Miklós Radnóti: In your two arms even death’s silence cannot frighten me

These days I was exploring once again the poetry of the Hungarian Jewish poet Miklós Radnóti (1909-1944) which I had discovered a few summers ago. Radnoti worked as a teacher and a translator during his life and he translated some works of the poets Guillaume Apollinaire and Jean de La Fontaine into Hungarian, but he died very young in sad circumstances as a victim of Holocaust. Poem “In Your Two Arms” was written in April 1941 and, like many of his other poems, was inspired by his wife and muse Fanni Radnoti. In his book of translations, Gabor Barabas writes of Fanni: “She was the muse that inspired many of his poems and since his death faithfully continued to carry the torch she once carried in her husband’s imagination, one that illuminated the profundities of love and nature, as well as the darkest recesses of men’s minds.” There is something bittersweet about these love poems written in the war years, but also something very beautiful. It is fascinating to me how the horrors of the war didn’t fill him with bitterness but rather inspired a sense of beauty and awoke the humanity inside him. Most of his poems written in 1941 … 1943 etc show how unburdened he was with the events of the times. One can sense death and the ending in his verses, but above it all like a cloud is – hope.

Photograph by Laura Makabresku

IN YOUR TWO ARMS

(translated by Gabor Barabas)