Fire, We Say — Web Exclusive
By Anna T. Szabó
Translated by George Szirtes
"What kind of spirit, what sort of fire?"
Flesh, we say. Though I don't know
your flesh. It isn't mine to know,
merely hidden, bloody, decaying stuff.
Bone, we say. I hide and lightly touch:
I know its articulation, its perfect
mechanism but it isn't you, not half enough.
Eyes, we say. My lips feel the rapid
trembling motion of your eye beneath the lid.
Inside your mouth the gentle pink
silkinesses where your body heat
pulses, transfusing tissue,
the eddies of your navel, the secret
valleys between your toes, the spiral
windings of your ears, the cradle
of collarbone and shoulder-blade
where I can drown in your scent
and sleep, those muscles of yours
so toothsome, your heat, your excitement,
the overpowering smell of fresh sweat,
your fierce tight embrace—still none of that is you.
You are living flame. Bone, flesh and blood,
you blaze where decay may not touch you,
you are movement itself, the prime mover,
occupying your body as you might a nest,
my body too, the way that you push onward,
let nothingness too have life, let flame lick sky
it powers and fills, with no source left to light it—
fire, we say: what we feel is the burning.
Anna T Szabó is a poet, writer, and translator, born in Transylvania (Romania) in 1972. She studied English and Hungarian literature at the University of Budapest, receiving her Ph.D. in English Renaissance literature in 2007. She was 23 when her first volume of poetry appeared, and received the Petofi Prize (1996), founded for promising young poets. She has since published four more volumes of poetry and has received several literary prizes. She has translated many poems and lyrics, essays, novels, drama, radio plays, and librettos, and writes essays, newspaper articles and reviews. She is currently the poetry editor of the literary journal The Hungarian Quarterly, which publishes Hungarian literature and essays in English.
George Szirtes was born in Budapest in 1948 and moved to England as a refugee in 1956. He was brought up in London and studied fine art in London and Leeds. His poems began appearing in national magazines in 1973 and his first book, The Slant Door, was published in 1979, receiving the Faber Memorial prize the following year. After the publication of his second book, November and May in 1982, he was invited to become a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Since then he has published several books and won various other prizes including the T.S. Eliot Prize for Reel in 2005. His own work has been translated into numerous languages.