Category Archive

Many authors today speak and write in at least two languages : indeed, it has for some time been almost mandatory for Scandinavians and inhabitants of the former Warsaw Pact countries, also inhabitants of India (where there are no less than twenty-two officially recognized languages and hundreds more spoken). As it happens, we have recently had consecutive presentations by two eminent Anglo-Hungarian poets, Goerge Szirtes and George Gömöri, at the Poetry Café (April 21 and April 28, see Events and Meetings).

Interestingly, they have opposite approaches to the problem : George Szirtes told us he always writes his poems in English and subsequently has them translated into Hungarian, whereas George Gömöri always writes in Hungarian first and has the poems translated into English later, usually by his friend Clive Wilmer who is an an esteemed poet in his own right.  George Gömöri has written a poem on this very subject :

Daily I switch languages — call them masks:
At times a mask can feel like your own skin.
At other times, the spirit has to struggle,
Saved only by the tongue it calls its own.

The mysteries of life, of the universe,
I can describe in English now, although
In my mother tongue alone I can stammer out
The words that compose the sunset, make it glow.

from Polishing October  (Shoestring Press, 2008)