There can be little doubt that it is his last poems that elevate Miklós Radnóti to the high rank that he deserves in literature. His poetry in its final dénouement created a matchless unity of life and literature. His final poems, “Töredék” (Fragment) and the ones that survived in the Bor notebook,1 speak on the very borderline of human existence. Indeed, “Razglednica (4)” (razglednica is Serbian for postcard), was written just a few days before his death, and freezes the image of his own murder at the hands of his guards, and articulates the tragedy of his senseless death from a point that is virtually beyond that border. His last ten poems were written in a notebook discovered on the exhumed body of the murdered poet—and contained the text in five languages with the opening line of the English text smeared into illegibility: “[The finder is kindly requested to forward this notebook, which] contains the poems of the Hungarian poet Miklós Radnóti to Mr. Gyula Ortutay, Budapest university lecturer, Budapest, VII. Horánszky u. 1. I thank you in anticipation”2—has become a symbolic object, with poetry and life, poetry and death, conjoined in a unique manner.
The significance that Radnóti has for world literature is shown by the fact that even though a Hungarian link can be traced behind virtually all the published translations of his poems, his poetry has nevertheless transcended cultural barriers and entered the international literary consciousness. Carolyn Forché, in her anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness,3 refers to Radnóti as a major Hungarian poet of the Holocaust, along with admittedly better-known figures such as Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs, Primo Levi, and Tadeusz Borowski. What raises Radnóti’s oeuvre beyond the realm of being merely testimony to the Holocaust alone is that the viewpoint that he adopted in his conceptually authoritative compositions is not retrospective. He was productive throughout his three tours of labor service, and his poems and the diary that he kept with meticulous care are both extraordinary attempts at placing poetry and life side by side. His last poems, and in particular “Töredék,” written on May 19, 1944, the day before he left for his third, and final tour of forced labor, and the poems in the Bor notebook were not the products of an unexpected, inexplicable flaring up of creativity but were the culmination of a deliberately and tightly woven web of themes and motifs he had been developing since adolescence.
Miklós Radnóti was born on May 5, 1909, in Budapest. Originally his family name was Glatter, and his father, Jakab Glatter was employed at the textile wholesale company owned by his brother-in-law Dezső Grósz. His ancestors on both sides were Ashkenazi Jews from Galicia who probably settled in Hungary some time in the early 19th century and lived in Northern Hungary. His grandfather, Jónás Glatter, was an innkeeper in Radnót, part of the county of Gömör-Kishont (today Radnovce in Slovakia). His mother and twin brother died at his birth, a fact that haunted him and his poetry throughout his life. There is no reliable surviving source to document whether after birth Miklós was taken home by his father, nor is it known where and by whom he was taken care of and what happened to him during the first two years of his life. What is known is that in 1911, two years after his birth, his father remarried. Jakab’s second wife, Ilona Molnár, came from a Jewish family in Transylvania and in 1914 their daughter, Ágnes, was born.
The parents did not reveal the tragic death of Miklós’s mother to the children, and Miklós did not know that Ilona was not his biological mother until the age of twelve when in July 1921 his father unexpectedly died of apoplexy. Radnóti, as he described in his autobiographical short story (Gemini) of 1940, “Ikrek hava” lived in emotional security until that time. In the months following his father’s death Radnóti lived with various relatives, one of whom finally revealed to him that his mother died during his birth, that Ilona Molnár was his stepmother, and that Ágnes was his half-sister. The fact that his twin brother also died at birth was not revealed to him until three years later. As his foster mother could not provide for two children alone, the family considered it advisable that Ilona and Ágnes move to Nagyvárad (today in Romania) where they had relatives, and in 1941 Ilona remarried. Ágnes was also married for a short while and published a volume of poetry and a novel under the name of Ágnes Erdélyi. She remained in contact with Radnóti until the end of their lives. Both Ilona and Ágnes perished in Auschwitz in 1944, the same year of Radnóti’s murder in a remote forest near Abda, Hungary, during a death-march.
While there is no reliable information about the life of Radnóti during the two years following his father’s death, he probably lived with the brother of his stepmother from 1921 until 1923, at which time his maternal uncle, Dezső Grósz, was appointed his guardian and Radnóti moved into the apartment of his great-grandaunt. This remained his registered address until his marriage.
