The Complete Poetry

...What characterizes his style is a kind of elevated simplicity which, in another language, can easily sound mannered or inappropriately colloquial...

...It's above all this totally harmonious fusion of esthetic and moral values that makes his poetry timeless, hence meaningful in any language...

...That's how you too will end, I whispered to myself: just lie quietly Patience now flowers into death...

...After the war his body was removed from a mass grave, and his last poems, his most gripping, written days before he was killed, were discovered in his coat pocket...

...Generally speaking, one must get used to a translation...

...that there is, to return, a home," he writes in the poem "Forced March," and ends the verse with these lines: But all that could return-just look at tonight's full moon...

...As strange as it may sound, knowing the original can be a hindrance: one becomes too harsh a critic...

...Shot in the back of the neck...

...Radnoti, at the age of thirty-five, fell victim to these forces...

...what can be done-and Emery George is all for it-is to find the words the poet would have used if he wrote his verses in the language into which they are being translated...

...Hungarian-born himself, George belongs to the generation for which Radnoti has come to represent an ideal-the modern poet who clung with stoic serenity to the humane values of the Western tradition at the very moment the forces of inhumanity tried frantically to destroy them...

...But even in his darkest moments Radnoti was sustained by his faith in the human spirit, in love, in reason...

...Oh, if you could believe that I haven't merely borne what is worthwhile, in...

...in ashen ruins, With villages orphaned...

...calmly it waits for that fate, yet it sprouts new leaves in the meantime...

...they proved to be prophetic because so many of them foreshadow the poet's own violent death...

...A work in translation may hold its own and suffer only when compared too closely with the original...

...It's even harder to find the right equivalent for Radnoti's diction which is formal, stately, though not artificial as some critics have suggested...

...Still, I write, and I live in the midst of this mad-dog world, as lives that oak: it knows they'll be cutting it down...

...The contemporary Hungarian poet Istvan Vas, who was a good friend of Radnoti, has written in his memoirs that whereas he, Vas, had said as a young man: "I don't want to be a Jew," Radnoti claimed simply, "I am not a Jew...

...my heart...

...Miklos Radnoti's tragic fate lends a special poignancy to his work...

...In the first of His celebrated eclogues, for example, written in 1938, he has the Poet say: Cannon rumbling...

...in late 1944, during a forced march westward across Hungary, he along with other members of his forced labor company were shot to death by their Hungarian guards...

...In recent years several attempts have been made to introduce Radnoti's work in the English-speaking world and of these Emery George's is by far the most ambitious...

...Not only are the poems written in the thirties filled with disquieting premonitions about the future...

...What may have seemed at the time little more than the anxieties and obsessions of a hypersensitive artist strike the postwar reader as sober preparations, mental training, for that long forced march, that summary execution...

...In fact it is his last poems, in his famous eclogues, in lines addressed to his wife, Fanni, that despair, resignation, nostalgia yield most readily to defiant hope...

...that white cross on it signals: tomorrow the treemen will buzz-saw the region...

...Der springt noch auf, a voice said above me...

...Don't go past me, my friend-shout...

...According to Soviet emigre writer Simon Markish, such an attitude reveals a "mental state [that] borders on the pathological...

...In death's jaws Radnoti still watches, listens-and records...

...His final "Postcard" is dated October 31, 1944: I fell beside him...

...In his prefatory essay Emery George calls attention to numerous subtle correspondences, parallels, echoes, revealing just how thoroughly Radnoti assimilated the Western poetic tradition...

...To equal a poet's achievement is well-nigh impossible...

...and I'll rise again...

...Martyrdom ennobles, of course...

...In his greatest poems Radnoti combined the moral imperatives of the Judeo-Christian tradition with an evocation of the classical ideals of beauty...

...Radnoti is not an easy poet to translate...

...Emery George does not always succeed in avoiding these pitfalls, but an undertaking as formidable as this-translating complete works has to be the ultimate labor of love-is bound to have its weak points...

...Born a Jew, he became attracted to Catholicism...

...He was among the first in his country to translate Apollinaire, Cendrars, Trakl...

...Despite the unique problems posed by Radnoti's work, it's clear that he is one Hungarian poet who should be read in other languages, if only because he was a true European-mindful of his native heritage, but always open to new cultural stimuli...

...Ivan Sanders THOUGH relatively little known in the West, Miklos Radnoti (1909-1944) is already a legend in his native Hungary...

...He turned his back on his petty-bourgeois background and embraced the ideals of the intellectual left...

...On my ear, blood dried, mixed with filth...

...Perhaps it was this immunity that enabled him to create up to the very end, although in one of the Lager poems ("The Seventh Eclogue") he does cry out: "Is there a home, where people can savor hexameter language...

...Thoroughly modern in spirit, his poems are for the most part traditional in form, and for him, as for many other Hungarian poets, form is as important a carrier of the poem's message as content...

...his body turned over, already taut as a string rope about to snap...

...See Commentary, December, 1978, p. 38.] Vas, in response to Markish's observation, maintains that Radnoti was "the sanest of all of us": his strength lay in being totally immune to a hostile, harmful environment...

...He rejected the more aggressive "isms" of the twentieth century, but he didn't reject the century...

...But what makes his mature poetry even more extraordinary is that he intimated the horrors to come long before Europe was engulfed in war, and saw the artist's lot as an especially melancholy one...

...The Ver-gilian hexameters used in the eclogues, fixed metric patterns and rhyme in general, obviously present difficulties for the translator...