Craft: Miklós Radnóti
Miklós Radnóti (b. Miklós Glatter, 1909-1944) was a Jewish-Hungarian poet born in Radnóti, a part of Hungary that is today in Slovakia and known as Radnovce. He was born in Budapest. His father, Jakab Glatter, worked at a wholesale textile company owned by a brother-in-law, Dezsó Grósz. Radnóti’s mother, Ilona Grosz, and twin brother died at his birth. His father then remarried a woman named Ilona Molnár in 1911 and they had a daughter, Ágnes, in 1914. He didn’t know that Molnár was not his mother until July 1921 when he was 12 and his father died suddenly of a stroke. Then he went to live with relatives who told him the truth.
Both Ilona and Ágnes Molnár were killed in Auschwitz in 1944. There is very little data about Radnóti’s early life, but the death of his mother and brother appear in much of his early poetry.
Radnóti graduated from the University of Szeged, then went to Budapest to teach, but could not get any teaching positions because he was a Jew. He instead supported himself by translating Hungarian and French. His first book, Pogány köszöntó [Pagan Salute] was published in 1930.
When World War II began, he was conscripted into forced labor three times. Jews were not allowed to carry firearms and were thus prohibited from serving in the Hungarian army in combat. Beginning in July 1942 he was forced to wear a yellow armband marking him as a Jew. After his final call to forced labor service, he was taken to a town called Bor, Serbia with 6,000 other Jews to work in a copper mine to support the German war effort.
When the Soviets began their advance east in August 1944, the inmates were taken on a forced march from Bor to Szentkirályszabadja, Hungary [about 750 km or 466 mi] during which Hungarian soldiers shot all the prisoners. The mass grave in which he was buried was discovered in June 1946. His wife then discovered a small black notebook that contained his final ten poems.
Radnóti’s poems have the same prophetic doom as Kafka’s stories and evoke the mystical dream state of Bruno Schulz’s stories, but they are poems certainly rooted in his own experiences.
As in “Charm,” Radnóti could move from the unsettling terrors of war to psychological dismay to romantic sensitivity with ease.
Because his poems are dated, they can be tracked to specific wartime experiences.
His poems evoke the violence and uncertainty of war, but this belies the deep well inside him that allowed him to make poems out of such experiences soberly and without self-pity.
As the threat of autocracy becomes increasingly real in the United States, poets would be wise to see how poets of the past remained sober and accurate in the face of such threats rather than to assume that “it can’t happen here.”
For further reading:
Radnóti, Miklós. Miklós Radnóti: The Complete Poetry in Hungarian and English. Jefferson, NC: McFarland Publishers, 2014. [Buy at Bookshop]
—. All that Still Matters at All: Selected Poems. Milwaukee, WI: New American Press, 2014. [Buy at Bookshop]
—. Clouded Sky. Riverdale, NY: Sheep Meadow Press, 2003. [Out of print]
About Sean Singer
Heartbreakingly beautiful poems. How complex, Radnoti's life and how straightforward his poems. I'm grateful to learn of him, these lines.
What poems. What a serene, sensitive face. Thank you, Sean.