HUNGARIAN STUDIES 11. No. 1. Nemzetközi Magyar ... - EPA
HUNGARIAN STUDIES 11. No. 1. Nemzetközi Magyar ... - EPA HUNGARIAN STUDIES 11. No. 1. Nemzetközi Magyar ... - EPA
32 ZSUZSANNA OZSVÁTHThe drama echoes the ancient words: "The voice of thy brother's bloodcrieth to me from the ground." The curse is not forgotten; it demands sacrifice."The angel" recurring again and again in Radnóti's work does not,however, always emerge as an executor of divine vengeance. Intermingled withhim is an indifferent character, the creature who appears suddenly in the midstof Serbia's violated landscape. In the first of the "Razglednicas," composed inthe early fall of 1944, on the death march Radnóti was forced to endure, thisfigure emerges as standing and watching the road on which the pain-struck,ghostly masses of Jews move. It is for the last time in his work that Radnótisummons Fanni, but he does so only in a flash. Then, he lets her merge withthe creature, who stands quietly in the wasteland of Death:And you're the only constant in the changing and the messyou shine on eternal beneath my consciousness;mute as an angel wondering at the catastrophe,or the beetle of burial from his hole in a dead tree. 9Etching itself into his mental processes, Radnóti's consciousness of guilt andpunishment molds his life into a dramatic, powerfully construed legend.In some poems, rather than his mythical self-recriminations, the child'ssense of abandonment and exile dominates. In fact, certain lyrics express asense of shattered innocence, a theme that pervades also "Gemini," demonstratingthe force of the blow that the knowledge of the circumstances of hisbirth had on Radnóti's life and poetry. As "Memory," the poem of thetwenty-one year old expresses:Ohlbare-leggedchild -stood with my arms lifted highunder the sky;white was the fieldcrowded with ladybirds, stars in the rye!And then whatever god I beheldbended away his eye! 10Orphaned, vulnerable, and forsaken, the boy cannot comprehend why he issingled out, why he is rejected. Yet incomprehension does not dissolve sin.Whether aware or unaware of what he had caused, he knows that evil must beexpiated. It is this self-lacerating morality that Radnóti imposes upon himself,ignoring the reality of the incompetent medical treatment, responsible for the
FROM CAIN TO NAHUM 33deaths of his mother and infant brother. He regards the myth of guilt as anintegral part of his own psychic identity, offering himself up for a ritualisticblood sacrifice, as if to redeem the world through that ancient reckoning oforiginal sin.While the themes of sacrifical brotherhood and isolation maintain theirprominent roles in the oeuvre of Radnóti, by the early thirties, they are joinedby a number of new ones, among them that of global devastation. Emergingin the lyrics of "Like a Bull", images of destruction start to spread throughRadnóti's landscapes, linking up with another major theme: the moralobligation of resisting violence. As "Like a Bull" shows:*but the bull snorts and doesn't flee as the deer arefleeing; he fancies that when his hour comes round he'll fightand fall, and the pack will scatter his bones all over the meadowandslowly, sadly, bellows into the buttery air.Even so will I struggle and so will I die;Still as a sign to posterity the fields will preserve my bones. 11The poem, the first piece in his fourth volume of poetry New Moon,captures two beings, first the bull then the persona, both as being attacked bythe wolf pack, murdered, and left unburied, their bones scattered around thefields. This is an image of premonitary significance, especially if seen from theperspective of "War Diary" and "A la recherche", not to mention the dam atAbda. But where did this image come from? Clearly, in Hungary, during theinterwar period, the miscarriage of justice was hardly a rare occurrence; norwere the cruelties committed by the police in the prisons or by the gendarmeriein the countryside. But the vision emerging from the "bull poem" does notproject injustice; nor does it recall the cruelties of the Hungarian "lawenforcement"officials. Rather it suggests the vulnerability of being, thedesecration of the body, and the moral imperative of restoring human dignity.It also presages the coming disaster.But where do these notions emerge from? After all, August 3,1933, the dateof the poem, lay remote from the time of the prewar atrocities perpetrated inEthiopia and Spain. It was in chronology even further removed from thehorrors of the death camps and the massacres committed during World WarII. As a matter of fact, at this point of history, there was no indication of therise of that extraordinary aggression that exploded a few years later on several
- Page 1 and 2: Papers of the Radnóti Memorial Con
- Page 3: HUNGARIAN STUDIESVOLUME 11, 1996 CO
- Page 8 and 9: 6 GEORGE GÖMÖRIprobably Fürst an
- Page 10 and 11: 8 GEORGE GÖMÖRIof the utmost impo
- Page 12 and 13: 10 GEORGE GÖMÖRIén e földön...
