János Pilinszky's ruminations about trauma and memory struck a particular chord with Ted Hughes. At the same time as the Yorkshire poet was working on translations of Pilinszky's poetry with János Csokits in the early 1970s, he was writing two of his own collections that contain similar stylistics: Cave Birds, which he started in 1974, and Gaudete, which he worked on intensively in 1975. This synchronicity resulted in two collections that often read as if they were translations. I analyze Pilinszky poems such as “Unfinished Past” and “You Have Had to Suffer Wind and Cold” and extracts from Hughes's Cave Birds and Gaudete sequences in order to demonstrate the dialectic of influence between the two writers in the early 1970s, when, critics such as Neil Roberts argue, Hughes produced his best work.
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