I Made a Feeble Show

 

Miklós Radnóti (1909-1944), now recognised as one of the the greatest among the Holocaust poets, was virtually unknown when he was murdered as a Jew by the Hungarian Army at the close of WW2. His best poems were found on his body when it was recovered from a mass grave.

1.

WALK ABOUT, CONDEMNED MAN

Just walk about, condemned man, walk!
A cat screams from the gale-torn shrubs,
a tumbling avenue of trees
confronts you and the roadway arches
its back in fear: its dust turns pale.

Just shrivel up, you autumn leaves!
and shrivel up, you dreadful world!
The cold falls hissing from the sky,
the passing wild geese drop their shadows
across the stiffened, rusty grass.

Oh poet, now you must be pure
like those who dwell on vast and windswept
snow-capped peaks, and innocent,
as innocent as babies pictured
in pious paintings of the past,

… and endure, like bleeding, wounded
wolves that trek through hostile grounds.
 

2.

OLD PRISONS

The stillness of old prisons, true, sublime
   old fashioned suffering and noble death,
poetic death… heroic, lofty view,
   composed and measured talk and due attention –
How far you are! Oblivion receives
   one who still dares to move. The fog descends.
Reality has lost its form and content,
   and, like a shattered pot, it strews about
its shards: untrue, incoherent perceptions.

What will become of you who would discuss,
while still allowed to live, reality
in formal terms, and teach the art of judgment?

I would still teach, though all has burst asunder.
I sit. I stare. No more is left to do.
 
3.

SHALL I THUS WONDER…?

          I lived… although I made a feeble show of life,
and I assumed that I’d be buried here in time
as clods of earth and rocks and years piled high above,
that while the maggot-eaten flesh disintegrates
the blind and naked bones must shiver in the dark…
I understood all that – yet hoped that, in the light,
a scuttling distant future would leaf through my lines
despite my dust still sinking deeper in the ground.
I knew. But tell me! Has the work, the work survived?


Miklós Radnóti

Translated from the Hungarian and Edited
by Thomas Ország-Land

If you have any comments on these poems, Thomas Ország-Land would be pleased to hear from you.