EchoesofAeschylusandTalmud
Moris Farhi and Anthony Rudolf analyse two impressively creative intellects
Bloodaxe, £12 Reviewed by Moris Farhi
GEORGE SZIRTES, who settled in England agedeight,inthewake of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, is an eminent translator and interpreter of his native country’s rich literature. Equally impressively, he is a distinguished poet who transcends boundaries with deep insights into our turbulent times.
Pursuing the symbolism of the “delta” in this collection’s title, he explores the existential sediments the human condition deposits through numerous confluences before flowing, in several channels,intoanocean.I feel that his choice of the “delta” as his stream into our unconscious is purposefullyasenigmaticas theoceanthatreceivesit. Does it represent death or life after death?
Is it the location that bears the secret as to whether life is meaningful or just an irrelevant galactic accident? Can it provide, if not cogent answers, then relevant clues about emotions, expectations, prejudices, ideals, anxieties, loss, fears and forebodings that govern us?
Szirtes, the progeny of a Jewish father and an atheist Transylvanian mother incarcerated for a time in Ravensbruck asa“political”,hasdeclaredthat“insofar as Jews anywhere are attacked, assailed, slandered, or threatened, I am Jewish, George Szirtes : ‘world citizen’ who extends the horizons of poetry in English in the same way my father was: by accident.”
The coda “accident” is interesting. It might echo Szirtes’s — and our — deliberations on the meaning of life.
It is with these deliberations and the myriad nuances Szirtes offers in countless observations that his poetry engages me. I should admit that I attribute this affinity to the main strains of my own spiritual DNA — Jewishness and displacement. I recognise, even in Szirtes’s most oblique poems, both the angst of the Jew’s heavy history and the
— yearning or melancholy — of the émigré’s uprootedness. I feel that, though Szirtes considers himself a British poet, and though he has enriched British poetry — indeed, extended its horizons — he declares himself to be a world citizen, an outsider who, like all world citizens, hopes to see the day when the barricades of illiberalism come down while aware that such a day is unlikely to dawn.
In terms of style, Szirtes often resorts to a classicism that, always profound, always honed into exemplary simplicity, reflects the structural convention of Aeschylean plays. Many of his poems are internal dialogues wherein selves discourse in strophes and antistrophes with strophes narrating and expanding the theme and antistrophes voicing, in growing alarm, concern, caution, irresolution, even portent.
(This is also a talmudic convention where the first part, the Mishnah, posits a biblical portion and the second part, the Gemara, expounds the portion with commentaries from rabbinic sages.)
Szirtes has given us 122 poems in this collection. A short review does not provide the space to analyse individual examples, let alone the complete set. Consequently, I will simply say that readers who are lovers of poetry would do well to savour these poems one by one. They will be surprised by the manna that nurtures them while also goading them to seek meaningful answers to the existential questions that have been with us since we evolved brains, visions and moralities.
I am Jewish in the way my father was: by accident’