George Szirtes on translation, Hungarian literature’s global moment, and the voice behind Krasznahorkai

2025 became a landmark year for Hungarian literature as László Krasznahorkai received the Nobel Prize and David Szalay won the Booker Prize. Against that backdrop, George Szirtes, one of Krasznahorkai’s key English-language translators, has offered a detailed account of how translation helps literary reputations travel and why the translator’s work remains both indispensable and precarious.

Szirtes describes himself first as a poet and only later as a translator. He began writing in 1967 and publishing books in 1979, while translation entered his life in 1984 after an Arts Council-supported visit to Budapest, the city where he was born. Although he left Hungary as a refugee in 1956 and grew up speaking English rather than Hungarian, he said his return to the country in the early 1980s opened the path back to the language and literature of his origins.

His earliest translation work came from the Hungarian poet and novelist Dezső Kosztolányi, followed by a dramatic work, Imre Madách’s A Tragedy of Man, and then fiction, beginning with Kosztolányi’s Anna Édes. Szirtes said poetry and translation have fed one another over the years: translation sharpens attention to register, tone and precision, while poetry trains the ear to follow language line by line. He stressed that translation is not simply a matter of carrying over content, but of making close decisions between possible equivalents in two languages.

That sensitivity becomes especially important in Krasznahorkai’s work, whose famously extended sentences demand unusual patience from both translator and reader. Szirtes said he aimed not to shorten or simplify the prose in The Melancholy of Resistance, but to preserve the architecture of the original, including its long delays in arriving at meaning. He linked those sentences to the novels’ atmosphere of instability and disorder, in which ordinary social order seems to have broken down. He added that Krasznahorkai’s sentences have become even more expansive over time, with one recent sentence extending beyond two hundred pages.

Szirtes also used the discussion to address the status of translators, saying the profession has often been undervalued or rendered invisible. He noted that in the past, some books appeared without the translator’s name on the cover, though he said this has improved. He contrasted the literary cultures of England and Hungary, observing that Hungarian writers have historically also worked as translators, partly because of the country’s need to bring world literature into its own language.

The Nobel Prize, he argued, raises the question of whether translators should receive greater recognition for the role they play in building an author’s international reputation. He pointed out that no single translation creates a global readership on its own, since multiple translators often contribute to the wider circulation of a writer’s work. In Krasznahorkai’s case, he said the work of other translators has also been important in bringing the author to readers in different languages.

For younger translators, Szirtes’s advice was simple: listen closely to the voice of the book. He urged translators to focus less on the author’s opinions or politics than on the texture of the prose itself, then to find a corresponding voice in English. He argued that there is no single correct translation, only a continuous exchange between languages in which the translator tries to grasp what is really happening in each sentence. In a second draft, he said, the translator should set aside the original and focus on the book being written in the target language.

He also drew a distinction between translations intended for experimentation and those meant for readers who will encounter them in print and purchase them as books. For poetry, he said, there can be room for multiple versions and formal play; for novels, the priority is usually to create a readable work that allows the new reader to enter the original writer’s world. That, he suggested, is not a betrayal of the source text, but the practical work of giving a book a foothold in another language.