I lived, but then in living I was feeble in life and
always knew that they would bury me here in the end,
...
A few miles away they're incinerating
the haystacks and the houses,
while squatting here on the fringe of this pleasant meadow,
...
Out of Bulgaria, the great wild roar of the artillery thunders,
resounds on the mountain ridges, rebounds, then ebbs into silence
while here men, beasts, wagons and imagination all steadily increase;
...
Crazy, who, from collapsing, gets up for new advance,
and moves in stumbling torture the limbs to get his chance,
and still is heading forward as if with wings he'd fly,
in vain the trench is calling, he does not dare to die.
...
The moon sways on a foamy sky,
I am amazed that I live.
An overzealous death searches this age
and those it discovers are all so very pale.
...
1. Monday Evening
You see, now fear often fingers your heart,
and at times the world seems only distant news;
...
I went out, closed the street door, and the clock struck ten,
on shining wheels the baker rustled by and hummed,
...
I'm a poet and nobody needs me,
not even if I mutter wordlessly:
u-u-u- no matter, for instead of me,
prying devils will sing relentlessly.
...
Miklós Radnóti, birth name Miklós Glatter (5 May 1909 – 10 November 1944) was a Hungarian poet who died in The Holocaust. Radnóti was born in Budapest 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"). In his last years Hungarian society rejected Radnóti as a Jew, but 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 not prompted by the persecution of the Hungarian Jews from which converts to Christianity were initially exempted, for Radnóti consciously did so at a time when he could have no more advantage of his conversion. The reason was rather his long-standing fascination with Catholicism and his admiration to his former professor of literature, the Piarist priest Sándor Sík.)
And So Will I Wonder...?
I lived, but then in living I was feeble in life and
always knew that they would bury me here in the end,
that year piles upon year, clod on clod, stone on stone,
that the body swells and in the cool, maggot-
infested darkness, the naked bone will shiver.
That above, scuttling time is rummaging through my poems
and that I will sink deeper into the ground.
All this I knew. But tell me, the work--did that live on?
am trying to find poem All that still matters at all.