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I Lived Upon this Earth in Such an Age<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n I. Letter to My Wife<\/strong><\/p>\n Mute worlds lie in the depths, their stillness crying No longer can I guess when I will see you, nagged jealously in my soul for a truthful I once believed in miracles, forgetting along the highways, down the soul\u2019s appalling <\/p>\n II. Fragment<\/strong><\/p>\n I lived upon this earth in such an age I lived upon this earth in such an age I lived upon this earth in such an age I lived upon this earth in such an age I lived upon this earth in such an age <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Mikl\u00f3s Radn\u00f3ti (1907\u20131944) Translated from the Hungarian and edited by Thomas Orsz\u00e1g-Land<\/p>\n Thomas Orsz\u00e1g-Land<\/strong> is a poet, translator and award-winning foreign correspondent who writes from London and his native in Budapest. His poetry has been published here and in Ambit, The BBC World Service, The London Magazine, The Spectator and Stand.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Note: These first of these pieces was found at the close ofWW2 in a mass grave of 22 prisoners executed because of their Jewish birth. Their author is recognized today as perhaps the foremost poet of the Holocaust. The present translation of the second poem is set in bronze on a memorial in Serbia marking the site of the murder. Both poems will appear in The Survivors: Holocaust Poetry for Our Time<\/em> by Thomas Land, to be published by Smokestack in 2014.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I Lived Upon this Earth in Such an Age I. Letter to My Wife Mute worlds lie in the depths, their stillness crying inside my head; I shout: no-one\u2019s replying in war-dazed, silenced Serbia the distant, and you are far away. My dreams, persistent, are woven nightly in your voice, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prose-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5208"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5208\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5211,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5208\/revisions\/5211"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\ninside my head; I shout: no-one\u2019s replying
\nin war-dazed, silenced Serbia the distant,
\nand you are far away. My dreams, persistent,
\nare woven nightly in your voice, and during
\nthe day it\u2019s in my heart still reassuring \u2013
\nand thus I keep my silence while, profoundly
\ndetached, the cooling bracken stirs around me.<\/p>\n
\nwho were once firm and sure as psalms can be \u2013 you,
\nas lovely as the shadow and the light \u2013 you,
\nwhom I could seek out mute, deprived of sight \u2013 you,
\nnow with this landscape you don\u2019t know entwined \u2013 you,
\nprojected to the eyes, but from the mind \u2013 you,
\nonce real till to the realm of dreams you fell \u2013 you,
\nobserved from my own puberty\u2019s deep well \u2013 you,<\/p>\n
\npledge that you love me, that upon the youthful
\nproud peak of life you\u2019ll be my bride; I\u2019m yearning
\nand then, with sober consciousness returning,
\nI do remember that you are my wife and
\nmy friend \u2013 past three wild frontiers, terrified land.
\nWill autumn leave me here forgotten, aching?
\nMy memory\u2019s sharper over our lovemaking;<\/p>\n
\ntheir age; above me, bomber squadrons setting
\nagainst the sky where I just watched the spark and
\nthe colour of your eyes \u2013 the blue then darkened,
\nthe bombs then longed to fall. I live despite them
\nand I am captive. I have weighed up, item
\nby painful item, all my hopes still tended \u2013
\nand will yet find you. For you, I\u2019ve descended,<\/p>\n
\ndeep chasms. I shall transmit myself through falling
\nlive flames or crimson coals to conquer the distance,
\nif need be learn the treebark\u2019s tough resistance \u2013
\nthe calm and might of fighting men whose power
\nin danger springs from cool appraisal shower
\nupon me, bringing sober strength anew,
\nand I become as calm as 2 x 2.<\/p>\n
\nwhen man was so debased he sought to murder
\nfor pleasure, not just to comply with orders,
\nhis faith in falsehoods drove him to corruption,
\nhis life was ruled by raving self-deceptions.<\/p>\n
\nthat idolized the sly police informers,
\nwhose heroes were the killers, spies, the thieves \u2013
\nand the few who held their peace or only failed
\nto cheer were loathed like victims of the plague.<\/p>\n
\nwhen those who risked protest were wise to hide
\nand gnaw their fists in self-consuming shame \u2013
\nthe crazed folk grinned about their terrifying
\ndoomed future, wild and drunk on blood and mire.<\/p>\n
\nwhen the mother of an infant was a curse,
\nwhen pregnant women were glad to abort,
\nthe living envied the corpses in the graves
\nwhile on the table foamed their poisoned cup.<\/p>\n
\nwhen even the poet fell silent and waited in hope
\nfor an ancient, terrible voice to rise again \u2013
\nfor no-one could utter a fitting curse of such horror
\nbut the scholar of dreadful words, Isaiah the prophet.<\/p>\n