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George Szirtes Home


Photo by Caroline Forbes

Fish Music

For Pascale Petit

He struggles into his borrowed human skin,
the one he wears for special occasions
with the sewn-in dinner jacket and polished patent feet.
He brushes off earth and other traces of night,
Smells the remnant darkness on his sleeve,
Bends back the fingers that constitute his living,
And picks up the instrument. His mother is listening
In the next room, holding her breath for him,
The breath she has been saving all her adult years.

After the skin, the fish scales. One must glitter.
One must swim through the day. He flicks his tail
This way and that. He makes the first sounds
Those scraped sighs that are the sign of his well-being.
‘I’m ready,’ he says, his eyes glassy and round.
‘I’ve got my gills on. The whole amphibian kit.’

The music begins. The sea waits by the door.
Both skin and scale are glowing. The neck he wears
Is just a little loose, he must tighten it.
The chin has worn away on his left side.
The music slops about inside his belly a while
Then creeps upward blowing through his ears
Into the room and hard against the walls.
Now he is swimming. He sees the music
Floating in the tank of the room. He must practice harder.
It is his food after all. He can feel its strands
Slip between his fingers, now silk, now knife.
It smells wholesome, of water, night and skin.

‘How does it sound?’ he asks her. ‘Like salt,’ she says,
‘Like salt and damascene.’ Her fancy talk, he thinks.

It’s not his skin, he knows that. The dinner jacket
Is of another era. Too many buttons on the waistcoat
Of the flesh. Too much blood in the fibre, none of it his.
But music too is skin. He wraps it about him.
He’s hardly there: half-fish-half-man is elsewhere,
In the bone beneath a skin that’s not his own.
Each living thing has its own element, he thinks,
And even this old skin belongs to someone.

George Szirtes was born in Budapest in 1948 and came 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. It won the Faber Memorial prize the following year.

By this time he was married with two children. After the publication of his second book, November and May, 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.

Having returned to his birthplace, Budapest, for the first time in 1984, he has also worked extensively as a translator of poems, novels, plays and essays and has won various prizes and awards in this sphere. His own work has been translated into numerous languages.

Beside his work in poetry and translation he has written Exercise of Power, a study of the artist Ana Maria Pacheco, and, together with Penelope Lively, edited New Writing 10 published by Picador in 2001.

George Szirtes lives near Norwich with his wife, the painter Clarissa Upchurch to whose website this is linked. Together they ran The Starwheel Press. Corvina has recently produced Budapest: Image, Poem, Film, their collaboration in poetry and visual work.

There is a variety of old and new poems to be found on this site. Apart from the regularly replaced poem on the home page, there is a regularly maintained Blog in the News section, and some stray notes and photographs in Notes. Poems and excerpts from published books (as well as selected reviews) may be located by clicking on specific books in the Books section. There is also an audio sample available among the Links.

Contact details

Email:

georgeszirtes@googlemail.com