Description
Book SynopsisAn account of the life, art, and tragic death of a 20th-century Hungarian Jewish poet.
Trade ReviewCo-translator of Radnóti's (Radnoti's) Foamy Sky (1992), Ozsváth (Ozsvath) (Univ. of Texas, Dallas) has written a useful and reverential biography of one of Hungary's greatest 20th-century poets. Radnóti's (Radnoti's) life story resembles that of many central European literary artists of Jewish inheritance: repelled by antisemitic writings in the early 20th century, the poet was attracted to Magyar national and literary traditions, which he universalized in his poetry. Ozsváth (Ozsvath) traces Radnóti's (Radnoti's) childhood and young manhood in the context of the central European Zeitgeist; his attraction to the political Left; his alienation as fascism gained power in Hungary; his marriage to Fanni Gyarmati, who inspired much of his poetry; and his martyrdom in May 1944 at the hands of Hungarian guards as part of a Jewish labor battalion and burial in a mass grave. Those who exhumed his body after the war found in his pocket a stained address book that had preserved ten poems he had composed as a forced laborer and on a death march, poems that established Radnóti's (Radnoti's) place in Hungarian literature. Including lucid analyses of Radnóti's (Radnoti's) poems, this well-designed, fully documented and indexed volume offers a bibliography of Hungarian and English sources and 11 useful photographs of the poet, his associates, and environs. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.June 2001
-- D. S. Gochberg * Michigan State University *
Table of ContentsPreliminary Table of Contents:
Preface
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
1. Myth and Consciousness
2. Poetic Images: Socialist Art and Political Commitment
3. The Pull of Contraries: Making of the Past
4. Visions of Destruction, Lyrics of Resistance
5. In Extremis: 1944
Notes
Works Consulted
Index
