Letter to My Wife, By MIKLOS RADNOTI (1909-1944)

(written in Lager Heidenau, above Zagubica in the mountains, August-September, 1944)

Down in the deep, dumb worlds are waiting,

silent;

I shout; the silence in my ears is strident,

but no one can reply to it from far

Serbia, fallen into a swoon of war,

and you are far. My dream, your voice, entwine,

by day I find it in my heart again;

knowing this I keep still while, standing proudly,

rustling, cool to the touch, many great ferns

surround me.

When may I see you? I hardly know any longer,

you, who were solid, were weighty as the psalter,

beautiful as a shadow and beautiful as light,

to whom I would find my way, whether

deafmute or blind;

now hiding in the landscape, from within,

on my eyes, you flash--the mind projects its

film.

You were reality, returned to dream

and, fallen back into the well of my teen years,

jealously question you: whether you love me,

whether, on my youth’s summit, you will yet be

my wife--I am now hoping once again,

and, back on life’s alert road, where I have

fallen,

I know you are all this. My wife, my friend and

peer--

only, far! Beyond three wild frontiers.

It is turning fall. Will fall forget me here?

The memory of our kisses is all the clearer;

I believed in miracles, forgot their days;

above me I see a bomber squadron cruise.

I was just admiring, up there, your eyes’ blue

sheen,

when it clouded over, and up in that machine

the bombs were aching to dive. Despite them, I

am alive,

a prisoner; and all that I had hoped for, I have

sized up, in breadth. I will find my way to you;

for you I have walked the spirit’s full length as

it grew,

and highways of the land. If need be, I will

render

myself, a conjurer, past cardinal embers,

amid nose-diving flames, but I will come back,

if I must be, I shall be as resilient as the bark

on trees. I am soothed by the peace of savage

men

in constant danger: worth the whole wild

regimen

of arms and power; and, as from a cooling wave

of the sea,

sobriety’s 2x2 comes raining down on me.

From “Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness” edited and with an introduction by Carolyn Forche. (Norton: $35.; 812 pp.) “Against Forgetting” is an anthology that encompasses more than 140 poets from five continents, over the span of this century from the Armenian genocide to Tian An Men Square. To be included, the poet must have had the personal experience of extremity, war, torture, exile or repression. 1993 by Carolyn Forche. Reprinted by permission.