Miklos_Radnoti_(1909-1944)

"The poet's duty is this
To improve on the blank page
I doubt if it's possible."
Nicanor Parra

The below is from 'Against Forgetting', a superb anthology edited by Carolyn
Forche

Miklos Radnoti (1909-1944)

Radnoti, orphaned by age eleven, enrolled at the University of Szeged in
1930, the year his first book of poetry appeared. For his second book,
Radnoti was tried for "Effrontery to public modesty and incetement to
rebellion," and found guilty, whereupon his books were confiscated. He was
called to forced military labor intermittently from 1940 until his death. In
1944 he was sent to Yugoslavia to construct a railway, but was force-marched
with three thousand other men back to Hungary because of the advancing Red
Army. In early November 1944, Radnoti and twenty other survivors of this
march were put in the hands of Hunagarian noncommissioned officers, who,
unable to place their charges at a local hospital, shot them. Radnoti's body
was exhumed from a mass grave in 1946. His widow, going through his pockets,
discovered a notebook full of poems, which included "Forced March," "Letter
to My Wife," "Picture Postcards," and "Seventh Eclogue".

Letter to My Wife

Down in the deep, dumb worlds are waiting, silent;
I shout; the silence in my ears is strident,
but no one can reply to it from far
Serbia, fallen into a swoon of war,
and you are far. My dream, your voice, entwine,
by day I dind it in my heart again;
knowing this I keep still while, standing proudly,
rustling, cool to the touch, many great ferns surround me.

When may I see you? I hardly know any longer,
you who were solid, were weighty as the psalter,
beautiful as a shadow and beautiful as light,
to whom I would find my way, whether deafmute or blind;
now hiding in the landscape, from within,
on my eyes, you flash–the mind projects its film.
You were reality, returned to dream
and, fallen back into the well of my teen years,

jealously question you; whether you love me,
whether, on my youth's summit, you will yet be
my wife–I am now hoping once again,
and, back on life's alert road, where I have fallen,
I know you are all this. My wife, my friend and peer–
only, far! Beyond three wild frontiers.
It is turning fall. Will fall forget me here?
The memory of our kisses is all the clearer;

I believed in miracles, forgot their days;
above me I see a bomber squardon cruise.
I was just admiring, up there, your eyes' blue sheen,
when it clouded over, and up in that machine
the bombs were aching to dive. Despite them, I am alive,
a prisoner; and all that I had hoped for, I have
sized up, in breadth. I will find my way to you;
for you I have walked the spirit's full length as it grew,

and highways of the land. If need be, I will render
myself, a conjurer, past cardinal embers,
amid nose-diving flames, but I will come back,
if I must be, I shall be resilient as the bark
on trees. I am soothed by the peace of savage men
in constant danger; worth the whole wild regimen
of arms and power; and, as from a cooling wave of the sea,
sobriety's 2x2 comes raining down on me.


(Lager Heidenau, above Zagubica in the mountains, August-September 1944)

translated by Emery George