New Life

It is unusual for a poet who is quite so young (b.1950) and who haspublished relatively little, to be granted the status of a major poet-in-waitingthat translation may seem to bestow. Nevertheless, when a voice is as clear, ascapable of speaking so passionately yet intelligently, as that of ZsuzsaRakovzky's people do tend to sit up and pay attention. Rakovszky has won allthe major literary prizes available: the Graves Prize, the much coveted JozsefAttila Prize, and the Dery Prize, twice. Some of her poems have appeared inEngland, the United States, and Germany; her Collected Poems are in preparationin Hungary.The world of her poems is recognisably the world of her readers: a shiftingurban landscape of noisy neighbours, malfunctioning television sets, shadows onlandings, snatched meetings, and dying ideologies. Rakovszky's tone is racy,fast, flittering, but precise, and despite the elaborate forms, she isseeentially informal. George Szirtes intention in these wonderful translations,has been to make her sound in English, as she sounds to him in Hungarian.It is partly the classical contral, partly the brillant clarity of herobservations, that as attracted readers. While her poems tend to concentrate onprivate experiences, with the themes of love, deciet, guilt, identity, andpersonal loss uppermost, there is a current feeling that encompasses a moregeneral and public sense of place and identity.