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“... My name​ is Róbert Valzer and I like walking, not that I have anything to do with the famous Robert Walser, nor do I think it strange that walking should be my favourite hobby. I call it a hobby but I accept – or rather I am prepared to entertain the fact – that where I live in this Central European country I am considered to be too unstable to be regarded as a normal person and that my hobby is not to be compared with other people’s hobbies ...”

“... of most Irish poetry are rarely as pronounced in mainland British verse. Edwin Morgan and George Szirtes are both willing to expand their poetics beyond its traditional range. Morgan has always delighted in maverick experiments both with the typewriter and with scissors-and-paste, and his new book, Themes on a Variation, provides the customary ...”

“... by exporting an elderly English widow as a minor Hindu deity. Of the poets here, Philip Gross and George Szirtes follow Conrad’s route. Fleur Adcock, re-importing a wicked Englishness from the Antipodes, favours Mrs Moore. The others work variations on Forster, with the occasional Conradian divertissement. The son of ‘a Displaced Person from ...”

“... is from an earlier selection of Petri’s poems chosen and translated by Clive Wilmer and George Gömöri, Night Song of the Personal Shadow, as are these lines from ‘Marriage’: Your skirt is like a bag of candies, offering familiar sweetness. Do not resent him thinking he’s grasped what in fact he’s misunderstood. (Though already love’s ...”

“... and War, each section is a single sentence that sometimes coils over several pages. His translator George Szirtes has written of ‘the slow lava flow of narrative … the vast black river of type’, which beautifully describes the physical experience of reading Krasznahorkai’s work, the need to slow down in order to find its rhythm, the feeling that ...”

“... gives Márai’s writing its brusque vitality in this book, so fluently translated by the poet George Szirtes, is his ingenuity at warding off, or keeping at bay, his own disillusionment with the novel. Like Casanova, he has to be unflagging in his wish never to flag. He has to keep telling himself, and the reader, that it’s worth going on reading ...”

“... please’, ‘Yoo hoo’), daft, slightly old-fashioned exclamations (‘by Gosh’, ‘by George’, ‘by Golly’) and corny ones (‘Heck’, ‘Darn!’, ‘nifty’, ‘critter’, ‘dangblasted’). This fits in well with the book’s obsessive concern with past fashions, games that are no longer played, flowers that are no longer worn, and ...”

“... rendering of Chinese when I was young to László Krasznahorkai, more recently, in the versions of George Szirtes and Ottilie Mulzet, which read enthrallingly in English, though needless to say I have no way of knowing what the originals are like. Many celebrated translators, like Gansel, carry on adding to their linguistic crane bag: Michael Henry ...”