RADNÓTI, Miklós

Nationality: Hungarian. Born: Budapest, 5 May 1909. Education: University of Szeged, 1930s. Family: Married Fanni Gyarmati in 1935. Career: Editor, translator, and author. Prisoner, forced labor and concentration camps in Yugoslavia, World War II. Co-editor, Kortars and 1928 magazines, late 1920s. Awards: Baumgarten prize for Járkálj, csak, halálraítélt!Died: Executed by firing squad, Abda, Yugoslavia, 8 November 1944.

Publication

Collection

Miklós Radnóti: The Complete Poetry. 1980.

Poetry

Pogány köszöntö [Pagan Salute]. 1930.

Újmódi pásztorok éneke [Song of the New Shepherds]. 1931.

Enek a négerröl aki a városba ment. 1934.

Ujhold. 1935.

Járkálj csak, halálraítélt! [Walk On, Condemned!]. 1936.

Meredek út [Steep Road]. 1938.

Ikrek hava: napló a gverekkorról. 1940; in Under Gemini, A Prose Memoir and Selected Poetry (selections in English), 1985.

Válogatott versek, 1930-1940. 1940.

Orpheus nyomában: Muforditások kétezer év költoibol [In the Footsteps of Orpheus]. 1943.

Karunga a holtak ura; néger musék. 1944.

Bori notesz [Camp Notebook]. 1944; as Last Poems of Miklós Radnóti, 1994.

Tatjékos ég. 1946; as Clouded Sky , 1972.

Radnóti Miklós versei. 1948.

Tanulmányok, cikkek. 1956.

Összes versei és müfordításai. 1959.

Ikrek hava; napló a gyerekkoról. 1959.

Eclogák. 1961.

Legszebb versei [Selected Poems]. 1972.

The Witness: Selected Poems (selections in English). 1977.

Forced March: Selected Poems (selections in English). 1979.

Költeményei. 1982.

Foamy Sky: The Major Poems of Miklós Radnóti (selections in English). 1992.

Miklós Radnóti 33 Poems (selections in English). 1992.

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Critical Studies:

Miklós Radnóti: A Biography of His Poetry by Marianna D. Birnbaum, 1983; The Poetry of Miklós Radnóti: A Comparative Study by Emery Edward George, 1986; "Edward Hirsch on Miklos Radnoti" by Edward Hirsch, in Wilson Quarterly, 20(4), 1996; The Life and Poetry of Miklós Radnóti: Essays by George Gömöri and Clive Wilmer, 1999; In the Footsteps of Orpheus: The Life and Times of Miklós Radnóti by Zsuzsanna Osváth, 2000.

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When the body of Miklós Radnóti was conclusively identi-fied after being exhumed in the summer of 1946, nearly two years after the poet had been murdered by retreating Hungarian fascist militia and buried in a shallow mass grave, a notebook with his last 10 poems and a plea to send them to his best friend after his death was the final vestige of a short and brilliant career overshadowed by tragedy from the onset.

Born to Jewish middle-class parents in Budapest in 1909, Radnóti was haunted by feelings of guilt and remorse for the death of his mother and his stillborn twin brother, expressed frequently in his early poems and in his Proustian prose memoir, Under Gemini (Ikrek hava: napló a gverekkorról, 1940). Raised after his father's death by his uncle, he studied Hungarian and French literature at the University of Szeged—his uncle had intended him for a career in the textile industry—encouraged by the publication of his first collection of poems, Pagan Salute (Pogány köszöntö ), in 1930. At the university he first came into conflict with the increasingly powerful fascist regime of Miklós Horthy, which charged him with subversion and offending public taste after the publication of his second volume of poetry, Song of the New Shepherds (Újmódi pásztorok éneke, 1931). Most of these early poems are on the whole affirmative and socially engaged or celebrate his love for Fanni Gyarmati, whom he married in 1935; after 1937 his poetry becomes dark and foreboding. Beginning with the poems in his volumes Walk On, Condemned! (Járkálj csak, halálraítélt!, 1936) and Steep Road (Meredek út, 1938), written in the shadow of the Spanish Civil War, Radnóti's poetry turns into a prophetic vision of the impending cataclysm and of his intensifying certainty that he was not destined to survive the Holocaust. This doomsday prophecy is particularly obvious in his poems dedicated to Federico García Lorca, whose death at the hands of the Franco fascists he foresees as his own. During these years he also devotes considerable energy to literary translation and the editing of other Hungarian authors, almost as if he were attempting to save some of these authors' works from the approaching purges. Never a devout Jew, Radnóti converted to Catholicism in 1943.

Radnóti's predictions were unfortunately all too accurate. From September to December 1940 he served in a forced labor camp in the Carpathian Mountains, mainly dismantling mines. After the publication of his collection In the Footsteps of Orpheus in 1943, he was pressed into service in a sugar factory, and in May 1944 he was taken to Lager Heidenau near the town of Bor, in German-occupied Yugoslavia, together with 6,000 other conscripts, mainly to build a railroad line in support of the local copper mines. Radnóti was largely spared the inhumane treatment meted out to the inmates of neighboring camps, but when the area was threatened by advancing Russian army units, the inmates were force-marched first to Bor and then sent in two groups of 3,000 men each on a grueling 14-day march to western Hungary. Radnóti, who had managed to be included in the first group to leave, survived the first massacre of 500 Jews near the town of Cervenka and that of another 500 in Sivac, among them the violinist Miklós Lorsi, an event described in Radnóti's last poem. On 8 November 1944, however, his premonitions of sharing Lorsi's fate came true: sick and unable to walk, Radnóti and 21 equally weakened comrades were loaded onto ox carts, presumably to be taken to a nearby hospital at Györ. According to local witnesses, the men were driven to a dam on the Rabca River, near the village of Abda, ordered off their carts, told to dig a ditch, and then shot and pushed into the shallow grave; the last survivor, who had been ordered to cover the bodies, was killed with shovels. Ironically, nearly all the 3,000 men in the second group to leave Bor survived.

While Radnóti had established his reputation as a poet before his time in the labor camps, the circumstances of his death and the sensational discovery of his last poems vaulted him into international prominence; he is certainly one of the most translated twentieth-century Hungarian poets. Radnóti is particularly admired for his stoicism in the face of his certainty about his and Europe's impending doom and his conviction, similar to T.S. Eliot's, that brutality and mechanized indifference must be met with humanistic faith and with reference to those fragments from classical literature and art that "we must shore against our ruins." A posthumous selection of his poetry after 1937, Tatjékos ég, appeared in 1946 and was translated into English in 1972 as Clouded Sky. Miklós Radnóti: The Complete Poetry, translated by Emery George, was published in 1980.

—Franz Blaha

See the essay on Clouded Sky.