Forced march

So, to be honest with you, it must be said that poems have little entertainment value in the commonly understood sense of the term.

But they can help you to endure your life, even when they most emphatically cannot save it. Witness a poem I’d like to discuss by Hungary’s greatest modern poet Miklós Radnóti, who lived from 1909 until 1944. As a stylist, Radnóti was something of a shape-shifter, a prolific writer who managed to, on the one hand, introduce surrealism and a particularly fluent sort of free verse to Hungarian poetry and, on the other, excel in strict meters and rhyme schemes, and to deftly modernize venerable classical forms such as the eclogue. But his death was hastened by something that surely also hastened the death of Mandelstam—Radnóti was a Jew. With the outbreak of World War II, Hungary’s fascist government aligned itself with the Nazis, enacted anti-Semitic laws, and became an Axis puppet state. From 1940 onward, Radnóti was conscripted to serve on various forced-labor details, often performing tasks thought too dangerous for regular troops—clearing minefields, for example. By 1944, as the Nazis faced defeat, conscripts such as Radnóti came to be seen as superfluous. So the poet was shot, and his body thrown into a mass grave. What makes his story more than simply another of the tens of millions of tragedies connected to the Holocaust is this: after Radnóti’s body was exhumed, a small notebook containing seventy-two poems was discovered in the poet’s raincoat. This work was subsequently published by Radnóti’s widow, Fanny, in 1946. “Forced March,” the poem which I present here, was among those poems, and is above all a love poem to Fanny. But it is also a powerful testament to the endurance of the spirit and the imagination even in situations of incomprehensible duress.

Forced March

You’re crazy. You fall down, stand up    and walk again,
 your ankles and your knees move pain    that wanders around
 but you start again as if    you had wings.
 The ditch calls you, but it’s no use    you’re afraid to stay,
 and if someone asks why,    maybe you turn around and say
 that a woman and a sane death    a better death wait for you.
 But you’re crazy.    For a long time now
 only the burned wind spins    above the houses at home,
 Walls lie on their backs,    plum trees are broken
 and the angry night    is thick with fear.
 Oh, if I could believe    that everything valuable
 is not only inside me now    that there’s still home to go back to.
 If only there were! And just as before    bees drone peacefully
 on the cool veranda,    plum preserves turn cold
 and over sleepy gardens    quietly, the end of summer bathes in the sun.
 Among the leaves the fruit    swing naked
 and in front of the rust-brown hedge    blond Fanny waits for me,
 the morning writes    slow shadows—
 All this could happen!    The moon is so round today!
 Don’t walk past me, friend.    Yell, and I’ll stand up again!

/ David Wojahn, in: Blackbird. Via Poetry Daily