India-Books/Literature
New Delhi
Contemporary poetry, says noted Hungarian-British poet and award-winning translator
George Szirtes, is the expression of unconscious cultural transfers like the “chicken
balti masala and the vindaloo” on the British lunch menu — watered by assimilation from global diversity.
“Transfer is a very good
thing. When we came to England from Hungary (the poet as an eight-year old after the 1956
Budapest uprising with his parents, who were survivors of Nazi concentration
and labour camps), I did not speak any English,” the poet, who teaches literature
at the Univerity of East Anglia in UK, told this writer at the World Poetry
Festival in the Indian national capital.
“But with mutual respect, the
cultural (and literary) transfers worked well,” the poet said. The socio-cultural
milieu of Britain and the poet’s engagement with the society, education and
life of his adopted homeland (spent in English boarding schools) opened the
door to linguistic transfers. But in a strange way, it also consolidated his connection with his Hungarian
roots, a language whose rich literary expositions Szirtes brought to Britain’s
mainstream through several prize-winning translations.
“This imposition (of another
language) was an act of transfer. It was a situation brought on by conformity
to a new life — by acts like let us go to the school, cinema and sing,” the
poet said. At times, when Szirtes speaks
Hungarian, English feels like a second language to him, but the “sense of
language as a material body is useful for any writer, especially for a poet,” he
observes in an interview to The Oxonian Review.
The sense of wonder of being
able to express in English is palpable in Szirtes’ childlike pre-occupation
with the language, which he speaks with fluid erudition.
Szirtes, considered one of
the leading authorities on contemporary European and new world poetry, studied
painting at the Harrow School of Art and Leeds College of Art and Design before
putting together his first book of poetry, “The Slant Door” in 1979. In 2005,
he won the T.S. Eliot prize for his collection “Reel”. He is a member of the
Royal Society of Literature.
The poet, who chaired key sessions
on translations, cross-currents between poetry and other arts in New Delhi at
the poetry festival presented by the Sahitya Akademi (the nodal Indian body of literature),
pointed out that the aim of the new poetry movement was to include as many
different shades of voices as possible — to testify to this process of cultural
transfer which has become more vigorous in the era of globalization.
“In one of the important anthologies
of new poetry published in 1996, the editors (George Szirtes was one of the co-editors)
made a point to include voices from different cultures such as India and Africa
because poetry cannot be described as British, American or Asian any longer in
this century,” he said. Poetic sensibilities have blurred borders.
Szirtes does not aver with
the “perception of Commonwealth poetry” or literature that critics say “is developing
as a distinct language flavoured by the local vernacular in the former colonies”.
“London is fully multi-cultural. The assimilation is natural despite the fact
that the cultural practices are different,” he said.
The integrated voice of
poetry across cultures, loaded with echoes of differences in one linguistic strand
(English), has become more pronounced in the age of Internet — and by the fact
that poetry draws from all other forms of art like visual imagery, theatre and cinema,
the poet explained.
“The development of the
Internet has changed the way poetry is reaching out to readers and the voices
it is reflecting. There is constant change in the voices. Anyone can post their
poetry on the Internet and look professional. There are different poetry forums,”
the poet said, comparing “poetry in his generation and now”.
“Growing up in my generation…
there were certain schools of poetry. But now there is great explosion of information
and knowledge on the Internet. Poetry can be read across greater spaces. There
are a number of very good young poets at the University of East Anglia where I
teach. They are not afraid to move between different kinds of voices; they are
conscious of the voices and constantly change their voices… In a way the voices
save future of books. More people are literate about poetry,” Szirtes said.
The poet is one of those pragmatists
who advocates poetry as an “acquired art”— a literary genre that needs to be
honed by tutelage. “It may be a spontaneous in man but the oeuvre has to be
grounded in grammar like meters and rhythms. The crafts overlap geography like
the sonnets have to be mastered from the Italians, the gothic poetry from
Germany and the ballads from France. All these make up contemporary poetry,” Szirtes
pointed out.
Personally, “American and
French poetry” move Szirtes. “One of most exciting periods in 20th
century English poetry is between the two wars — my favourite poets are located
in that period,” Szirtes said.
He is fond of Baudelaire and
Rilke, which he has read in translations from French and German respectively.
On his part, Szirtes has translated works of Hungarian poets like Imre Madach (The Tragedy of Man) and Zsuzsa Rakovsky (New
Life) to award-winning volumes.
The poet refers to cinema as
a “creative learning tool” to mature poetic imagery. “Understanding movies is important.
I often tell my students to do a
close-up or a zoom — like on a theatre stage. I was speaking to the Indian
filmmaker Mani Kaul, who explained to me how raga (classical Indian music notations)
works on the five elements of existence. He was speaking about Bollywood – and its
genres like gangster, comedy and musical cinema. There has been cross-fertilisation
across traditions and oeuvres. Poets now perform their poetry and combine it
with other arts like photography and painting,” he said. It is a thread.
Cinema is like poetry as are
other arts, Szirtes summed up.
His approach to poetry as a shared
experience in arts is perhaps best established by the following excerpts from one
of his clusters of short poems in response to a painting by John Latham’s painting,
“The Observer IV (1960)” based on the
novel The Brothers Karamazov. The poems were published by Tate Modern in 2010.
“Leading A Charred Life: Seven Short Songs
by George Szirtes
1. I had thought to
have been charmed Not framed: Had
thought to be disarmed Not blamed. But life hangs fire as if suspended As if it
had been slyly ended.
2. We cannot
altogether escape the fact. The facts are something that can’t be quite
escaped. But something is wrong in both thought and act: The act is thought,
and act and thought are shaped.
3. Had I behaved
better than I did… Had sky been lighter, detail more compact… Had escape ever
been possible… Had I but thought, were it still feasible to act…
4. Someone is
raising a hand at a bus stop. Someone is waving to someone on the other side.
We watch the smile light briefly on a face. We watch our loved ones make their
way through space, Then space rolling in like a tide, Entering a bus, a house,
a shop.
5. Sometimes the
beauty of wood is overwhelming. We love that which seems warm yet indifferent.
So things burn down, so wood turns to coal, So coal begins where trees are
rife. So we survive. We lead a (haha) charred life.
6. There is the
terrible vehicle of darkness That runs over us in hope. There is my hand, there
are your fingers. We hang by our fingertips. We cope.
7. If poetry were
just a matter of the air Playing around the heart We’d feel a powerful gust
beneath our lungs And call it art - And art would do, or be, at least,
a start.
- Madhusree Chatterjee
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