At the end of the second world war, there was a brief moment when younger Hungarian writers began to assert themselves before the communist takeover. At this time, a young woman called Ágnes Nemes Nagy, and her then husband, the critic Balázs Lengyel, launched a magazine called Újhold, meaning New Moon. The best of the old and new writers flocked to it, but the new regime considered it too individualistic, too bourgeois, and took appropriate steps not only to close it down, but to ban its contributors from publishing.

So it was that the young Nemes Nagy found herself excluded from the literary life of the country. She taught in schools and Lengyel was imprisoned. I began visiting Nemes Nagy in 1985, when an editor friend said she would like to meet me. I had published an article that was translated into Hungarian about growing up in England, and she was taken by it. Her flat was a dark two-roomed affair in a square in Budapest. She was 63. Her voice was husky and cracked with smoking, her face strong and set, her eyes penetrating. I can't remember much about the conversation except her voice and insistent curiosity.

We met every year after that, usually in the same room, for an afternoon of talk and coffee. I had already read some of her work in Hungarian and in English translation by the Irish poet Hugh Maxton. At first reading she seemed clear yet dense. Some of the English translations added to the sense of enigma. I don't think I had quite grasped her vision and manner, but I felt its power partly through rhythm and natural imagery and tried to convey it.

I started translating some of her poems, the clearer, shorter, more epigrammatic ones first, since they seemed more cloudy in Maxton's translation than I thought they needed to be. Their ambiguity lay in their apparent clarity. They were rhymed, often in quatrains, with a firm metrical hand and the occasional line left almost orphaned, hanging like a thread into some other darker territory. I was certain the poems' power lay precisely in their formal structure: in the iron coincidence of rhyme, in the tight-fitting metre. This steely manner was the door into the temperament, and beyond it lay a vision of cosmic justice and a huge, indifferent natural order that offered fierce but stoppered energies.

I hadn't come across anything like it before, except perhaps in Rilke, and, in a curious way, Emily Dickinson, who too was capable of compressing explosive forces into apparently miniature works. One complete section from Nemes Nagy's sequence Journal , "Before the Mirror", might illustrate this: "You take your face and slowly remove the paint, / But would remove the face that fate assigned you, / You wait for the armchair to rise and with a faint / Gesture of boredom to appear behind you."

The oeuvre seemed to be a compound of fury, frustration and geological stoicism: the poems were crystalline shapes left embedded in molten lava. Their approach to life was necessarily tangential, in a state where everyone read between the lines. Narratives were intertwined and the self assumed a distant semi-mythical function.

Nemes Nagy's longest sequence of poems concerns the Egyptian god-king, Akhenaton, with whom the poet had developed a kind of empathetic fascination, though in many ways he serves as cover for other material, such as memories of the shortlived 1956 revolution against the Stalinist regime. The major poem of the sequence, "The Night of Akhenaton", begins with a clear reference to a central date in the story of 1956: "By the time he reached the open square that night / the tents had been soaked through with lanternlight, candles were stuck in bottles. It was bright / as summer on this All Souls Day, / and on improvised shelves there lay / crepe-paper dolls of rose pink thick with dust.

"Piled up on one side were tattooed heaps / of oil green melon rinds, their bodies scarred / with heart shapes picked out with old knitting needles. / Above them, neon signs were curling like hair. A hot wind. Straw in the air. / The night was very dark.

"He walked, as if circumscribed / by his presence in some guise, walked without moving, as a train ran by on rails above him."

There is little that could be labelled autobiography in Nemes Nagy. In another of the early Journal poems, "Sincerity", she tells us: "Inspecting myself makes me bilious. / It's easier for the spontaneous. / I would if I could be the driver of the dray / Who washes great blonde horses all the day / And has nothing to say."

Born into a middle-class Calvinist family, she retains something of the severe mystical aspect of Calvinism. Among all the iron-handed formal poems, however, there is a burst of extraordinary, almost avant-gardist prose poems, among them, "A Terraced Landscape", a vision of history, that begins:

"When the century fell into step beside me I couldn't quite tell which one it was. There are, undoubtedly, many centuries and which particular one this was, displaying itself in human form, is anyone's guess."

The poem then takes us through various, apparently arbitrary, levels of the landscape. It is strange, echoing and utterly unlike anyone else. Translating her was a long work of devotion. I tried to keep what elements of form seemed to be necessary to squeeze the poems into tension. I have no doubt at all that she is a great poet, one who stands several miles above most of us and that she must and will be read after my own translations are forgotten.

She died of cancer in 1991, addressing God in another prose poem, asking Him: "Have you swum in a river? Eaten a crab-apple? Have you handled calipers, bricks, small slips of paper? Do you have fingernails? To scratch the living trees with, to carve nonsense on peeling plane trees with, while above you the afternoon stretches ahead, on and on into the distance? Do you have an up there? Is there anything above you?"

"What have I said?" she asks in the last line of the poem. "Nothing," she answers. But the voice giving the answer rumbles up from the deepest places.