All That Still Matters at All by Miklos Radnoti

by Miklós Radnóti

Miklós Radnóti (1909-1944), whose work beautifully combines colloquial modernism with Virgilian classicism, is best known internationally as one of the great poets of the his final, harrowing poems were recovered from a notebook found on his body upon exhumation from a mass grave in 1946. But while he is certainly one of the key literary chroniclers of the Holocaust, he is also much more than that. All That Still Matters at All spans his entire output, from his carefree early love lyrics to the increasingly urgent poems written as the clouds of fascism and war descended upon Europe to the poems composed during forced labor and the death march that finally took his life. All of his work, however, was inspired by his wife, muse and literary executor, Fanni Gyarmati Radnóti, who enthusiastically endorsed these new translations by Ridland and Czipott prior to her death in 2014 at the age of 101.

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published September 17, 2014

About the author

Miklós Radnóti, birth name Miklós Glatter, was a Hungarian poet who fell victim to the Holocaust.

Radnóti was born into an assimilated Jewish family. His life was considerably shaped by the fact that both his mother and his twin brother died at his birth. He refers to this trauma in the title of his compilation Ikrek hava ("Month of Gemini"/"Month of the Twins").

Though in his last years, Hungarian society rejected him as a Jew, in his poems he identifies himself very strongly as a Hungarian. His poetry mingles avant-garde and expressionist themes with a new classical style, a good example being his eclogues. His romantic love poetry is notable as well. Some of his early poetry was published in the short-lived periodical Haladás (Progress). His 1935 marriage to Fanni Gyarmati (born 1912) was exceptionally happy.

Radnóti converted to Catholicism in 1943. This was partly prompted by the persecution of the Hungarian Jews (from which converts to Christianity were initially exempted), but partly also with his long-standing fascination with Catholicism.

In the early forties, he was conscripted by the Hungarian Army, but being a Jew, he was assigned to an unarmed support battalion (munkaszolgálat) in the Ukrainian front. In May 1944, the defeated Hungarians retreated and Radnóti's labor battalion was assigned to the Bor, Serbia copper mines. In August 1944, as consequence of Tito's advance, Radnóti's group of 3,200 Hungarian Jews was force-marched to Central Hungary, which very few reached alive. Radnóti was fated not to be among them. Throughout these last months of his life, he continued to write poems in a little notebook he kept with him. According to witnesses, in early November 1944, Radnóti was severely beaten by a drunken militiaman, who had been tormenting him for "scribbling". Too weak to continue, he was shot into a mass grave near the village of Abda in Northwestern Hungary. Today, a statue next to the road commemorates his death on this spot.

Eighteen months later, his body was unearthed and in the front pocket of his overcoat the small notebook of his final poems was discovered (his body was later reinterred in Budapest's Kerepesi Cemetery). These final poems are lyrical and poignant and represent some of the few works of literature composed during the Holocaust that survived. Possibly his best known poem is the fourth stanza of the Razglednicák, where he describes the shooting of another man and then envisions his own death.

Reviews

[Steve]

Miklós Radnóti (1909-1944)

I toppled next to him, the body flipped,
stiff already, as a gut string snaps.
Shot in the nape. “You’ll end like this as well,”
I whispered to myself, “Lie still, relax.
Now, Death’s the rose they say that patience makes.”
“Der springt noch auf,” rang out above me.
On my ear the muddied blood was caking.

- Picture Postcards 4, translated by John M. Ridland and Peter V. Czipott

Miklós Radnóti (born Glatter) was born in Budapest to a family of assimilated Jewish textile manufacturers and vendors but was able to resist his family’s pressures to enter the family business and instead studied philosophy and languages at the University of Szeged, where he submitted his doctoral thesis in 1934. In 1935 he married Fanni Gyarmati (1912–2014!); by all reports (including Radnóti’s moving love poetry), the marriage was very happy, if heedlessly curtailed by Hungarian fascists some time in November, 1944, as Radnóti and more than 3,000 other Hungarian Jews who constituted a slave labor brigade for the Hungarian army were driven back to Hungary from the mountains of Serbia as the Axis forces retreated before the vengeful partisans of Marshall Tito. From the above quote (just one of many such to be found in his poetry), Radnóti knew that if he evidenced too much weakness, his Hungarian guards would shoot him where he lay. Shortly before the Hungarian border the injuries he suffered from a vicious beating by a guard who objected to scribbling in his notebook were too much for him, and he was finally gunned down in the snow.

His corpse was thrown into an unmarked mass grave but was disinterred after the war; the notebook, containing the texts he wrote during the last of three conscriptions into a labor battalion between 1940 and 1944, was found in the remains of his pocket – much of it still legible – and posterity was graced with a great poet’s witness of, for ordinary human beings, unspeakably cruel circumstances.

The final poems – the Picture Postcards – are achingly laconic and brief, as if he knew that he had to prevent the reader turning away from the horror, or perhaps because his own mind shied away from what he experienced.

Nine kilometers from here
haystacks, houses burn,
from the meadow margin watch
shaken peasants, silent, smoking.
Onto rippling lake waters
steps a tiny shepherd girl
and the ruffled flock
bends, drinks clouds.

- Picture Postcards 2, translated by Jack Roberts

Earlier in his unwilling service to the Fascist masters he wrote less laconic poems about his time in the labor camps, but they are too lengthy to quote here.

