. If you love working with words and forms these are wonderful fun and pleasure to work with.

I am married to Clarissa Upchurch, a visual artist, so collaborating with her is a delight. My early books contained many poems that arose out of paintings in books and galleries. And of course I myself was a visual artist.  

I wrote plays and musicals because I taught in schools for some years. Writing plays for students was entertaining and gave me opportunities to experiment.

Critical writing sprang from years of reviewing but also from thinking intently about the nature of my craft and the craft of others. Some arose from invitations to speak at festivals and universities.

I like my mind and energy to be engaged as much as possible. Every new experience, including work in other genres, is a potentially fertile field.

RS: Fortinbras at the Fishhouses, conceived as a series of poetry lectures, blurs the boundary between critical thought and lyric expression. Do you see poetry as a form of thinking—perhaps even philosophy—conducted through sound and image rather than argument?

GS: Poetry is certainly a form of thinking, but there is no great difference between thinking and feeling. One thinks through feeling and one feels one thoughts. To me they are indistinguishable. The language of critical thought is different from the language of feeling but poetry is a kind of synthesis between those languages, and others languages too, such as those of music, visual art and architecture. They are all ways of apprehending and forming the world.

RS: Looking back from The Slant Door to Fresh Out of the Sky, what feels most continuous in your work, and what has surprised you by changing—either in your themes, your formal choices, or your sense of what poetry is for?

GS:  The formal instinct has remained. I have had an adventurous life with forms of different kinds. I wanted to see what each one can do so I could learn from it. Themes have changed over time of course. Youth and desire, gave way to themes concerning children and their lives and to a close engagement with the arts of painting, photography and film. Returning to Hungary in 1984 opened an entirely new set of themes. Memory itself became a subject both in the poems and in The Photographer at Sixteen, a memoir of my mother. Childhood in Hungary and childhood, as well as early adulthood, in England became subjects. Animals and fantastical creatures have interested me, as well as all things grotesque and disorientating. Translation became more than a practice: it became a subject. My natural tendency is to be productive and to keep moving. What is poetry for? It is for articulating a fleeting sense of the world as best and as truly as one can.

RS: Your work often circles memory, responsibility, and history. How do you recognise a subject that demands a poem, rather than an essay, a lecture, or silence?

GS: Poems are my first instinct. Poetry is what I turn to first. Essays are more rational structures, better adapted to ideas than to the kind of apprehensions that are the natural terrain of poetry. Silence is what you find in the courtyards of those Budapest tenements. It’s a populated, historical silence, a silence in stormy times. The centre of music.

RS: Living in Norfolk, after a life shaped by movement and translation, what does “home” mean to you today—and how does it reflect in your work?

GS: I find home difficult to define. It is where one is, whom one loves, whose presence is most persistent. There is a specific courtyard in Budapest that serves as the ghost of my historical home but I have never lived in it. Home is what is, and remains, strange as well as familiar. It is your vanishing, insecure lodestone. Norfolk is only a small part of that.

Thank you for talking with The Wise Owl about your creativity and craft. We wish you the best in all your creative and literary endeavours