Just Listen: An Interview with George Szirtes

The year 2025 was a large one for Hungarian literature: the Nobel went to László Krasznahorkai and the Booker to David Szalay. But Krasznahorkai reached his global readers through his English translators, one of whom is George Szirtes, the Hungarian-born British poet, speaking here with Mohammad Farhan for Asymptote. Szirtes came to England as a refugee child in 1956, and his parents decided the family would speak English from that day on, so that for years he did not speak Hungarian at all. Translation began in 1984, when an arts council grant took him to Budapest and he was asked to translate some poems. He says translation taught him to make fine distinctions between words that could each serve as an equivalent, and to listen to register and rhythm, which fed back into his own poetry. The first Krasznahorkai he translated was The Melancholy of Resistance, and he says he was determined not to take shortcuts, keeping the sentences as long as the original and sometimes longer, because the meaning inside them is endlessly postponed. The longest sentence he has translated ran about seventy pages, and one in the author's latest book runs to more than two hundred. Szirtes sees the translator as a servant, saying that anyone who becomes one has chosen to be a servant of the master, though he adds that because he had his own poetry, this never became his identity. His advice to young translators is to listen to the voice of the book rather than to the author's ideas, and he holds that there can never be one right translation. For the second draft he follows Michael Hofmann's counsel, to put the original away and attend to the book you yourself are writing.