SOURCE: Hopkin, James. “Wrestling with Englishness.” Guardian (27 October 2001): 11.

In the following essay, Hopkin writes about Szirtes's transition from being Hungarian to being English.

’Xenophobia is not what it used to be,” says Anglo-Hungarian poet and translator George Szirtes, and he should know. Ever since he walked across the Austrian border as an eight-year-old refugee in 1956, Szirtes has lived the life of a hyphenated being, never quite belonging to his adopted country, England, and never quite leaving behind his native Hungary.

When he began writing in his late teens, he realised that the struggle for identity was located in language itself. “I was thinking very hard of becoming an English writer,” he says, “and I had to work my way out from the written word to the spoken.” Immersing himself in the English canon, he embarked on “a search for a capacious language” that could accommodate his two-fold existence...