George Szirtes interviewed by James Byrne on Reel, form and memory
James Byrne interviews George Szirtes soon after Reel (Bloodaxe), his fourteenth collection, won the T. S. Eliot award. The introduction records his birth in Budapest in 1948, his family's move to England in 1956, his extensive work as a translator of Hungarian poets and his teaching on the creative writing MA at UEA. Asked how he will spend the prize, Szirtes says he hopes to buy time, and he calls himself astonished to have won. Questioned about the shifting geographies of Reel, he replies that shifting ground is simply the human situation, and that ground does a great deal of travelling by itself.
On the family poems that open the book, he explains that they are part memory, part imagination, and that the first set deals with things before memory. For him memory in poetry is the vivid impression of a truth he will believe inside the poem, not evidence in a court. He recounts how he was a writer before he was an artist, starting at seventeen, and how he reconciles describing himself as an English writer with being European: the experience is partly not English, but the words, rhythms and nuances are. The Penguin Modern European Poets series fed his reading in the late sixties and seventies.
A longer answer deals with form. Strict form slows a fast mind and aids invention, because rhyme forces you to dodge cliche. He works with sentences more than lines, citing Frost and preferring the word counterpoint, with the sentence playing against line, rhyme and stanza. He is neither for nor against free verse or prose poetry, and names music, development and tension as poetry's key qualities. Texts for musicals, operas, choirs and children's verse have given him chances to try other characters and moods.
The last questions turn to translation, which he says taught him about poetry and likens to a radio ham turning the dial. He recommends Lorinc Szabo, Attila Jozsef, Miklos Radnoti, Sandor Weores, Janos Pilinszky and, among those he has translated, Agnes Nemes Nagy, Zsuzsa Rakovszky, Otto Orban and Ferenc Juhasz. He still feels displaced, as in a drawing Orban once made of him in a cloud between Hungary and England. What is left to achieve? Write better poems, and, with MacNeice's 'Snow' in mind, never settle.
- Work
- Reel
- Author
- George Szirtes
- Publisher
- Bloodaxe
Poems in this selection
- Snow
Strict form has another great benefit.
George Szirtes, The Wolf, issue 9
the imperative of rhyme or stanza is an aid to invention, not a bar
George Szirtes, The Wolf, issue 9