Hungarian Poetry: Radnóti

The Angel Oak. If you’re ever in Charleston, SC, be sure to drive out and see this; it’s simply breathtaking.

To continue posting a few of the non-Russian poems I teach in some of my classes, below are some of the remarkable and haunting final poems of Miklós Radnóti (by the way, in Hungarian the last name comes first, meaning he’d be known as “Radnóti Miklós”), a Jewish-Hungarian poet conscripted into forced labor by the Nazis and shot in early November, at age 35, after being marched to the point of exhaustion. The first poem — “Root” — was found in his pocket when his body was exhumed from a mass grave.

With the simple metaphor of the root, Radnóti captures the kind of total commitment to poetry that must have made it possible to continue to produce it even in these horrific circumstances. The root is indifferent to the world, to the worms surrounding it; all it cares about is nourishing the tree above, its leaves and flowers; the root “marvels” at this world above (the Hungarian verb is “csodál,” from “csoda” — “wonder” or “marvel,” and one of many Slavic borrowings in Hungarian — compare the Russian чудо). All of this makes the impending decapitation at the poem’s close all the more terrifying, as it seems Radnóti — the poet, the root — is concerned not so much with himself, but with the loss of poetry; if the saw is wailing at the root’s head, then it obviously means that the tree is about to be cut down. And yet even this poem was somehow dug up and saved from oblivion.

Gyökér

A gyökérben erő surran,
esőt iszik, földdel él
és az álma hófehér.

Föld alól a föld fölé tör,
kúszik s ravasz a gyökér,
karja akár a kötél.

Gyökér karján féreg alszik,
gyökér lábán féreg ül,
a világ megférgesül.

De a gyökér tovább él lent,
nem érdekli a világ,
csak a lombbal teli ág.

Azt csodálja, táplálgatja,
küld néki jó ízeket,
édes, égi ízeket.

Gyökér vagyok magam is most,
férgek között élek én,
ott készül e költemény.

Virág voltam, gyökér lettem,
súlyos, sötét föld felettem,
sorsom elvégeztetett,
fűrész sír fejem felett.

Lager Heidenau, Žagubica fölött a hegyekben,
1944. augusztus 8

Root

Strength courses in the root;
It drinks the rain, it lives together with the soil,
And its dream is white as snow.

From beneath the soil to above the soil it bursts;
The root crawls, cunning,
Its arms like ropes.

On the root’s arms, worms sleep;
On the root’s legs, worms sit;
The world grows worm-ridden.

Yet the root lives on below;
The world does not concern it —
Only the branch does, full of leaves.

Marveling at the branch, it feeds it constantly;
To it it sends its savors,
Its sweet, celestial savors.

Now I too am a root;
I too now live among worms;
It is there that poetry is made.

I was once a flower; now I have become a root,
With the heavy dark soil above me;
My fate now ended,
A saw wails above my head.


Camp Heidenau, in the mountains above Žagubica,
August 8, 1944

trans. M. Pettus