It took Radnóti several years to process the trauma of these years, and the idea that his birth involved the sacrifice of the lives of his mother and twin brother became a recurrent theme of his poetry from his earliest works until 1941. He elaborated on this most fully in his short story, “Gemini,” which reveals how deeply these personal tragedies and their protracted revelation had wounded him, and how they led to serious identity problems. At the very age that the components of his personality were about to be solidified, these experiences profoundly influenced his view of his relation to the world and to himself. The awareness of death permeated his thought since his adolescent years and it was during these years that he started to write poems. His earliest works were published in various student journals, and he joined a student association of literature which released a home-printed journal Haladás (Progress). The ideas that the members shared amalgamated left-wing sentiments and philosophies with the teachings of Jesus and Hindu mysticism, and all these influences had a specific impact on him.
His first volume of poetry, Pogány köszöntő (Pagan Salute), was published in 1930. The title of the volume indicated the entry of the young poet into literature, as well as his standing as an outsider who uses the language of pastoral poetry. The volume was introduced by a motto taken from the book Jesus (1927) by Henri Barbusse (1873–1935), which formulated the concept of “goodness.” Radnóti viewed Jesus as a social revolutionary and the term “pagan” was intended to convey less a position on religion than a sense of rebellion.
Radnóti’s goal was to pursue studies at Pázmány Péter University (now Eötvös Loránd University) in Budapest, but he was denied admission because he was Jewish. He was, however, able to enroll in the University of Szeged, a major town in the Southeast region of Hungary, and in 1930 was majoring in Hungarian and French. He immediately became a member of the leftist student organization, the Art College of the Youth of Szeged, which organized cultural visits and performances at neighboring villages, and was at the same time deeply influenced by his professor of modern Hungarian literature, Sándor Sík, who was a respected scholar, poet, priest, and member of the Piarist order. The dark side of his university years was the rising anti–Semitism that led to repeated “Jew-beatings” at the university organized by racist “Turulist” associations with impunity.
Radnóti’s second volume, Újmódi pásztorok éneke (Song of Modern Shepherds), was published in 1931. Only a few weeks after its publication the public prosecutor began an inquiry and had all the copies confiscated on the charge of offence against decency and religion. Radnóti was interrogated and a lawsuit was brought against him. In the summer of 1931 Radnóti made his first trip to Paris and spent two months there with the purpose of improving his knowledge of the language. He was deeply impressed by the cultural variety of a democratic society and when he attended a so-called “colonial exhibition,” it turned his attention toward African cultures, an interest that he maintained throughout his life. On his return to Hungary, the tribunal found that two of his poems, “Arckép” (Portrait) and “Pirul a naptól már az őszi bogyó” (The Autumn Berries Redden in the Sun) justified the charges. He was sentenced to eight days of prison but immediately appealed. It was partly through the intervention of his mentor and friend Sándor Sík that the sentence was suspended, which was fortunate because Radnóti might otherwise have been expelled from the university, limiting any hopes of an academic or teaching career. In his third book, Lábadozó szél (Convalescent Wind), published in 1933, he included some of the poems of the previous, confiscated collection.
In 1934 at the age of twenty-five, Radnóti wrote his PhD dissertation on Margit Kaffka (1880–1918), a Hungarian poet and novelist. This was in keeping with his on-going efforts to elevate the place of women in Hungarian literature. (One-third of the book reviews that he published between the late 1920s and early 1940s took for its subject books written by women, a percentage that far exceeded the critical output of any of his contemporaries.) After receiving his doctorate and marrying Fanni Gyarmati, Radnóti tried to make a living by writing, but his only stable income was the monthly support he received from his guardian. He was never able to obtain a job as an editor or teacher because of the anti–Semitic laws and restrictions in most professions.
His literary career and reputation, however, grew during these years and in 1935 he published his third volume of poetry, Újhold (New Moon), which signaled a turn in his oeuvre. With this book he became a mature poet, and the presentiment of violent death, which became perhaps the main motif of his poetry, appeared here for the first time. The theme was further elaborated upon in his next book, Járkálj csak, halálraítélt! (March On, Condemned!), published in 1936 and honored with the prestigious Baumgarten Award a year later. With the money he received Radnóti was able to make his second trip to Paris, with Fanni, and it was during this trip that he became acquainted with the poetry of Federico García Lorca (1898–1936), the Spanish poet who was murdered by fascists during the Spanish Civil War. The death of the young poet prefigured for Radnóti his own violent and premature death.
