George Szirtes Biography
George Szirtes (born 29 November 1948) is a Hungarian-born British poet, writing in English, as well as a translator from the Hungarian language into English. He has lived in the United Kingdom for most of his life.
Born in Budapest on 29 November 1948, Szirtes came to England as a refugee in 1956 aged 8. He was brought up in London and studied Fine Art in London and Leeds. Among his teachers at Leeds was the poet Martin Bell.
His poems began appearing in national magazines in 1973 and his first book, The Slant Door, was published in 1979. It won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize the following year.
He has won a variety of prizes for his work, most recently the 2004 T. S. Eliot Prize, for his collection Reel and the Bess Hokin Prize for poems in Poetry magazine, 2008. His translations from Hungarian poetry, fiction and drama have also won numerous awards.
Szirtes lives in Wymondham, Norfolk, and teaches at the University of East Anglia. He is married to the artist Clarissa Upchurch, with whom he ran The Starwheel Press and who has been responsible for most of his book jacket images. Her interest in the city of Budapest has led to over twenty years of exploration of the city, its streets, buildings and courtyards in paintings and drawings.
O, my America, discovered by slim chance,
behind, as it seemed, a washing line
I shoved aside without thinking -
does desire have thoughts or define
...
The eye is drawn to that single yellow star
that no wise man will follow.
The hunched men in caps, the grimacing woman
her eyes screwed up, cheeks hollow.
We look and look again until we burn a hole
in the paper. We strive to learn
from their resignation but it is beyond us.
We let them burn.
...
It was the empty chairs he feared,
not those with a proper behind rammed into them,
not those littered with stray bits of food or waste paper.
It was the voices that did not speak,
the wheezes and creaks the chairs didn't make.
The kicking over, the collapse,
the broken legs of chairs, the everyday business.
To see them ranged about a table
turned in on themselves as for a ritual,
that was the unsettling thing, and that one there,
yes, that one with its open arms
and its invitation to sit,
its somnolence, its stab at dignity
its emptiness, was the very devil.
...
The hard beautiful rules of water are these:
That it shall rise with displacement as a man
does not, nor his family. That it shall have no plan
or subterfuge. That in the cold, it shall freeze;
in the heat, turn to steam. That it shall carry disease
and bright brilliant fish in river and ocean.
That it shall roar or meander through metropolitan
districts whilst reflecting skies, buildings and trees.
And it shall clean and refresh us even as we slave
over stone tubs or cower in a shelter or run
into the arms of a loved one in some desperate quarter
where the rats too are running. That it shall have
dominion. That it shall arch its back in the sun
only according to the hard rules of water.
...
Finally we arrived at the city of silence,
enormous, high-walled, its furious traffic lights
signalling in panic. The streets were covered over
in thick rugs. It was a place without doors, a series
of moving mouths.
Their eyes, of course, spoke volumes,
vast encyclopaedias. There was little light reading.
Their white gloves fluttered before them
with grotesquely dancing fingers.
It was written that all this should be as it was.
Their thought-crimes, hand-crimes, and heart-crimes
were listed in long numbered chapters.
Policemen pulled faces or pointed at notices.
The civic authorities were sleeping in the park.
DO NOT DISTURB, said the signs.
ASK NO AWKWARD QUESTIONS.
The rest went on feeding and breeding.
They were planting tongues in the cemetery,
thick flowering shrubs of silence.
...
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