- Page 14 and 15: 12 GEORGE GÖMÖRINotes1. Miklós R
- Page 16 and 17: 14 MIHÁLY SZEGEDY-MASZÁKself alwa
- Page 18 and 19: 16 MIHÁLY SZEGEDY-MASZÁKtype is r
- Page 20 and 21: 18 MIHÁLY SZEGEDY-MASZÁKpose, the
- Page 22 and 23: 20 MIHÁLY SZEGEDY-MASZÁK"Wozu Dic
- Page 24 and 25: 22 MIHÁLY SZEGEDY-MASZÁKand Wilme
- Page 26 and 27: 24 MIHÁLY SZEGEDY-MASZÁKbeen the
- Page 28 and 29: 26 MIHÁLY SZEGEDY-MASZÁKBolond, k
- Page 30 and 31: 28 MIHÁLY SZEGEDY-MASZÁK6. Emery
- Page 32 and 33: 30 ZSUZSANNA OZSVÁTHand breaks as
- Page 36: 34 ZSUZSANNA OZSVÁTHcontinents at
- Page 39 and 40: FROM CAIN TO NAHUM 37which, as Csap
- Page 41 and 42: \FROM CAIN TO NAHUM 39and bears and
- Page 43 and 44: FROM CAIN TO NAHUM 41who sees what
- Page 45 and 46: FROM CAIN TO NAHUM 438. "A félelme
- Page 47 and 48: HELP ME, PASTORAL MUSE:THE VIRGELIA
- Page 49 and 50: HELP ME, PASTORAL MUSE 47compete! W
- Page 51 and 52: HELP ME, PASTORAL MUSE 49of a priva
- Page 53 and 54: HELP ME, PASTORAL MUSE 51Once again
- Page 55 and 56: HELP ME, PASTORAL MUSE 53Eighth Ecl
- Page 57 and 58: HELP ME, PASTORAL MUSE 55have that
- Page 59: HELP ME, PASTORAL MUSE 57Paul de Ma
- Page 62 and 63: 60 SAMUEL J. WILSONWe did, however,
- Page 64 and 65: 62 SAMUEL J. WILSONbeings and contr
- Page 66 and 67: 64 SAMUEL J. WILSONHungarians would
- Page 68 and 69: 66 SAMUEL J. WILSONthe Austrians. G
- Page 70 and 71: 68 SAMUEL J. WILSONnorth-eastern Zi
- Page 72 and 73: 70 SAMUEL J. WILSONoriginally pursu
- Page 74 and 75: 72 SAMUEL J. WILSONGörgey's decisi
- Page 76 and 77: 74 SAMUEL J. WILSONfrom occurring,
- Page 78 and 79: 76 SAMUEL J. WILSON8. Artúr Görge
- Page 80 and 81: 78 STEVEN TÖTÖSY de ZEPETNEKtört
- Page 82 and 83: 80 STEVEN TÖTÖSY de ZEPETNEKThe c
FROM CAIN TO NAHUM 33deaths of his mother and infant brother. He regards the myth of guilt as anintegral part of his own psychic identity, offering himself up for a ritualisticblood sacrifice, as if to redeem the world through that ancient reckoning oforiginal sin.While the themes of sacrifical brotherhood and isolation maintain theirprominent roles in the oeuvre of Radnóti, by the early thirties, they are joinedby a number of new ones, among them that of global devastation. Emergingin the lyrics of "Like a Bull", images of destruction start to spread throughRadnóti's landscapes, linking up with another major theme: the moralobligation of resisting violence. As "Like a Bull" shows:*but the bull snorts and doesn't flee as the deer arefleeing; he fancies that when his hour comes round he'll fightand fall, and the pack will scatter his bones all over the meadowandslowly, sadly, bellows into the buttery air.Even so will I struggle and so will I die;Still as a sign to posterity the fields will preserve my bones. 11The poem, the first piece in his fourth volume of poetry New Moon,captures two beings, first the bull then the persona, both as being attacked bythe wolf pack, murdered, and left unburied, their bones scattered around thefields. This is an image of premonitary significance, especially if seen from theperspective of "War Diary" and "A la recherche", not to mention the dam atAbda. But where did this image come from? Clearly, in Hungary, during theinterwar period, the miscarriage of justice was hardly a rare occurrence; norwere the cruelties committed by the police in the prisons or by the gendarmeriein the countryside. But the vision emerging from the "bull poem" does notproject injustice; nor does it recall the cruelties of the Hungarian "lawenforcement"officials. Rather it suggests the vulnerability of being, thedesecration of the body, and the moral imperative of restoring human dignity.It also presages the coming disaster.But where do these notions emerge from? After all, August 3,1933, the dateof the poem, lay remote from the time of the prewar atrocities perpetrated inEthiopia and Spain. It was in chronology even further removed from thehorrors of the death camps and the massacres committed during World WarII. As a matter of fact, at this point of history, there was no indication of therise of that extraordinary aggression that exploded a few years later on several
Change language