Miklós Radnóti

Miklós Radnóti (Budapest, 1909 - Abda, 1944) was one of the most distinguished Hungarian lyric poets of the twentieth century. He wrote in Hungarian, the language in which he trained as a teacher of Hungarian and French, and his work matters above all because it joined the classical tradition with the experience of antisemitic persecution and war.

He was born into a Jewish family of textile merchants. His mother died soon after childbirth, and his father, a travelling salesman, died in 1921. After commercial studies and a spell in Liberec, he enrolled at the University of Szeged, where he studied Hungarian and French. In 1934 he earned his doctorate with a thesis on the writer Margit Kaffka. That same year he Magyarised his surname to Radnóti, after the village of his paternal ancestors. In 1935 he married Fanni Gyarmati, who became the central figure of much of his love poetry.

His verse of the 1930s sought a balance of form drawn from classical models, above all the pastoral eclogues of Virgil. Idyllic landscapes and the beauty of nature served as a humanist counterweight to the rise of fascism. He translated Apollinaire and La Fontaine and contributed to the journal Nyugat. Anti-Jewish laws sent him to forced labour several times, beginning in 1940.

In 1944 he was sent to a copper mine near Bor, in Serbia. In the autumn the camp was evacuated and the prisoners were marched on foot towards Hungary. During the march he wrote his last poems in a notebook. He was shot with other prisoners in November 1944 near Abda. His body was exhumed in 1946, and the notebook, found in his coat pocket, preserved the final poems.

He is now regarded as one of the great Hungarian poets of the twentieth century. His last lines, in which classical form holds out against barbarism, are read as testimony to the Holocaust and to poetry's capacity to survive violence.