Miklós Radnóti
Postcard IV
I fell beside him; his body turned over,
already taut as a string about to snap.
Shot in the back of the neck. That’s how you too will end,
I whispered to myself; just lie quietly.
Patience now flowers into death.
Der springt noch auf, a voice said above me.
On my ear, blood dried, mixed with filth.
Szentkiràlysazbadja, d1 October 1944
Miklós Radnóti was a Hungarian poet. (Born to Jewish parents, Radnóti converted to Catholicism.) He wrote poems celebrating love, affirmation, social criticism in the 1930’s. His poetry became more oppositional, although it retained his personal, lyric voice. The fascist government of Miklós Horthy saw him as an enemy, and imprisoned him in a forced labor camp. The war, as we now recognize, eventually went badly for the Axis forces, and in 1944 the inmates of the Yugoslav labor camp where Radnóti was incarcerated were forced into a long march ahead of advancing Russian troops.
This much we know. In early November 1944, weakened by illness, Radnóti and some of his fellow inmates were forced to dig a ditch. They were shot and, dead, pushed into that ditch.
After the war his body was exhumed. His widow, Fanni Gyarmati, went through the clothes on his dead body and found a notebook in his overcoat in which had written poems while incarcerated in the labor camp and on that forced march. Among them were four brief poems entitled “Postcards” (“Razglednicas”).
The last of these four ‘postcards’ is at the start of this letter. It was written about the death of his friend, the violinist Miklós Lorti, who was on that forced march with him. It is contemporaneous history, written about an event that Radnóti witnessed.. Even more, it is an augury of Radnóti’s own death a week later.
The blood-stained notebook records, for us, what death is like for one who is about to die at the hands of violent perpetrators who likely do not realize how horrendous is the crime they are in the midst of committing. It is deeply moving, both in its own right, and as testimony, witness, to the horrors of war and destruction.
The third ‘postcard’ testifies to what one sees in the midst of a forced march. It is close to unreadable, a horrible vision of human beings pushed until they are almost indistinguishable from beasts, tortured by almost inhumane exertions, facing a death which is certain.
III
Bloody saliva hangs on the mouths of the oxen.
Blood shows in every man’s urine.
The company stands in wild knots, stinking.
Death blows overhead, revolting.
Mohacs, 24 October 1944
There is not much to say of these four lines. Beasts drool bloody saliva. Men, reduced to beasts, also bleed, internally, as the blood in their urine indicates. There is no order – “wild knots” – and over all there is the stench of inhumane conditions. Above all, like clouds in the sky, is death. “Revolting,” in the words of our translation; another translation has it “hideous.”
To say ‘death is in the air’ is to reduce an extraordinary line to a trite expression. And that is to falsify. For death is more (pardon me, Bob Dylan) than “blowing in the wind.” Death is overhead, an profound clue to the scene’s weather. As Walt Whitman put it, in quite another context, “Death, death, death, death, death.”
Before this ‘postcard’ Radnóti wrote about the conditions one endures on a march from a forced labor camp to—where? Nowhere? Death? He begins “Forced March,”
The man who, having collapsed, rise, takes steps, is insane;
he’ll move an ankle, a knee an arrant mass of pain,
and take to the road again
But as the poem proceeds, a vision of earthly paradise keeps him going: home, summer, coolness, ease, quiet except for buzzing bees, fruitfulness condensed, sleep, peace, and of course the love of his life, his wife Fanni. As Alexander Pope once famously wrote, “Hope springs eternal in the human breast.” On that difficult march, hope keeps him going, even though he is “an arrant mass of pain.”
Oh, if I could believe that I haven’t merely borne
what is worthwhile, in my heart; that there is, to return, a home;
tell me it’s all still there: the cool verandah, bees
of peaceful silence buzzing, while the plum jam cooled;
where over sleepy gardens summer-end peace sunbathed,
and among bow and foliage fruits were swaying naked;
and blond, my Fanni waited before the redwood fence,
with morning slowly tracing its shadowed reticence . . . .
It seems like there can be little more to say: men are like beasts, but they still hope and still continue. This is the story we tell ourselves, nowhere better than in Albert Camus, who wrote of Sisyphus ever pushing his rock uphill, ever seeing it roll back down, ever going onward with his absurd task. Persevering is what we do.