During this period, he was also engaged in translation, and in just a few years Radnóti became one of Hungary’s best literary translators. In 1937 and 1938 he delivered a series of lectures on Hungarian literature on radio, which came to an abrupt end due to the anti–Jewish legislation of 1938.
His fifth collection of poetry, Meredek út (Steep Road), came out in 1938 and was the last to be published in his lifetime. It was in this volume that he published his “First Eclogue” inaugurating a “hidden cycle” of eclogues he was to write in the next six years and that blended the bucolic tone of his early poetry with that of his great theme of death. In the summer of 1939 he traveled to France for the third and final time, a bittersweet journey taken at a time when war loomed. This was a period of both feverish literary activity and deep distress over his ever-dwindling opportunities to find employment.
After the start of World War II Radnóti was called up for forced labor service on three occasions since Jews could not serve in the Hungarian army in a combat capacity, prohibited as they were from carrying arms. The first tour was between September 9 and December 9, 1940, and involved disassembling wire fencing that separated the former Romanian border around Veresmart in northern Transylvania from Hungary. At this stage of his life he was exposed to anti–Semitic attacks in the press and part of his response was to compose a sequence of absurd surrealist poems, “Eaton Darr strófái” (The Songs of Eaton Darr), that he wrote behind the mask of a fictitious British poet to mock the cruel reality rising around him. “Eaton Darr” is “Radnóti” backwards, and the poems were published posthumously in 1970.
His private life also went through an emotional crisis when he fell in love with the painter Judit Beck, and he addressed his poems “Zápor” (Rain Shower) and his “Harmadik ecloga” (Third Eclogue) to her. His marriage to Fanni, however, did recover, as shown in his poem, “Októbervégi hexameterek” (Hexameters in Late October), written during his second tour of forced labor service (July 3, 1942–April 1943). While he did not have to wear any special marking during his first service, on this second tour he had to wear a yellow armband that marked him as a Jew. On this tour he was sent to Transylvania to set up phone poles and was then taken to a small town in October to work in a sugar factory. Starting in November he nailed ammunition cases and later worked in a machine factory on the outskirts of Budapest. He recorded these humiliating experiences in his diary making his final entry on March 14, 1943. The reason for the abrupt silence that followed was an incident on March 16. Radnóti had received an official leave for that afternoon, but an officer picked him up on the street as he was waiting for a trolley, and he was taken into a nearby garrison where his head was shaved, he was beaten, and was tortured with drills. After this incident his friends sent a petition to the Ministry of Defense asking for his discharge. Whether for this or some other reason, he was discharged in the final days of April after serving ten months of hard labor. Several days later he and Fanni converted to Catholicism. The months before his third and final call for forced labor service were spent feverishly working on translations and his own poetry. Among other works he began translating Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, which he never completed.
On May 20, 1944, he was called up for forced labor service for the last time and composed the short poem “Töredék” on the day before his departure. He was taken to the town of Bor, in Serbia, where through an inter-governmental agreement between Hungary and Nazi Germany, whose army now occupied Radnóti’s country, about six thousand Hungarian Jews were assigned to work in a copper mine and on railroad construction to support the German war machine. The labor camp was supervised by the Hungarian army, and on this tour Radnóti wore a white armband indicating his Christian religion. The camp of Bor was a series of sites established on the line between Bor and Žagubica, and the various lagers, or camps, were named after German towns, with Radnóti assigned to Lager Heidenau. On August 29, because of the advance of the Soviet army and the renewed activity of Yugoslav partisans, the lager was evacuated and its inmates were taken on a forced march to the central lager in Bor. From here, the thousands of prisoners were set on the road to Germany in two detachments. Radnóti was assigned to the detachment that was scheduled to leave first. Before embarking on September 17, he gave a copy of five of his poems written in the labor camp to a friend, who luckily survived and carried the manuscripts home to Fanni.
