War Diary (1935-36) by Miklós Radnóti

(October 2013)

 

These days the distant news dissolves the world

the trees of old still hold your childhood secrets

in their widening memory rings.

 

Between suspicious mornings and furious nights,

you have spent half your life corralled by war.

Upon the glinting points of the bayonets, striding

repression encircles you.

The land of your poetry may appear in your dreams

with the wings of freedom gliding above the meadows,

still sensed through the mist, and when the magic breaks

the elation may persist.

But you half-sit on your chair when you rarely dare

Your hand still dignified by the pen moves forward,

more burdened day by day.

View the tide of clouds: the ravenous thunderhead

of the war is devouring the gentle blue of the sky.

With her loving, protective arms around you

sobs your anxious bride.

I can sleep calmly now, and methodically

grenades and bombs and aircraft made to kill me.

So I have come to live as hard as teams

of road-builders high among the windy hills:

when their light shelters

decay with age,

they build new shelters

and soundly sleep in beds of fragrant wood-shavings

and splash and dip their faces at dawn in cool

and radiant streams.

* * *

 

I spy out from this hilltop where I live:

the clouds are crowding.

As the watch on the mainmast over stormy seas

he thinks he sees

a distant land,

I also can discern from here the shores of peace:

I shout: Compassion!

The chilly stars respond with a brightening light,

my word is carried far by the chilly breeze

of the deepening night.

 

 

A slowly dying wasp flies through the window.

The clouds are turning brown. Along their edges

caressed by the breeze, white ripples teem.

I shall fall broken, abandoned without any reason

and worm-ridden earth will fill my mouth and eye-pits

and through my corpse, fresh roots will sprout.

* * *

Oh, peaceful, swaying afternoon, lend me your calm!

I too must rest for a while, I will work later.

Your sunrays hang suspended from the shrubs

as the evening saunters across the hill.

The blood of a fine fat cloud has smeared the sky.

And beneath the burning leaves, the scented yellow

berries are ripening, swelling with wine.

 

 

The sun is descending down a slippery sky.

The evening is approaching early, sprawling

along the road. The watchful moon has missed it.

Pools of mist are falling.

grow louder. The hedges wake to turn and tilt

at weary travellers. These lines clasp one another

as they are slowly built.

 

And now!.. a squirrel invades my quiet room

and runs two brown iambic lines, a race

of terror between my window and the wall

and flees without a trace.

My fleeting peace has vanished with the squirrel.

Outside in the fields, the vermin silently spread,

digesting slowly the endless, regimented,

reclining rows of the dead.

 

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