HUNGARIAN STUDIES 11. No. 1. Nemzetközi Magyar ... - EPA

38 ZSUZSANNA OZSVÁTHfrom the deep, and cutting across his populist style, this experience foreshadowsa vision that would become prominent in his later-day lyrics. Besidesthis poem, the rest of the lyrics of New Moon, also point toward changes. Mostof them reflect Radnóti's waning political activism and anticipate new structuresand new perceptions.It is with the volume Just Walk On, Condemned to Die, however, that hiswork arrives at the point of transition. With Italy occupying Ethiopia andFranco leading the Falangists against the Spanish Republic, Radnóti's poetryregisters the new circumstances. Suddenly, he foresees the destruction ofhuman civilization. The beatings at the university, the scenes, which he forgedonce into a vision of violence in the "bull poem" but suppressed otherwise,coalesce now with vistas of global massacres. What he suddenly perceives is auniversal curse, cast upon creation. The beast from the other world, standingat the gate between life and death, lifts up his face: it is war itself. New imagesstart to appear to him. From the mid-thirties onward, Radnóti sees the horrificin the context of a new war: hence his premonitions, hence his visions of death.Many poems of the volume last mentioned allude to apocalypses and have warand atrocity as their structuring principle. In the lyrics of "A Garden of God'sHill," war and bombs appear, with the persona standing amid the lovelygarden of the summer house, seeing the future which would destroy the idyll:And you young man, what death is waiting now for you?is that insectile buzz the bullet's soundor will you, smashed and scattered by a bomb,be ploughed into the dark beneath the ground? 19The image is clear and concrete. War arrives on the wings of bullets andbombs, raining death on millions of people. And there is no one who wouldstop it. As the voice says in "Guard and Protect Me":And what's the word worth here between two wars?Scholar of words, the rare and arduous,what worth am I? - when bombs are everywherein hands most lunatic and fatuous? 20The horrors of war emerge in the hexameters of the shepherd's voice in the"First Eclogue", projecting the collapse of civilization:Is it true what I hear? - on the crest of the wild Pyrenees, that blazingmuzzles of cannon debate among corpses frozen in blood,