Creator Bio
Miklós Radnóti
1909–1944
Miklós Radnóti is widely recognized as one of the greatest Hungarian poets of the twentieth century. He came from a highly acculturated Budapest family and received no Jewish education or introduction to Jewish ritual. He remained indifferent to Jewish affairs his entire life, assertively proclaiming his freedom from Jewish particularism. He and his wife converted to Catholicism in 1943 in an effort to save themselves from persecution. Although his poems have little Jewish content, they foretell and then record the savagery of the Nazi years. While serving in a forced labor battalion during the war, he was shot dead by his Hungarian guards.
Entries in the Posen Library by This Creator
Primary Source
And Cain Spoke unto Abel His Brother
(Genesis 4:8)
for D. G., my uncle
Abel, brother, yesterday the primal crime awoke me:
I had murdered your snow-white dreams and damned I was urging myself
endlessly on down the night-darkening…
Primary Source
Portrait
This is what he must have looked like,
Christ in the autumn, like me with my
twenty-two summers: still beardless,
blond, and the girls couldn’t help it,
dreamed of him night after night!
Translated…
Primary Source
Just Walk On, Condemned to Die
Just walk on, condemned to die!
in woods where winds and catscreams wail,
sentence in darkened lines
shall fall upon the pines;
hunchbacked with fear the road turns pale.
Just shrivel up, you…
Primary Source
And Thus, Perhaps, I Will Reflect . . . ?
I lived, but as for living I was shiftless in my life,
knew always I’d be buried here when all was done,
that year layers itself upon year, clod on clod, stone on stone,
that in the chill and wormy…
Primary Source
The Dreadful Angel
The dreadful angel in me is invisible
today, his screeching almost still.
You startle at its whisper. Is it
someone come to pay a visit
or a grasshopper tapping at the sill?
It’s he. Oh, he is…