Having a complete bi-lingual edition of Radnoti's poetry is a welcome addition to literature that was written during and influenced by the Holocaust. Radnoti's early pastoral lyrics turn darker as time goes on. The editorial notes in this edition are uneven; the historical notes are good, but the interpretive notes seem a bit idiosyncratic. ( )

Review of Three Distinctly Different Poetry Books

MIKLOS RADNOTI: THE COMPLETE POEMS IN HUNGARIAN AND ENGLISH, translated by Gabor Barabas, includes the books published in Radnoti's lifetime along with the ten poems found in a notebook in his pocket after his body was discovered in a mass grave, executed at age 35 by Hungarian soldiers during the Holocaust.

In general, I'm leery of translations because poetry is so much about finding the exact word, conveying and obeying the poet's true message, the shape of the poem on the page, and so on. But Radnoti's fifth book, MARCH ON, CONDEMNED! blew me away. Here's an excerpt from "Before Sleep": "The melon's flesh is animated by autumn's breath, / and does not cry out when caressed by the edge of my knife, / but softly splits in two, dripping words of wisdom…" The foreword, by Gyozo Ferencz, states that Radnoti "asserts…that as a poet, he represents normalcy in an age of lunacy" and I believe that's exactly what he accomplished.

His early poems were too cliché, full of too many adjective and adverbs, trite subjects—but he was young and experimenting, as should be. As his own life grew darker (brought to trial for "sacrilege and insulting morality" for his second book, which was seized and destroyed by the Hungarian right-wing, and called up to serve in three forced-labor camps), Rodnoti became more focused. As Ferencz says, Radnoti was "the only one among his contemporaries who sensed the danger that would, in the end, destroy him." It's sad and terrifying that his circumstances brought out the most intense and marvelous poetry in him.

I highly recommend this book, though I am not convinced of true translations and copyeditors carefully going through it. Some of the facts in the foreword by Ferencz and the introduction by the translator, Barabas, conflicted. I am tempted, in fact, to wonder whether Ferencz, author of THE LIFE AND POETRY OF MIKLOS RADNOTI, might not have been the better choice as translator. Since I do not know Hungarian, I cannot judge, but there were many places where I felt the translation seemed like American phrases were not accurate considering the place and period, or the punctuation was off (too often for comfort!), or the sentence length of the original vs. the translation was far, too far, apart. And then we have Barabas's footnotes, which insult the reader OFTEN. And Barabas, I felt, talked too much about his own journey at the beginning and end of the book. Then there's the fact that he overexplains everything. Can we not give the reader some credit? Maybe much of his "interpretation" should have come at the end of the book for a reader to explore or disregard as he/she chose.

Still, it's an ambitious undertaking. There are poems that will haunt you. There are poems that will make you wonder why you had never discovered Radnoti's poetry before this. There are poems, despite the fact that you are not Hungarian nor a Holocaust survivor, that you will recognize as a piece of yourself. And isn't that what poetry is about?

From Radnoti's "I Sat with Tristan"

"You could be a sailor."—he said—
"Windswept, clean of heart,
and live between the
blue of twilight and the blue of the shimmering sea!"
"That is what I am,"—I laughed, "for a poet
can be anything!
and everything…" ( )

This is a brilliant edition of a poet much less well-known than he ought to be. It's complete and, crucially, bilingual, and there are useful appendices on the translation and the context of the work. But it's the poetry that matters, and Radnóti's voice is strong and supple throughout his changing styles. From the jumpy, political absurdism of his youth, through the surreal and lyrical pre-war pieces, to the sui-generis final poems (and this is a very perfunctory summary) there is a clear connecting thread. Radnóti has the central European gift of expressing a deep rootedness, a strong sense of place and home, while also articulating the plight of the outcast and satirising/despising the mob. Frequently surprising, by turns angular and enbosoming, these poems seem to spring from the very kidney of shadowed pre-WWII Europe; and that they should do so out of such an alien tongue as Hungarian is a great testimony to the translator. ( )

The reputation of Miklós Radnóti has grown steadily since his death in 1944; many of his poems have been translated into English several times over, and there has been one previous translation of the complete poetry. Gabor Barabas explicitly disavows any dissatisfaction with earlier translations, or indeed any ambition to improve upon them. The present edition originated, seemingly, as a means of working out his personal interest in Radnóti.

Despite the modesty of its claims, this translation achieves in many of the poems a more muscular and memorable phrasing than that of its predecessors, enlivening the relatively neglected early poems and bringing into sharper focus some well-known ones, especially the Eclogues, the Postcards, and this poignant memory from “The Forced March,” which is an example of Barabas at his best:

as it did once on my old faithful veranda,
where bees droned in peace, where plum preserves were cooling,
in the summer’s leaving and where the sleepy garden,
and the fruit among the branches swayed nakedly,
as my blonde Fanni waited by the russet hedge,
and the shadows slowly gathered....