A short digression. Skip it if you wish. [Perhaps Pope understood better. It is fashionable these days to look down on the couplet-writing, God-believing, eighteenth century poet. But here is the stanza, from “The Essay on Man,” that precedes that ‘hope spring eternal.” That hope, Pope tells us, is God’s way of protecting us from the emptiness that the world can be.
For Pope, atoms and systems can be hurled into ruin; heroes may fall as easily as sparrows. No one, not even Emily Dickinson at her most dark and dire, ever conceived of anything more monstrous than that concluding line linking childish play and the end of all we know:“And now a bubble busts, and now a world.”
III.
Heav'n from all creatures hides the book of fate,
All but the page prescrib'd, their present state:
From brutes what men, from men what spirits know:
Or who could suffer being here below?
The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed today,
Had he thy reason, would he skip and play?
Pleas'd to the last, he crops the flow'ry food,
And licks the hand just rais'd to shed his blood.
Oh blindness to the future! kindly giv'n,
That each may fill the circle mark'd by Heav'n:
Who sees with equal eye, as God of all,
A hero perish, or a sparrow fall,
Atoms or systems into ruin hurl'd,
And now a bubble burst, and now a world. ]
The last of the four ‘postcards’ tells us something beyond the ‘hope’ we encountered in “Forced March.” It recounts a single death. Ostensibly it describes the death of his friend Lorty; as Radnóti must have known, he was foretelling and foreseeing another death, his own. What the poet envisioned here came to pass. And it was not a metaphorical death, but an actual one.
Seven lines. Five are end-stopped, but two move into the succeeding line, which creates a ‘presentness’ that is overwhelming. We are there.
I fell beside him; his body turned over,
already taut as a string about to snap.
Shot in the back of the neck. That’s how you too will end,
I whispered to myself; just lie quietly.
Patience now flowers into death.
Der springt noch auf, a voice said above me.
On my ear, blood dried, mixed with filth.
The poem is strange in form: both a description of what the poet sees, and a sort of dream meditation in which the poet inserts himself into what he sees. In the first sentence of the poem the poet falls, living, into a grave for those who have been shot, as his friend Lorti has been shot: “Shot in the back of the neck.” Not yet dead himself, Radnóti in his imagining lies among those who have just been murdered. It appears that the line “already taut as a string about to snap” tells of the already dead (Lorti) and the poet’s own impending death, the ‘snapping’ out of life and into nonexistence. (The line also commemorates the cellist who plays upon strings, who has just died.
“That’s how you too will end.” The poet knows, foresees, his own death, shot by his ‘guards’ on this forced march. There is no outcry here, only the poet whispering to himself. There can be no avoidance. (Heroic resistance is not an option for a prisoner on a forced march, overseen by guards with guns.) “Just lie quietly.”
His endurance will lead nowhere but death, which is metaphorically described as a ‘’flowering.’ One thinks of the bloom of blood where the bullet has entered a body. The irony is overpowering: No esthetic blooming, no beauty, no seed-forming here. Only death. “Patience now flowers into death.”
He hears a voice. In German, for the guards are German. In some ways the intrusion of German is incomprehensible to the reader of the text (be it in Hungarian or in English translation), as is the nonchalance of the murdering soldiers. For us as readers, an alien language, the language of those who deal out death. “Der springt noch auf “ – ‘He’s still moving.’ [The German ‘aufspringen’ means, literally, ‘to jump up. It is, here, a purely physical action. No transcendence is possible. Bloody death in a ditch is, well, final and irrevocable.] How alien the language, how different from the reality of what is happening to those in the ditch – this German phrase, removed from the words which have brought us this far. The voice comes from above, not a divine voice but a voice from those who, physically, stand above the suffering, dying, dead, prisoners.
The poet hears the voice with an ear which, like his existence, is bloodied and filthy. “On my ear, blood dried, mixed with filth.” That hearing is a witness, not only to his friend’s death, but to his own upcoming death. He, too, will be bloodied; he too will be shoved into a ditch and covered with dirt.
That this poem comes to us from a recovered manuscript, a notebook stained by the poet’s dying blood, is almost unbearable.