`This is ironic. I'm not a scholar, I'm more like a journalist: I write sketches, not theses." George Szirtes (pronounced "Sear-tesh") is a Hungarian poet who - after the failed uprising in 1956 - emigrated from Budapest to Britain with his family. He has just taken up his post as TCD's first international writer fellow.
Speaking in a pronounced Hungarian accent, Szirtes describes his sense of his poetic role as like a thermometer: "I dip in to see what the temperature is like." Dipping into life in Dublin appeals: he has been here before and has made friends. He has rooms in New Square, and his post involves a time commitment of one term (he leaves at Christmas), wherein he teaches a course in translation at the Oscar Wilde Creative Writing Centre on Westland Row, has office hours to facilitate meetings with any TCD students who may wish to make contact, and will give lectures and readings. "It's a new post, so the duties are still evolving."
Cut off from Hungary from the age of eight, Szirtes reconnected with his birthplace as an adult. The result has been a large body of powerful poems, most of which have been included in his recent collection, The Budapest File (Bloodaxe Books, £9.95 in UK) - a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. As well as touching on themes such as the nature of identity, nationality and rediscovering a sense of place, he revisits the lives of his Jewish family: "My grandfather was gassed in Auschwitz. My father escaped from a labour camp on a route march. My mother spent three months in Ravensbruck and came out looking like a skeleton." He smiles without bitterness: "My family circumstances were not unusual."
His mother worked as a photo-journalist, and he believes his approach to writing has come from hers ("Photography, I need you. Freeze me too."). She committed suicide in 1975: "She was recuperating from heart operations which left her weak and in pain. But the whole time we lived in England she was detached. She was always an emigre. Even when we moved to a house with the perfect kitchen. She just sat there, disconnected." Although he was aware his father was Jewish, he did not know of his mother's Jewishness until after she died: "All along she had insisted she was Lutheran."
His mother's suicide and his need to "shoulder some of her past" led him to start reading about Hungary and make a visit there in 1984. "The visit blew me away. I realised I had been carrying internal geography around with me in my head. Not just a street map but the look and smell of things. I hadn't been there since I was a child, but it had been in my head like a ghost." In poem after poem he describes the city of Budapest like a living entity, and he firmly believes that much of history is contained in geography: "The streets and the buildings still had bullet and shell holes. The city still carried the history of 1945 and 1956 on its skin. All that big history and that personal history is in those walls; it's like walking into a body." (He writes in the long sequence, "Metro": "It is the peculiar happiness of buildings/To be witness.")
His childhood years were spent in a flat in "the seventh district, next to the Franz Liszt Music Academy, in the old Jewish ghetto in Pest. It's just a 15-minute walk from the Danube. We lived on the third floor. Blocks of flats would be full of people from every section of society, from academics to bus drivers - moving in, moving out; living, dying. Buildings contain so much. Anyway, my block of flats is still there. I just haven't mustered the courage to visit. I fear a let-down. I think I remember my bedroom, where the piano was in the sitting room, but these memories are misty and uncertain."
He spent a year in Budapest in 1989, when "all the changes were happening". He joined in "the demonstrations and the marches", but still felt like a visitor: "I remember thinking on one march, `if this gets any worse, I can always go home'." Once back in England, the notion of home became "problematic". He now speaks of being "in between". He envies poets such as Seamus Heaney and Tony Harrison, who come from a rooted community and whose work is founded on a strong sense "of the local":
"I'm one of Eliot's `rootless cosmopolitans'. To some extent this is part of the Jewish experience. I wonder, who are my people? The only answer I can come up with is `people on trains'. And there are more people on trains now than there used to be. It's harder to be local now, to come from one specific history and framework." He recounts an anecdote to illustrate how formerly rooted local communities are opening up: "I have a friend in Kerry, the poet Gabriel Fitzmaurice. We went into a pub there that probably hasn't changed since 1930. But it turned out that the owner's wife was Hungarian and had lived in London!"