The integrity of the translation’s attention to diction comes perhaps at this cost: as Barabas says in the first appendix, he has chosen not to try to replicate Radnóti’s handling of meter and rhyme, which traces an interesting development through an early period of free verse to the later adoption of classical forms. However, perhaps the greatest of this edition’s many merits is that it includes the original Hungarian text, and is the first English version of Radnóti that is both complete and dual-language. There are of course limits to what one can do with this; my impression is that form in the late poems is not especially lyrical (it’s the early erotic poems that seem lushly lyrical) but a kind of white-knuckle grip on the material. But it’s hard to confirm such impressions without knowing the language, and some discussion in the footnotes of what Radnóti is doing formally would have been welcome. Nevertheless, the original text is there, and this allows even those with little or no Hungarian to make out something of the music (and serves as an enticement to try learning some Hungarian).

This benefit is partially vitiated by the unfortunate typesetting of the book, which was presumably dictated by economic necessity. Ideally, a dual language edition would be printed on facing pages, but that is very expensive. Here the poems run seriatim, with the English immediately following the Hungarian; worse, they are printed in double columns and a correspondingly tiny font (but not tiny enough to keep many lines from running over the column margin), so that, for instance, if the Hungarian occupies one column and part of the next, the English will start in the lower part of the second column and finish on the next page. This makes it impossible for the eye to glide naturally between the translation and the corresponding lines of the original. I think they might have retained most of the space saving, and much improved the utility, by printing the Hungarian all in the left column and the English next to it in the right column.

But even if it is hard on the eyes, the virtues of this edition—the strong translation, the inclusion of the Hungarian, the appendices and other apparatus—make it likely to become the reference edition of choice for English-speaking students of Radnóti’s poetry.

Unfamiliar verse often filters through me as colourless & banal; derivative; if not muddle-headed then completely above me; or perhaps worst, without noticeable register, seemingly empty of all content and so forgotten the minute I lay the pages down. I was not acquainted with Miklós Radnóti even as a name, yet none of these scenarios proved the case here.

Radnóti's poems address some perennial themes (freedom, destiny, guilt, love) yet almost immediately present a distinctive voice. His repeated appeals for social justice shed almost all familiar tones of social realism or pathos. Instead, Radnóti celebrates the body and that quiet pleasure arising out of an awareness of landscape, even while worrying at the bones of underprivilege and oppression, and his own violent death.

Radnóti's poems are not easy, nor simple-minded, neither are they byzantine or densely obscure in their language or allusions. Motifs are recognisable even after reading just a handful of his pieces: the image of steep roads, or pilgrimage into mountain heights; storm or wind emblematic of coming change; chance encounters with strangers. Yet Radnóti leavened his more somber concerns with a sincere pastoral delight, a deep affection and passion for his wife, and a consistent reflection on the place of creativity and verse in a world too easily defined in mundane and pragmatic concerns.

In the end, I'm not sure Radnóti will ever become a favourite of mine, but the integrity of his verse was immediately clear, and as elusive as it is to put words to what makes his voice distinctive, I was kept interested. There's a lot to get from these poems, and that makes the reading worthwhile.

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This edition proves a handy introduction, providing background on Radnóti's circumstances, the Hungarian legacy of pogroms culminating in Radnóti's era between the World Wars, and yes, his eventual murder at the hands of pro-Nazi nationalists. Without these, the themes of the verse would not sound as genuine, the story of his final poems mere melodrama and farce (poems written on his death march, and found in his trenchcoat pocket a year and more after his death, upon his exhumation from a mass grave). Welcome though this contextual material is, it is not obtrusive: the poems comprise the supermajority of pages here, even counting only the English translations.

The layout is economical and spare: first the original Hungarian verse, then the translation, for each piece, chronologically through the various published books and unpublished pieces. It can be difficult to scan, a busy network of fonts and typefaces, though intelligible. Better would be more white space, but understandably pragmatics prevail in this edition. Perhaps future editions will allow a more reader-friendly layout.

Translator Gabor Barabas provides a "Guide for Readers New to Radnóti" in his Introduction [26], along with a biography and chronology of Radnóti's work and life, and a useful critical appreciation of Radnóti's verse.

Appendices include a history of antisemitism in Hungary, and notes on the approach to translation.

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"His poetry in its denouement created a matchless unity of life and literature" (Ferencz, from his Foreward) ( )