The second detachment left Bor on September 29 and was liberated by Yugoslav partisans on the following day. Radnóti’s group, however, was decimated, its members indiscriminately killed by the guards and various German units. Radnóti was last seen at Szentkirályszabadja airport where his group was lodged in a barracks. It was here that he wrote his final poem, “Razglednica (4),” on October 31. After this there is no surviving document relating to Radnóti except for the exhumation record of the mass grave found in Abda, a village in the northwest region of Hungary a year and a half after his killing and more than a year after the end of the war. Radnóti’s final days, like the first two years of his life and the two years that followed his father’s death, are forever shrouded in mystery What is known is that the forced laborers were compelled to walk from Szentkirályszabadja towards the Western borders of Hungary and that 22 persons, among them Radnóti, who were unable to walk were placed on a carriage. The men were wounded and ill and were to be taken to a hospital in nearby Győr, but the hospital refused to accept them. Eventually, the Hungarian soldiers guarding them drove the carriage to Abda where they executed all the prisoners. The mass grave was discovered in late June 1946 and the exhumed bodies were taken to Győr to be buried in the local Jewish cemetery on June 25. Autopsies were performed and corpse number 12, that of “Miklós Radnóczi,” was buried for a second time. According to the official cause of death he was killed with a shot to the skull and his body was identified through documents found in his clothes that included his name card, his civil identity card, his membership certificate to the Economic Association of Writers, an authorized copy of his certificate of baptism, and letters addressed in his name.
Also among his papers was a small black notebook that contained Radnóti’s final ten poems. Five of the poems had been given to his friend, who gave them to Fanni, who in turn published them in the posthumous collection Tajtékos ég (Frothy Sky) in 1946, before the discovery of the mass grave. The five newly discovered poems were then published for the first time in Radnóti’s collected poems in 1948.
Radnóti was buried for the third and final time in grave 41, parcel 41 of the Kerepesi Street Cemetery in Budapest on August 16, 1946.
In considering his entire oeuvre, it is striking how Radnóti’s prose, diary, essays and reviews, even as they are themselves self-contained and -consistent, seem to serve the inner unity of the poetic works. At the start of his career, he published two volumes (Pogány köszöntő [Pagan Salute] in 1930 and Újmódi pásztorok éneke [Song of Modern Shepherds] in 1931) of uneven but interesting poetry, and they were followed by a third, blustering volume, Lábadozó szél (Convalescent Wind), published in 1933, that should have proven to be the dead end to his creative output. All the same, a detailed analysis of these early volumes shows that even before his poetry was fully developed, Radnóti strove for a mature concept. His compositional flair was of a high order, even if it was still not uncommon for uncertainties to be manifest in the poetics, meter and tone struck by a poem. Thus a cycle of poems within a given volume, the positioning of poems within a cycle, or the arc of motifs within a poem forms a closed architectonic system. Indeed, it is noticeable that the volumes build on one another, with the opening or closing poems of one book, for instance, referring to similarly placed poems in volumes preceding or following, so that these early poems become the structure of a soundly uniform work.
Two conspicuous characteristics of his poetry, both early and late, are its economy and the unbroken arc of its inner development. In moving on from his early, more experimental period, Radnóti incorporated into his mature poetry aspects that he considered usable. The most revealing example is the bucolic tone that he hit upon in his first published volume, Pogány köszöntő [Pagan Salute], which was maintained through the poetry of mid–1930s, then suitably transformed into the love idylls in the garden on Istenhegy (Hungarian for “God’s Hill”) in Buda, and found its culmination during the final years in a series eclogues. This constancy of point of view is illustrated by a similar continuity in his nature poems, which often observe minute incidents, from the perspective of a person bending down to closely scrutinize objects, and thereby catching a glimpse of the universal in the microcosm of a trifle. This is summed up in the final line of the 1941 poem “Eső esik. Fölszárad …” [The rain falls, then dries…]: “Consider the tiny agitations of the world.”
