Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Let me begin with an obvious statement: poetry’s roots are in childhood. In this sense, truly, ‘the child is the father of the man’. I was born and grew up in Hungary, more precisely in Budapest, a city which I love to this day. (The only collection of my poems translated into English is entitled My Manifold City and refers to a kind of ‘dream-Budapest’.) Also, I wrote my first poem at the age of nine, and after I began writing regularly as an adolescent, my first ‘real’ poem was published while I was still at secondary school. That was two years before the Hungarian revolution of 1956, the failure of which catapulted me into the world and, eventually, to England. That is why I write poetry in Hungarian – I was a grown man when I came to this country, and could not change my ‘organic’ voice which I had already found in my ‘green and salad’ years.

Do I write in English, though? Of course; but only essays and book reviews, or scholarly studies on Polish or Hungarian literature. As for translation, it is a different matter. Though I have lived here for over forty years I still do not feel at ease with my English poetic vocabulary, not being able to tell exactly whether a certain phrase sounds appropriate in a given poetic context or whether a certain rhyme has been overused to the point of making a slightly comic impression. I have also translated Hungarian verse into English on my own, but I have never felt comfortable about it. In the early 1970s, however, I found an ideal cotranslator in the person of the Cambridge poet and art critic, Clive Wilmer. Clive knows everything about ‘poetic English’ that I don’t and probably never shall. He has an amazing ear and a vast vocabulary improving greatly on my often clumsy first versions We have been working together since we met and have produced four volumes so far (Forced March by Miklós Radnóti in 1979, two collections of György Petri, and my own English collection) as co-translators. We have also done many translations for the comprehensive anthology of modern Hungarian poetry, The Colonnade of Teeth (Bloodaxe, 1996) which I edited with George Szirtes. George, having arrived in England as a young boy and having gone to school here was able to become an English poet. While he translates both poetry and prose from the Hungarian and writes verse on Hungarian themes it woud be inappropriate to call him a Hungarian poet.

Was I ever tempted to emulate Szirtes? After all, writing in English would give one a potentially huge audience, something a poet writing in Hungarian could never aspire to. (Hungarian is spoken, according to recent estimates, by about 14 million people in the world.) I have never thought of this seriously. While Hungarian poets face stiff competition amongst themselves – until recently poetry used to be the leading genre of Hungarian literature – I feel that I am still able to add something new and original to this growing monument. I don’t think I would have a similar chance in English. In Hungarian I have written at least one poem which won two literary prizes, one Hungarian and one Italian, but I don’t think I would ever manage to do this in the language of Shakespeare and Ted Hughes.

Translating poetic texts helps me in various ways. It is a two-way discourse and I don’t deny that I have gained much from translating foreign poets into Hungarian. My own Hungarian verse has certainly been enriched by the modern English, American and above all, Polish poetry from which I have translated. TS Eliot and Czeslaw Milosz have influenced me and sometimes I can hear in my own Hungarian lines a whisper of foreign voices. I am not sure whether translating into English from the Hungarian has had the same effect. Some of the poets I have translated with Wilmer may have left a mark on my poetry. For example, I have written one or two poems in György Petri’s style, which is sarcastic, bitter, and politically challenging, but my real preoccupations have been gentler, and perhaps more traditional, than his were and my lifestyle is completely different. I may have been somewhat influenced by the late István Vas (who died in 1991), whom both Clive Wilmer and myself knew personally and loved as a friend. I also admire Sándor Weöres and his Protean ability to change his tune almost at will and put on so many different masks – his poetry is not a poetic miniworld but a whole ‘uni-verse’.

Most of my poems are translatable and, indeed, some of them have been rendered beautifully into English with the able assistance of Wilmer. None the less, I have sometimes written poems which are deeply embedded in Hungarian history or language, which I am reluctant to translate. They would need too many footnotes and are not for ‘foreign consumption’. Others work instantly in any language. As for my poetry written in the past 44 years, only part of it was conceived in England: I travel a lot and can write with ease on train journeys or even in mid-air between London and New York. So quite a few of my poems were written on route from country A to B – the most poignant case is a short poem about my deep attachment to the Hungarian language (my ‘mother tongue’) back in 1961 when I was in Makassar, Indonesia, waiting for a ship to take me to the spice-island of Ambon! This (otherwise perhaps not remarkable) poem, in a sense, sums up my reasons for writing poetry only in Hungarian; in recent years it has become an anthology piece in Hungary. I add it to this text as a kind of appendix.

        (Daily I change . . . )

Daily I change tongues, masks in other words,
And at times it seems: the mask is now my own skin.
At other times: the spirit struggles in vain,
Only in my own language can I find salvation.

For I can describe in English the mysteries
Of life, the universe in all its glory,
But only in my mother tongue can I compose
The words that make a sunset glowing.

[GG]