Radnãti, Miklós 1909-1944

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RADNÓTI, Miklós 1909-1944

PERSONAL: Born May 5, 1909, in Budapest, Hungary; executed November 8, 1944, near Abda, Hungary; married Fanni Gyarmati, August 11, 1935. Education: University of Szeged, 1930-34. Politics: Socialist. Religion: Jewish; converted to Roman Catholicism, 1943.

CAREER: Poet, translator, essayist, critic, and memoirist. Kortárs, coeditor; 1928, coeditor. Also worked variously as tutor, stenographic instructor, and translator.

AWARDS, HONORS: Baumgarten Prize in Poetry, 1937.

WRITINGS:

Versei, edited by Imre Trencsényi-Waldapfel, 1948.

Tanulmányok, cikkek, edited by Pál Réz, Magveto˝ Ko˝nyvkadió (Budapest, Hungary), 1956.

Sem emlék, sem varázslat. Összes versei (title means "Neither Memory, nor Magic: Complete Poems"), 1961.
Összes versei és műordításai (title means "Complete Poetry and Translations"), edited by Pál Réz, Magyar Helikon (Budapest, Hungary), 1966.

Művei (title means "Works"), edited by Pál Réz, 1979.

Forced March: Selected Poems, edited and selected by Clive Wilmer and George Gömöri, Carcanet New Press (Manchester, England), 1979.

The Complete Poetry, edited and translated by Emery George, Ardis (Ann Arbor, MI), 1980.

Válogatott versek 1930-1940 (title means "Selected Poems"), 1940.

Bori notesz (title means "Notebook of Bor"), Magyar Helikon (Budapest, Hungary), 1971.

Subway Stops: Fifty Poems, edited and translated by George, 1977.

The Witness: Selected Poems, translated by Thomas Orszag-Land, Tern Press (Market Drayton, England), 1977.

Foamy Sky: The Major Poems of Miklós Radnóti, edited and translated by Zsuzsanna Ozsvath and Frederick Turner, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 1992.

other

Kaffka Margit müvészi fejlödése (title means "The Artistic Development of Margit Kaffka"), Szegedi fiatalok muvészeti kollégiuma (Szeged, Hungary), 1934.

(Translator, with Istvan Vas) Apollinaire, Selected Poems, 1940.

Ikrek hava: napló a gyerekkorról, 1940, translated by Kenneth and Zita McRobbie and Jascha Kessler as Under Gemini, Ohio University Press (Athens, Ohio), 1985.

(Translator) Jan Huizinga, Huizinga valogatott tanulmanyai, 1943.

(Translator) Jean de La Fontaine, Selected Tales, 1943.

(Translator, with Geza Kepes, Ferenc Szemler, and Vas) Orpheus nyomában, Bethlen (Budapest, Hungary), 1943.

Karunga, a holtak ura: Néger népmesegyujtemeny (title means "Karunga, Lord of the Dead: Collection of Black Folk Tales"), 1944.

Napló, edited by Tibor Melczer, Magvetó (Budapest, Hungary), 1989.

Also editor and translator of Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes.

SIDELIGHTS: In 1944, during the German occupation of Hungary in World War II, poet Miklós Radnóti was sent to the labor camp Lager Heideman. A few months later, Radnóti and twenty-two other prisoners were forced to begin a march toward Germany. Along the way, near Abda, Hungarian guards executed the marchers and buried them in a mass grave.

When the bodies were exhumed two years later, a small notebook full of poems was found in Radnóti's raincoat pocket. A collection of poetry from his final months was posthumously published as Tajtekos eg and contains powerful poems written during his imprisonment, including "Eroltettet menet" ("Forced March"). Radnóti, killed at age thirty-five, is now considered one of the most important Hungarian poets of the twentieth century. Marianna D. Birnbaum wrote in Canadian-American Review of Hungarian Studies that "as the years pass, he is more and more recognized on a European scale as a significant poetic witness to our time, ranking with the late Paul Celan and with the Polish poet Zibignew Herbert."Radnóti had published nine collections of verse by the time of his death.

Though most critics agree that Radnóti's early work is too restrained, his first book, Pogány köszönto, drew national attention. According to George Gömöri and Clive Wilmer in their introduction to Forced March: Selected Poems, the main influences on his early poetry are "fairly predictable: the French avant-garde, German Expressionism and a Hungarian version of Constructivism associated with the Socialist poet and theoretician, Lajos Kassak." Gömöri and Wilmer characterized the poems in Pogány köszönto as "Whitmanesque celebrations of life, nature and erotic love." Around the time of Lábadozo szél, however, his interest in politics sparked more protest poems. After 1934 Radnóti's poetry was often preoccupied with death and predicted horrors to come. In 1936, as the Spanish Civil War began, Radnóti's collection Járkálj csak, halálraitelt! addressed rising fascism in Europe. This title foreshadowed his death.

Radnóti, citing striking parallels, likened his life to that of Spanish poet Federico García Lorca. According to George Gömöri in the Reference Guide to World Literature, Radnóti visited Paris often during the 1930s, and after one of these visits "the Spanish Civil War and Federico García Lorca's death appeared to him as a kind of memento and gained symbolic meaning in his personal mythology." In "Eclogak I" ("The First Eclogue"), Radnóti, like García Lorca, wrote of his premonitions. Similarly, years before his death, García Lorca also seemed to know he would die violently. After a matador friend was killed in the ring, he wrote "Llanto por Ignacio Sanchez Mejias" ("Lament for the Death of a Bullfighter") and remarked that his friend's death was a prelude to his own.

The historical events influencing the two poets are also parallel. Each lived during political upheaval and war—Radnóti during the German occupation of Hungary in World War II and García Lorca during the Spanish Civil War under the regime of Francisco Franco—and each spoke against fascism through poetry. During the Spanish Civil War many well-known intellectuals were persecuted and imprisoned. Because of his political ideals, homosexuality, and artistic prominence, García Lorca was arrested, executed, and buried in an unmarked grave in 1936. Though Radnóti had converted to Roman Catholicism in 1943, he was Jewish by birth, making him a target for Nazi persecution. Radnóti had previously been arrested, and his books confiscated on the grounds of religious defamation after the publication of Úmódi pásztorok éneke.

After the occupation, Radnóti and many others were rounded up with the cooperation of Hungarian guards and sent to labor camps in Yugoslavia. Radnóti was also persecuted because of his student activism in Szeged. Like García Lorca, Radnóti was killed by soldiers and buried in an unmarked mass grave. In the end, their premature deaths enhanced their reputations.

Radnóti was also a well-known editor and talented translator. He was the first to translate the works of several major writers into Hungarian, among them Guillaume Apollinaire, Blaise Cendrars and Georg Trakl. Radnóti's work has been translated into English more often than that of any other modern Hungarian poet, and English and American critics have praised it.

As Istvan Soter wrote in New Hungarian Quarterly, Radnóti's fame "is not on account of his martyrdom, which he shared with so many victims of the Second World War. . . . How simple it seems to deduce from [his poetry] the bitter and cynical argument that pure and authentic poetry could be fostered by Nazism and barbarity. Yet the SS guards of Lager Heideman can hardly be regarded as muses of poetry; for Radnóti, their presence, their function in his life, and his encounter with Nazism in general, were to decide only one thing—the necessity of creating poetry in the strongest possible repudiation of their world."