Stamp Honoring Hungarian Poet Radnóti Miklós (1909-1944)

The title of this post is the Magyar (Hungarian) word for “Roots.” Radnóti was a Jewish-Hungarian poet who was conscripted into forced labor by the Nazis and marched to the point of exhaustion. The poem below was found in his pocket when his body was exhumed from a mass grave.

Roots

Strength courses in the root;
It drinks the rain, it lives together with the soil,
And its dream is white as snow.

From beneath the soil to above the soil it bursts;
The root crawls, cunning,
Its arms like ropes.

On the root’s arms, worms sleep;
On the root’s legs, worms sit;
The world grows worm-ridden.

Yet the root lives on below;
The world does not concern it —
Only the branch does, full of leaves.

Marveling at the branch, it feeds it constantly;
To it it sends its savors,
Its sweet, celestial savors.

Now I too am a root;
I too now live among worms;
It is there that poetry is made.

I was once a flower; now I have become a root,
With the heavy dark soil above me;
My fate now ended,
A saw wails above my head.

Below is the first stanza of the poem in Hungarian, just to give you an idea of the severe compression possible in the Magyar language:

Gyökér

A gyökérben erő surran,
esőt iszik, földdel él
és az álma hófehér.