He notes that "valuable things come out of the local, the traditional, the concept of race", and admits his envy of "the better fruits of belonging and family". But, because of his experiences of anti-Semitism, emigration and exile, there is part of him that distrusts nationalism. He witnessed a disturbing right-wing rally in Budapest in 1989: "First of all I saw a black-shirt (Fascist) march, and then at the rally, one of the speakers mentioned the name of a Hungarian politician - a Jew. A cry went up: `He is not Hungarian'. More names were mentioned, and the same cry rose from the crowd. Those names were all Jewish."
His father's name was originally Schwartz: "He changed it at the end of the War to look more Hungarian. Hungarian Jews had been changing their names since the end of the 19th century. They wanted to identify with the country where they lived. When I read Ulysses I was struck by Bloom's name. His father, a Hungarian Jew, was called Virag. But Virag is a Hungarian name, not a Jewish one. I suspect the original name was Bloom, after all, probably spelt Blum."
Szirtes attributes his interest in poetic form and structure to his lack of a sense of a tradition: "I haven't got much of a family, in the physical sense, but I can create families of sonnets." He finds liberation in "an imposed structure": "When some of the burden of inventing everything is removed, then you can begin to assemble large and comprehensive things, one brick on another to build up the sense of the complexity of history. Stanzas, sonnets or terzarima (what Dante used to write the Inferno) give me an architectural guide, and as forms, offer a historical resonance."
He is currently working on a sequence of poems about the 44 years he has spent living in England. He felt, with the publication of The Budapest File, the risk of being "riven in twain", because his life does not fall neatly into two halves. He is also working on a novel about Tibor Szakacz, a Hungarian wrestler for whom his father worked as a translator. He himself is a noted translator and has translated many Hungarian poets, including the "Protean" Sandor Woeres, and, currently, Agnes Nemes Nagy ("a terrific poet").
Despite being "a landlocked state with movable borders", colonised through its history by Turks, Austrians, Germans and Russians, Hungary - unlike Ireland - has kept its unusual language (Hungarian is not an Indo-European language). This has created, however, the need for translators to bring this "intellectually vivacious" tradition to a wider audience.
Szirtes is also a trained painter and art historian, teaches creative writing at the Norwich School of Art and Design, and is married with two children. His poetry has won the Geoffrey Faber Prize, the Cholmondeley Award and the European Poetry Translation Prize, as well as being shortlisted for the Forward and Whitbread Poetry Prizes. He has received the Golden Star medal of the Hungarian Republic. He is co-editor, with George Gomori, of The Col- onnade of Teeth: Modern Hungarian Poetry (also published by Bloodaxe).
And what of Hungary since 1989? "The changes have come so fast, it's hard to form an opinion. But the big split in Hungarian culture has always been between two factions: the urban side that locates itself within the history of Europe; and the populist, rural side, originating from the wild horsemen who came out of the east." The ruralists are less keen to join the EU, while the urbanites (dismissed as bourgeoisie under communism) want to join, "partly for cultural reasons, and partly for defence". He describes Fidesz, the youth-orientated party now in power, as "liberal Tories": "The whole of Europe is in a state of transition following the events of 1989. There are elements to be lost and gained. I think Hungary has the intellectual force to emerge as an economically powerful country."
Aware of "the nostalgia gap" he could fall into about his birthplace, Szirtes writes most movingly about his father - "he is the history I stand on with one leg" - returning to Hungary as an old man for a reunion of his troupe of boy scouts: "They sing now, as they sang when there were many/ when the dead were young and wore vests and grins/ and went diving and tramping: Mowglis, Sir Galahads,/Chingachooks, Wolves, all of a mythical company/ bound by codes and by magic, where manhood begins/ with oaths and secrecy, discipline and parades.
And so they marched off, being Jews, to places/ the century saved for them . . .
. . . history came and blew them apart. Their arms and legs and heads flew off, their bodies aged in camps. They froze in forests./ Fires raged in ovens at the heart of unbearable farms.
The handsomest, cleverest, most athletic . . . the fire consumes whatever is thrown on it.
. . .They sing and tell stories. That is the role of the old/ who have travelled the roads and rails of atrocity."
(from "The Lost Scouts")
George Szirtes will lecture on Literature and Nationalism on November 29th at 7.30 p.m. in the Jonathan Swift Theatre in the Arts Block, TCD. He will read his poetry on December 6th at 7.30 p.m. at the same venue.