Even the literature that seems most rooted in one place is animated by writing from elsewhere – and trying to keep that influence out is profoundly dangerous

Culture is not a purely national business. I work as a poet and translator and would find it inconceivable to read Chaucer without being aware of the figures of Dante and Boccaccio in the background, or Shakespeare without Plutarch. Or indeed TS Eliot (himself an immigrant to the UK) without referring to 100 texts from other states in other languages. This form of internationalism is the lifeblood of art. It is rootless, it is cosmopolitan, and it is free thinking.

I began writing at 17 in what was chronologically my second language, having arrived in England at the age of eight as a Hungarian refugee with no English. I cannot tell precisely what inner resources I brought with me at that age, but I was not a clean slate. That slate had already been written on by my family history, my parents, my city, my street and the events of my then short life. I was, like everyone else, a palimpsest.

The literatures of our particular island are many, all constantly being annotated and rewritten by those who arrive and leave to travel elsewhere. We all move, even within the island, if only from town to town. Each move amplifies and modifies our sense of place. The annotation does not erase the local: the palimpsest extends it. Indeed, the assumed stability of the local is created by extensions beyond itself. The village knows itself as village through the knowledge of other villages, as well as of towns and cities. The nation knows itself as nation through the encounter, not just with other nations, but the world. Each extension is a modification, each another layer of the palimpsest.

The government of Hungary has sought for six years to narrow the vista of imagination for its citizens by creating “patriotic” national libraries, “patriotic” art, to increase cohesion on its own terms and exclude those it considers outsiders. That policy locks down, excludes and redefines even its own citizens as loyal patriots or potentially hostile elements. Their patriotism proceeds not through love of country, but the exclusion of others from it. It seeks to define some pure cultural core that is Hungary and Hungary alone.

I had written a few poetry books in English before I began translating from the Hungarian in 1984. I translated fiction, poetry and drama because I was asked to and also because I was fascinated by what would happen when a work in one language was transferred into another. What happens when a poem by, say, Ágnes Nemes Nagy enters the domain of another language? What happens to fictions set in unfamiliar places, like the Budapest seen in Dezsö Kosztolányi’s Anna Édes? How can a work to be translated as the same, yet be different? That question haunts not just translation but migration. How are we different from each other, and how are we the same, especially when our origins and backgrounds differ in dramatic ways? That is the point. The works of foreign writers are not entirely about “them”. They are also about us.

There were not too many Hungarian writers in circulation in the UK when I started. The Hungarian national belief is that literature is the great hidden treasure of the nation but that no one else knows this because of the supposed difficulty of the language. There is so much we don’t know about others but ignorance is not bliss: it is smugness and prejudice. Ted Hughes, who together with Daniel Weissbort founded the journal Modern Poetry in Translation, was much influenced by the Hungarian poet János Pilinszky, whom he translated, and by the Serbian poet Vasko Popa, who offered a model for Hughes’s 1970 collection, Crow. Free movement of experience and sensibility creates new works, new ways of understanding.

My own main work in translation has been with the works of Sándor Márai (the author of Embers) and László Krasznahorkai (author of Satantango, among others). Both are authors of international stature who describe worlds we don’t know at first hand but sense as possibilities, as versions of truth, in ourselves. They reveal us.



My travels as a writer have taken me to many countries. In all of them, there is much that is the same and much that is different. We are in constant contact with each other through communications, through trade, through shared cultures, through political and economic ties. I have collaborated with translators from many languages. The summer before last, I was teaching a translation class that included Bangladeshi, Japanese, French, Italian and Polish students. We learned from each other not just ways of writing, but ways of seeing, and even being.

The Hungarian poet István Vas wrote a poem titled The Translator’s Vote of Thanks. It was composed in a dark time in the 1950s when he was not allowed to publish his own work, only translations. In the poem, he describes how the words of others liberated him. “Translating Nero’s rule of terror, I / Could see before me the equivalent,” he writes, and continues:



I thank you for the view beyond my cell,

That I could trust my message to your page,

Assuring, gracious giants in whom we dwell …



We want out and we want you out. The message is clear enough Read more

Whatever some politicians say, we are citizens of the world whether we admit it or not. We consume and live by that which was once strange and once we close doors and windows we begin to suffocate. The terms in which the EU referendum was conducted extended far beyond normal debate about the movement of peoples, whether refugees or poor workers seeking a better life. They sought and exploited a latent hostility towards the foreign, a hostility that has increased since the decision. What this can lead to is more than a lack of air. It is a kind of aridity that becomes combustible. A few sparks can do it. The conditions for combustibility are already in place in the UK and in other parts of Europe, particularly in the region where I was born, and – especially now – in Trump’s US. Isolationism and patriotism are on the rise, partly as political acts, partly as social mood, exacerbated by whatever means, for political reasons.

Drop enough sparks on dry ground and a fire starts. We have seen such fires before. The view beyond the cell, as Vas put it, is vital: better still to get out of the cell and out into the fertile world, and become its citizen.