Besides this unity of composition and viewpoint, the cohesion of the entire oeuvre is also reinforced by the way that Radnóti returns, to an image or a word of seemingly slight importance but through repetition accumulates meanings. An example is found in the drool or saliva of a calf, stag or ox, which makes an appearance three times in his poems. The first is in the first cycle of Pogány köszöntő, in the poem that provides the book with its title: “And how our gentle calf drools / as he ambles dumbly behind our cart.” The next is at the near-midpoint of his poetic output, in the poem “Mint a bika” (Like a Bull) that opens the 1935 volume Újhold (New Moon), in which the young bull plays “in the sweltering / noonday sun, his frothy saliva fluttering in the breeze.” Then, close to the end, in “Razglednica (3),” we find: “The oxen drool bloody saliva.” (It has to be noted that Radnóti used the very same word, “nyál,” or saliva, in all three cases.) These three metaphors correspond to the three phases of the poet’s life.
Radnóti shaped his poetry in a state of continual creative readiness, and even under the most severe physical and emotional duress, he managed to reach the peaks of his poetic craft. One reason Radnóti’s works are assured a permanent place in world literature is the fact that he was able to mobilize his creative energies up until the very end. Of course, it is blind good fortune that his last poems, including “Root” and the four “Razglednica” poems, are extant only because the sole source of these poems, a small notebook, was discovered in a mass grave when his body was exhumed.
From the mid–1930s on, the inevitability of his own violent end was the main subject of Radnóti’s poetry. This consciousness of death in adulthood, as we know from the poems, was conditioned by his early childhood experience of the trauma of death that left a deep psychological scar and wreaked profound changes in his personality. On the evidence of the handwritten exercise books of poetry that he produced in his adolescence, it was this extreme childhood trauma that prompted him to turn to writing. For three years following the death of his father, when he was 12 years old, the full dimensions of his family’s tragedy were gradually revealed to him. In his early verses he attempted to formulate how the loss of both parents had affected his personality, using poetry for psychological self-healing. As the process of assimilating the trauma of these deaths gradually came to an end with the 1936 volume Járkálj csak, halálraítélt! (March On, Condemned!), he had a growing awareness of his vulnerability and mortality, to the point that it took over as the leitmotif in the subsequent volume, Meredek út (Steep Road, 1938), and then in his later poems. In this way, Radnóti deliberately integrated the tragedies of his childhood into the structuring of his personality, and looked on poetry as the terrain on which he could come to terms with the irrevocable losses he had suffered. This layer of his poetry is confessional, with a therapeutic function, and in assimilating his trauma he not only resolved his psychological difficulty, but also created himself as a poet. Through his very particular relationship with death Radnóti emerged, in the mid–1930s, as the only one among his contemporaries who sensed the danger that would, in the end, destroy him, and this awareness led to an existential crisis that is manifest within his poetry.
In this sense Radnóti’s poetry was a remarkable experiment in linguistic self- construction. He was searching for answers to what is perhaps the greatest of all questions in poetry in the European tradition—namely, What is the connection between a poet’s personal life and the work created?
Radnóti’s poetry asks another, related question, as well: Is it possible for an identity to be chosen freely? His own fate and his poetry attest unequivocally to the individual’s prerogative to select his own identity, and it is the great irony that in the repressive and murderous political milieu in which he lived in Hungary, this was not possible. The Hungarian state after World War I denied him this right. Even when he wished to change his name from Glatter to Radnóti the authorities responded in 1934 by high-handedly changing his choice to “Radnóczi,” making it clear that the prevailing powers reserved for themselves the right to choose even this aspect of his identity.
Radnóti’s linguistic self-construction of identity is comparable to poetic strategies employed by the so-called confessional poets. Attributed by literary history to primarily American poets of the late 1950s and 1960s—among them John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton—who consciously used their poetry to work out and explore psychological and emotional traumas, often from childhood experiences.4 Confessional poetry looks back on a substantial tradition in both historical and aesthetic terms, with its immediate precursor lying in the Romantic ideal of the poet as a prophet and seer; but its roots stretch back much further, all the way, it can be argued, to Plato, who believed that poets, by their very nature, are unpredictable and dangerous, their actions subverting common sense. Being confessional, however, does not necessarily involve the poet’s being damned or self-destructive. Radnóti, certainly, did not subscribe to such notions. His poetry, as in the case of the “Töredék” (Fragment), from May of 1944, directly contradicts Plato in that he asserts, in the opening verse, that as a poet, he represents normalcy in an age of lunacy.
