SOURCE: Szirtes, George. “Being Remade As an English Poet.” New Hungarian Quarterly 30, no. 113 (spring 1989): 149-59.

In the following essay, Szirtes writes about his youth and writing poetry in a new language.

At the age of twenty-seven I felt “I needed to be remade as an English poet.” It was of course a form of groping in the dark. What does it mean to be remade? If I ask myself this question now I am immediately led back into that odd twilight world in which the past becomes an unwitting liar, the clear conclusions that spring from it fade like mirages, and even the apparent certainties of what has come to be begin to lose their definition. Now I travel regularly to Hungary, have good friends there, read Hungarian poetry (still with some, though decreasing, difficulty), write about Hungary, and am less concerned about having to be remade as...