Forced March
You're crazy. You fall down, stand up and walk again,
your ankles and your knees move
but you start again as if you had wings.
The ditch calls you, but it's no use you're afraid to stay,
and if someone asks why, maybe you turn around and say
that a woman and a sane death a better death wait for you.
But you're crazy. For a long time
only the burned wind spins above the houses at home,
Walls lie on their backs, plum trees are broken
and the angry night is thick with fear.
Oh if I could believe that everything valuble
is not only inside me now that there's still home to go back to.
If only there were! And just as before bees drone peacefully
on the cool veranda, plum preserves turn cold
and over sleepy gardens quietly, the end of summer bathes in the
sun.
Among the leaves the fruit swing naked
and in front of the rust-brown hedge blond Fanny waits for me,
the morning writes slow shadows---
All this could happen The moon is so round today!
Don't walk past me, friend. Yell, and I'll stand up again!
Commentary
This poem appeared in today’s Washington Post Book World.
Miklos Radnoti was born in Budapest in 1909, and orphaned at the age of
12. He published a number of collections of poems before the war and was a fierce anti-fascist. In the 1940’s he was interned in various work camps, the last time being in Bor, Yugoslavia at a copper mine, to which he was driven in a forced march with other internees. Along the way, he and 22 other prisoners were murdered near the town of Abda sometime between November 6 and 10, 1944 and tossed into a mass grave. After the war, his body was exhumed and his last poems were found in his field jacket, written in pencil in a small Serbian exercise book.
The above poem is part of this collection, published in 1946 as “Sky With Clouds”. It is dated September 5, 1944.
There are a number of poems around, written by Holocaust survivors or others who faced the atrocities of modern warfare. This one strikes me having that ring of truth – of memeory unvarnished by the passage of time. I am particularly moved by how the poet conveys the way a person’s mind wanders to happier times and almost loses touch with the horrors of the present in the second half of the poem, and then is yanked back into the on-going atrocity by the fear of falling behind.
— Dave Fortin
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From the Wondering Minstrels mailing list, 1999–2008.
Magda & George Roth · 15 December 2004
I am reacting quite late to the publishing of this poem, but I had no idea that it was printed in the US.
I am an immigrant from Transylvania, and as such I used to read Radnoty in Hungarian. What a powerful voice, what a tragic destiny! He represented for me the life (if one can call it living) in the forced labor camps where my father spent years, and so many found their deaths. But beyond the tragic period of those times, Radnoty proved himself to be a wonderful writer, tender in love forceful in his believes, strong in his desire to live and survive. Thank you for publishing the poem.
Sincerely,
Magda Roth
Homewood, Illinois
Simon · 20 December 2004
This translation does not do justice to Radnoti.
Paul Hartal · 27 January 2005
Radnoti is one of the truly great poets of the modern era. I graduated from a highschool named after him in Szeged, Hungary. The poet’s Jewish background was never mentioned by my teachers, nor is it revealed in the 1963 Magyar Helikon edition of his collected poems, which is in my possession. The omission is not a coincidence but part of the denial of the truth, that Radnoti was murdered not because he was a communist, or because he became a catholic, but because he was born a Jew. The translation of Forced March appearing as #1325 distorts the original. A more faithful rendition of the first line, for example, should read: “Lunatic, who sinks to the ground rises and marches again”,
Paul Hartal