It is interesting to note that the confessional poets, an American group writing in the years after World War II, share many common features with certain creative efforts in Hungarian lyric poetry of the 1930s, foremost those of Attila József (1905–1937) and Radnóti. It is perhaps no accident that a poetic approach evolving in Budapest prior to World War II anticipated the methods adopted by the Americans, given that in the early years of the 20th century, the Austro–Hungarian monarchy, and specifically its twin capital cities of Vienna and Budapest, were the epicenters of Freudian psychiatry, before its blossoming in America. It was in the United States, however, that the everyday application of psychology completely permeated all aspects of intellectual life as it became a widely utilised therapeutic procedure.5
Hungarian and American confessional poetry is situated at the two ends of a timeline that spans the cultural crisis represented by the Second World War. The Hungarian variety emerged in the pre–Auschwitz era under an authoritarian political regime that was eventually to evolve into an open Nazi dictatorship, whereas its American counterpart unfolded in a period of liberal democracy in the post–Auschwitz era. Accordingly, it is broadly the case that the Hungarian poets were more deliberately political, and that the Americans poets were more psychologically oriented.
Radnóti’s poetry is strongly distinct from that of the American school insofar as he did not use psychotherapeutic methods to analyze himself, although he demonstrably read several of Freud’s works and even read psychology while he was at the university. Thus while he did not adopt Freudian or other psychological approaches to analyze his consciousness, his situation, or his life, and he did not put forward his poetry as an explicit program to construct himself, his poetic and prose works achieved precisely that end. His poetry is most akin to that of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, and it is of interest that both of these poets drew on images provided by the Holocaust to express events that were critical for their own lives and identities. More specifically, they had a clear sense that modern, industrialized genocide had deeply shaken the moral foundations on which human civilization is based. This was essentially the same issue that Radnóti himself confronted but in all its murderous immediacy. Genocide shadowed his life both before and during the war, and it was the direct cause of his death. In the 15 years that Radnóti was active as a poet, the idea that a person is a unique individual (the great accomplishment of Renaissance humanism) was torpedoed, and the very concept of the ego was shattered. The great question confronting the post-war confessional poets then was whether a destroyed ego emptied of meaning could be rebuilt by aesthetic means, something Radnóti nobly struggled with until the bitter end. Embodying the general crisis of civilization through his own fate, Radnóti became a poet whose intertwined life and art were a response to historical crisis experienced at the most personal level.
In reconstructing his self and ego in language, Radnóti had to reconcile and clarify his relationship to his Jewishness, his Catholicism, his political leftism, and his sense of being Hungarian. In the thinking of his own times, the pairings of Hungarian-Jewish, Jewish-Catholic, and Catholic-Communist, -Marxist or -socialist were generally regarded as mutually exclusive polar opposites in defining an individual’s identity. Yet Radnóti strove to resolve these contradictions within his own personality.
Not a trace is to be found of Radnóti ever having received a religious Jewish upbringing, and yet there are many references in his letters and diary entries to his Jewishness, and more generally to Judaism and Jewish culture. These point to his being acutely concerned with these issues, even if all the signs suggest that he did not feel any ties to the traditions of Hungarian Jewry. He thought of Jewish culture in much the same way as he did the culture of antiquity, and he felt its value in being part of the cultural heritage of mankind. It may seem somewhat surprising today, but he did not accept the notion of a dual identity but believed instead in unconditional assimilation. It is notable that the word Jew is used only twice in his poems. The first instance is in a jocular extemporization about Heinrich Heine, dated Christmas 1939 but unpublished during his lifetime, and was conceived as an outburst against literary anti–Semitism. The second instance occurs in “Hetedik ecloga” (Seventh Eclogue), where Jews are listed as merely one of several ethnic groups in the labor camp. In neither case is the word used to refer to himself directly.
In contrast, he was drawn to Catholicism starting in secondary school when he was also developing his left-wing convictions, and to the end of his life he did not regard these two orientations as contradictory. Radnóti was not a deeply read Marxist, and his knowledge was based purely on second-hand sources. The essence of his leftist views was a sense of social justice based on the principles of equality and solidarity between human beings. His Marxism (or at least what he conceived of as being Marxism) was emotional; he did not join any left-wing party and was indeed highly critical of the illegal Communist movement. At the same time he looked on Jesus as a social revolutionary, and Biblical and Christian religious motifs crop up frequently in his poetry, though it should be noted that references to Old Testament prophets proliferated particularly in the last phase of his life.
