Reel
by George Szirtes
Summary
George Szirtes was eight years old when his family fled Budapest after the crushed uprising of 1956, and Reel is the book in which a lifetime of carrying that city finally unspooled at full length. The title holds the method: a reel of film, memory run backward and forward, and the reeling of a mind between two languages and two homes. The collection's central sequences return to Budapest, its courtyards, trams, photographs, and dead, and to the child refugee's England, and they conduct the return in strict, elaborate form, Szirtes being one of the great formalists of contemporary British poetry, terza rima and rhymed stanzas sustained across long meditations the way Dante's measure carries a traveler through an underworld. He trained as a painter before he was a poet, and the poems see like paintings, light on brickwork, faces in old photographs, the exact tone of institutional corridors; the visual education also disciplines the nostalgia, since what cannot be verified by the eye is not claimed. Memory here is never simply recovered; it is examined, distrusted, and grieved, the emigrant's inheritance of images standing in for a country that no longer exists in the form he left it. Reel won the 2004 T.S. Eliot Prize, the first time the award went to a poet born outside the anglophone world, and it stands at the center of Szirtes's double career, since alongside the poems he became the leading translator of Hungarian literature into English, carrying László Krasznahorkai and Sándor Márai across the same border he once crossed himself.
Historical Context & Significance
Szirtes reached England in 1956 among the refugees of the failed revolution, and his career has run on the twin tracks Reel joined: English poems about Hungarian memory, and English translations of Hungarian masters, work that later helped Krasznahorkai toward the International Booker. The 2004 T.S. Eliot Prize recognized a poet who had been building quietly for three decades, and it read, in the year of European Union enlargement, as a timely acknowledgment that British poetry's first language has many accents. Szirtes later wrote The Photographer at Sixteen, an award winning memoir extending Reel's excavations, and his formal mastery has made him a touchstone for younger poets working in received forms, proof that strict stanzas can hold the century's displacements.