It would be a great mistake, though, to imagine that the poetic interest in Radnóti’s work is limited to that time of extreme trial or that he was a one-note author. Consider this poem written in the Spring of 1930, where he writes of irrepressible joy with almost haiku-like concentration and care:

As happy, with a woman on my chest,
as when the sun shines after April rain,
I shout! and straight away, clean-rinsed in light,
my voice rings, like that bird’s up to his middle,
now, in the crystal puddle.

- After April Rain, translated by John M. Ridland and Peter V. Czipott

And the many love poems he wrote to his wife before the bad times (and during) give the lie to my long-set belief that there was no way to write a love poem that hadn’t already been written countless times. Here is one from February, 1942:

For so long I’ve been hiding you
as among bough’s leaves slowly
ripening fruit’s concealed,
as the unperturbed ice-flower
on a winter window pane
you blossom in my mind.
And I know what it means when
your hand flutters to your hair,
and in my heart I also keep
your ankle’s little tilt,
your ribs’ fine curve
so coolly I admire,
as one already at home
with living wonders.
And often in my dreams
I have a hundred arms
and like a dreamed-of god
in my hundred arms I enfold you.

- I’ve Been Hiding You, translated by Jack Roberts

Though Radnóti’s work encompasses many other topics (many more than I can exemplify here), it is not surprising that a sensitive poet with his eyes on the world and not just on himself would sense the coming dangers(*) and return again and again to the foul dread emerging from the Fascist caverns in men’s souls. Even with the limited selection of his work available to me in translation, I saw him writing about the coming war at least by 1936.

It appears that his most extensive and ambitious work are the (incomplete) Eclogues (1938-1944), fashioned after the style of Virgil’s famous series and anything but bucolic. Since Hungarian is even more “Greek” to me than Greek itself (if you are familiar with the old saying), I have no idea if it is written in dactylic hexameter. I can see that dialogues and narrative poems alternate (mostly), and if I were more familiar with Virgil’s Eclogues(**) I expect I would see a richly entwining set of allusions. But instead I see that the war infuses Radnóti’s Eclogues from the outset, a dialogue between a “shepherd” and a poet, which is about that warm-up to the Second World War, the Civil War in Spain and the death of Federico Garcia Lorca.

For those who might wonder why he would continue writing under such inhuman circumstances, I close with the following excerpt from the Second Eclogue, a dialogue between a fighter pilot and a poet.(***)

I wrote; what else can I do? The poet writes, the cat
meows, the hound-dog howls, and the little female sprat
deposits its roe flirtatiously. I write down everything
perhaps for you, so you’ll know, up there, how I cling
to life, when the blood-veined moon’s light lurches between
the rows of houses exploding and leaning in,
and the Squares all buckling, absolutely terrified;
the breath stops, and even the sky feels nauseous inside,
and the aircraft keep coming, fly out of sight, come again, like
the drone of insanity, and again all goes down that they strike!

- translated by John M. Ridland and Peter V. Czipott


(*) Just consider Joseph Roth’s first novel, Das Spinnennetz, written in 1923 before Hitler’s failed Munich Putsch, where he clearly anticipated the threat to Germany of the rising black and brown tide. I tell you frankly, we are one election away from the three greatest Powers on the planet being ruled by autocrats. If Trump or one of his ilk wins in 2024, I do not expect to experience another free election in my lifetime. This state of affairs can already begin if the Republican Party takes back the Congress next month. Can you imagine Ukraine’s fate if Trump were President now? And what do you think awaits Europe when it is caught between a triumphant Trump released from his Constitutional restraints and a vengeful Putin freed from Biden’s lash? Do you think you will be able to stop all the black and brown cockroaches darting out of the walls by yourselves?

(**) I’m afraid that when I read them quite a while ago I didn’t particularly enjoy them and so haven’t picked them up again in order to deepen my appreciation. At this point I see that I would also have deepened my appreciation of Radnóti’s version, which I have enjoyed reading.

(***) By the way, two books provided me with this look into Radnóti’s life and work: Eclogues and Other Poems (2015), translated by Jack Roberts, and All That Still Matters At All (2013), translated by John M. Ridland and Peter V. Czipott. Both volumes are bilingual; the latter collection offers a more generous selection. Though I cannot speak to the accuracy of the translations, the versions of the poems common to both books do not disagree on their meanings. I enjoyed both volumes greatly, if one can use the word “enjoy” when speaking of such stark subject matter.

[Mandy · Rating 5 out of 5]

The poems in this collection range from Radnoti’s early love poems to meditations on his impending death in a forced labor camp. Running through all is the theme of survival, and of living and loving, even while despairing. This begins with his birth, which his mother and twin brother did not survive:

“…but there, amid the blood and crying out
they lifted me toward the light –
the winner! A little beast of human kind
that had already shown its worth,
leaving two dead behind.”

It continues with the experience of living—and writing poetry—in captivity in a labor camp:

“...Without accent marks, just line under line by feel:
That’s how I write the poem in the semi-darkness: like I live,
Purblind, worming my way across the page like a caterpillar”

And ends with the inexplicability of writing, living, and loving, even when his own death is imminent:

“...All the same, I write, and live, amidst this world gone mad, like
that oak tree there: it lives, knowing they’ll fell it, and though
it’s already marked with the white cross that tells the woodcutter,
who’s coming tomorrow, to drop it—it waits, but till ten sprouts new leaves.”

All in all, a deeply felt and beautiful collection. Thanks to John M. Ridland and Peter Czipott for bringing this important work to those of us who don’t speak Hungarian.