The Burden of Inherited Memory: Postmemory and Cultural Trauma in George Szirtes' New & Collected Poems

Abstract

This research investigates the concept of memory and postmemory and inherited trauma in the collection of New & Collected Poemsby George Szirtes' in the light of the theory of postmemoryas developed by Marianne Hirsch. Although Szirtes' poetry has garnered significant scholarly interest in the areas of exile, migration, identity, and historical consciousness, the complex interplay between memory, postmemoryand transgenerational trauma has been under-researched. The analysis is qualitative and interpretative, using a close reading method to study imaginative reconstruction of historical experience through poetic language, in the introductory material and a selection of poems from the first section of the collection. The analysis reveals that Szirtes sees memory not as a firsthand memory of lived experience, but as a process of mediation and inheritance of memory through family stories, a silence, family spaces, urban spaces, photographs, and visual images. The mnemonic structures have the power to convert individual memory into collective historical consciousness, which demonstrates that the collective historical memory of war, forced migration, exile, and theHolocaust continues to influence the identity and ethical imagination of later generations. The study further proposes that Szirtes' poetic vision is very close to Hirsch's theory of postmemory as it depicts inherited trauma as a mode of dealing with the past with an ethical dimension and an aesthetic dimension. This article foregrounds the interplay of memory, historical inheritance, and poetic representation and makes a contribution to the fields of memory studies, post-memory studies, trauma studies, and contemporary British poetry.