Radnóti was a lot more reserved in the manner in which he handled his sense of Hungarianness or national consciousness. The poetic summation of his sense of nationality is a famous poem written in January 1944, “Nem tudhatom …” (I cannot know …). In its 36 lines the words haza (homeland), hon (home country), táj (landscape), and föld (soil), or some compound or variant of these, occur 14 times. At first sight this emphasis seems to fit comfortably into a long series of major patriotic Hungarian poems in the Romantic tradition, but unlike its precursors the poem does not promote any outstanding events of national history, pointing instead to a personal bond to a geographically definable region as the dominant factor in forming a sense of nation. This also explains his paradoxical concern about both the destruction that war wreaks, ostensibly his prime reason for writing that poem, and the Allied aircraft whose bombs he feared might fall on his much-beloved countryside. This is not articulated in the text, of course, for in fact Radnóti wanted nothing more fervently than release from the Nazi rule of terror, and “Nem tudhatom …” takes a worm’s eye view of the matter and thereby, paradoxically, strips it of its concrete specifics and raises it to a level of universality.
The greatest accomplishments of Radnóti’s mature poetry spring from this intellectual field of force, and from the latter half of the 1930s, he achieves in a series of major poems a supremely high level of linguistic self-construction. This created identity, however, was in serious conflict with the outside world, as is signaled by an awareness of death that, throughout his mature poems, overshadows his love idylls. Before long a recurrent vision of his own death as a poet appears with almost obsessive regularity, and Radnóti speaks of his own death, or the deaths of other poets, in something like four dozen poems.
This necessarily means that with the growing consciousness of death, faith in the power of poetry and verbal expression is shattered. One of his very last poems, “Nyolcadik ecloga” (Eighth Eclogue), written in the forced labor camp at Bor, is essentially, from its first line to its last, an internal debate on the sense or senselessness of poetic expression and the power of the word. This tension can be clearly seen in the poems in the Bor Notebook composed literally during Radnóti’s own death march, and the fact that the notebook emerged from a mass grave is surely a peerless example of the triumph of a poet’s creative power over even self-liquidation.
The most exceptional example of the internal struggle of the late poetry can be found in “Razglednica (4),” Radnóti’s very last poem, written four days before he died. The poem relates the death of a companion, which is also clearly his own, with Radnóti literally at the side of a fellow prisoner at the moment of his execution as he slumps to the ground. The fate of the two men may be separated only by an instant in the poem, but Radnóti becomes a participant in his companion’s death, and when he reports on it he is reporting on his own death. This ambiguity is displayed in the fact that the text of the lines allows different interpretations, depending on whether the German phrase Der springt noch auf (He may still jump up), which appears in the penultimate of the seven lines, is taken to mean that the poet has been given a reprieve or, on the contrary, has been shot. The first interpretation is that in the course of the march those who became incapable of walking, and fell behind, were shot out of hand, but anyone who was capable of walking still had a chance of surviving. The freezing of the image in the last line (“as mud caked with blood dried upon my ear”) hints at the latter meaning. These musings are supported by the specifics of the poem’s origin, because the actual event that triggered the writing of “Razglednica (4)” was the death of Miklós Lorsi, a café musician from Budapest who served along with Radnóti in the forced-labor service and, according to eyewitness accounts, was shot after that quoted German cry was shouted out. By a process of reconstruction it becomes clear that poem’s narrative disrupted the chronological order, and while Radnóti used each and every motif of Lorsi’s death, the text that emerged was not a description of Lorsi’s death, authentic down to the very last detail, but of the poet’s vision of his own. In the final line the blood that denotes life becomes mingled with inanimate mud, just as the process of linguistic self-construction is completed in physical annihilation.
Győző Ferencz is an associate professor of English at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary. A poet, critic, and translator, he is the author of Radnóti Miklós élete és költészete (The Life and Poetry of Miklós Radnóti).