Poetry Meme
Oct. 16th, 2004 03:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pjthompsonInspired by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
matociquala and Yevtoshenko.
Letter to My Wife
by Miklós Radnóti
Down in the deep, dumb worlds are waiting, silent;
I shout; the silence in my ears is strident,
but no one can reply to it from far
Serbia, fallen into a swoon of war,
and you are far. My dream, your voice, entwine,
by day I find it in my heart again;
knowing this I keep still while, standing proudly,
rustling, cool to the touch, many great ferns surround me.
When may I see you? I hardly know any longer,
you, who were solid, were weighty as the psalter,
beautiful as a shadow and beautiful as light,
to whom I would find my way, whether deafmute or blind;
now hiding in the landscape, from within,
on my eyes, you flash—the mind projects its film.
You were reality, returned to dream
and, fallen back into the well of my teen years,
jealously question you: whether you love me,
whether, on my youth's summit, you will yet be
my wife—I am now hoping once again,
and, back on life's alert road, where I have fallen,
I know you are all this. My wife, my friend and peer—
only, far! Beyond three wild frontiers.
It is turning fall. Will fall forget me here?
The memory of our kisses is all the clearer;
I believed in miracles, forgot their days;
above me I see a bomber squadron cruise.
I was just admiring, up there, your eyes' blue sheen,
when it clouded over, and up in that machine
the bombs were aching to dive. Despite them, I am alive,
a prisoner; and all that I had hope for, I have
sized up, in breadth. I will find my way to you;
for you I have walked the spirit's full length as it grew,
and highways of the land. If need be, I will render
myself, a conjurer, past cardinal embers,
amid nose-diving flames, but I will come back,
if I must be, I shall be resilient as the bark
on trees. I am soothed by the peace of savage men
in constant danger: worth the whole wild regimen
of arms and power; and, as from a cooling wave of the sea,
sobriety's 2x2 comes raining down on me.
August-September 1944
tr. Emery George
Radnóti was born into a Jewish family in 1909, flirted with Communism, converted to Roman Catholicism. For his poetry he was tried and found guilty for "effrontery to public modesty and incitement to rebellion." Called to forced military labor on and off from 1940 to 1944, he was sent to Yugoslavia in 1944 to construct a railway. Along with 3000 other workers, he was force marched back to Hungary just ahead of the Red Army. He was amongst only twenty to survive that march, but in November 1944 the Nazi-allied guards didn't know what to do with these men, so they shot them. In 1946, the mass grave was opened and Radnóti's body was recovered. When his wife was going through the pockets of his clothes, she found a notebook containing his last poems, including this one.
"...I believed in miracles, forgot their days;
above me I see a bomber squadron cruise.
I was just admiring, up there, your eyes' blue sheen,
when it clouded over, and up in that machine
the bombs were aching to dive....
If need be, I will render
myself, a conjurer, past cardinal embers,
amid nose-diving flames, but I will come back,
if I must be, I shall be resilient as the bark
on trees...."
matociquala and Yevtoshenko.Letter to My Wife
by Miklós Radnóti
Down in the deep, dumb worlds are waiting, silent;
I shout; the silence in my ears is strident,
but no one can reply to it from far
Serbia, fallen into a swoon of war,
and you are far. My dream, your voice, entwine,
by day I find it in my heart again;
knowing this I keep still while, standing proudly,
rustling, cool to the touch, many great ferns surround me.
When may I see you? I hardly know any longer,
you, who were solid, were weighty as the psalter,
beautiful as a shadow and beautiful as light,
to whom I would find my way, whether deafmute or blind;
now hiding in the landscape, from within,
on my eyes, you flash—the mind projects its film.
You were reality, returned to dream
and, fallen back into the well of my teen years,
jealously question you: whether you love me,
whether, on my youth's summit, you will yet be
my wife—I am now hoping once again,
and, back on life's alert road, where I have fallen,
I know you are all this. My wife, my friend and peer—
only, far! Beyond three wild frontiers.
It is turning fall. Will fall forget me here?
The memory of our kisses is all the clearer;
I believed in miracles, forgot their days;
above me I see a bomber squadron cruise.
I was just admiring, up there, your eyes' blue sheen,
when it clouded over, and up in that machine
the bombs were aching to dive. Despite them, I am alive,
a prisoner; and all that I had hope for, I have
sized up, in breadth. I will find my way to you;
for you I have walked the spirit's full length as it grew,
and highways of the land. If need be, I will render
myself, a conjurer, past cardinal embers,
amid nose-diving flames, but I will come back,
if I must be, I shall be resilient as the bark
on trees. I am soothed by the peace of savage men
in constant danger: worth the whole wild regimen
of arms and power; and, as from a cooling wave of the sea,
sobriety's 2x2 comes raining down on me.
August-September 1944
tr. Emery George
Radnóti was born into a Jewish family in 1909, flirted with Communism, converted to Roman Catholicism. For his poetry he was tried and found guilty for "effrontery to public modesty and incitement to rebellion." Called to forced military labor on and off from 1940 to 1944, he was sent to Yugoslavia in 1944 to construct a railway. Along with 3000 other workers, he was force marched back to Hungary just ahead of the Red Army. He was amongst only twenty to survive that march, but in November 1944 the Nazi-allied guards didn't know what to do with these men, so they shot them. In 1946, the mass grave was opened and Radnóti's body was recovered. When his wife was going through the pockets of his clothes, she found a notebook containing his last poems, including this one.
"...I believed in miracles, forgot their days;
above me I see a bomber squadron cruise.
I was just admiring, up there, your eyes' blue sheen,
when it clouded over, and up in that machine
the bombs were aching to dive....
If need be, I will render
myself, a conjurer, past cardinal embers,
amid nose-diving flames, but I will come back,
if I must be, I shall be resilient as the bark
on trees...."