Formal Feeling

(Keith Ekiss is Artistic Director of TWO LINES. His first collection of poems, Pima Road Notebook, will be published next year by New Issues Poetry and Prose.)
When translating closed form poetry, the formal elements (meter and rhyme) are often the first thing the translator abandons. It's common to read sonnets in translation, for example, that dispense with the rhyme and meter of the original. I'm no neo-formalist, but when a translator comes along who's able to convey not only the sense of the original, but an approximation (or recreation) of the rhythm and rhyme, I pay attention. George Szirtes, a prolific writer and translator born in Budapest, who has lived in Britain for most of his life, is that kind of poet.
This Day, Szirtes' translation of the Hungarian poet Anna Szabó's A mai nap, subtitled Wherever I lie is your bed, gives the new TWO LINES anthology it's title. It's a cinematic poem, jump cutting between scenes and years in the poet's life. We follow the writer as a seemingly casual search for a new apartment turns into uncertain panic and terror.
Fog everywhere: anxiety was a tight
cold sleepless night;
that's my life I thought and felt it glide
swiftly away but I wasn't part of the ride;
my life went on without me inside.
The form is important. The irregular, though pronounced, rhythm and the rhyme attempt to reign in, if only slightly, the poet's inner turmoil. To lose the form would decrease the tension. A quick glance to the left-hand side of the page, without knowing any Hungarian, confirms that Szirtes's translation preserves these patterns.
Szirtes's second translation, Dog (Kutya, in the Hungarian), is by the Budapest born Krisztina Tóth. In his introduction, Szirtes describes Tóth as writing love poems with a [ ] disillusioned bitter, haunted edge to them. The poem bears agonizing, protracted witness to a couple who come across a severely injured dog, one recently struck by a passing car, though not their own. The poem is unflinching in its description of the wounded animal's suffering, mouth wide open, it sat there, a half-dog / though I could tell from its eyes that it saw everything.
But it's the poem's second half where the tension increases, when it becomes clear that the man's hesitant refusal to save the dog stands in, from the poet's perspective, for the couple's broken relationship, with the constant fury / and resignation involved in even love-making, and the way / you asked me just what it was that I wanted you to do.
Szirtes is also an active blogger, whose posts are well worth reading.