| Miklós Radnóti |
Razglednicas
*
I
fell next to him. His body rolled over.
It was tight as a string before it snaps.
Shot in the back of the
head - 'This is how
you'll end. 'Just
lie quietly,' I said to myself.
Patience flowers into death now.
'Der springt noch auf!' I
heard above me.
Dark filthy blood was drying on my ear.
***
Without commas, one line
touching the other
I write poems the way I live, in darkness,
blind, crossing the paper like a worm.
Flashlights, books - the guards took everything.
There's no mail, only fog drifts over the barracks.
From
'Eclogue VII,' tr. by Steven Polgár
*
Razglednicas: serbo-croatic for picture-postcard.
Published in “Als ze me martelen”, (When they torture me), POINT Editions, 1987
©
Fanni Radnóti
Miklós
Radnóti
, Hungarian poet and translastor, considered one of the most important
20th-century poets of his country, was born on May 5, 19O9,
in Budapest of Jewish descent but he did not really consider himself a
Jew. He studied Hungarian literature and French and earned a doctorate
in the Liberal Arts. With Járkálj
csa, halálraítélt! (1936, Walk On, Condemned), which dealt
with the theme of violent death, Radnóti
won the Baumgarted Prize. By 1933, with Hitler gaining power and the
start of World War II drawing near, a kind of fore-boding started to
creep into his poetry.
He
as was killed at the age of thirty-five during World War II on a forced
march toward
