I had never heard of poet and translator Emery George (and there’s essentially nothing about him online except that “He is Emeritus Professor of German at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor”), but he did a terrific translation (judging by the English—I don’t read Hungarian) of “A la recherche,” one of Miklós Radnóti‘s last few poems before he was shot by the SS in 1944. Hexameters don’t come naturally in English, and to make them sound this effortless takes a lot of work:
Evenings, gentle and old, you return as memory’s nobles!
Gleaming table, crowned as by laurels with poets and young wives,
where are you sliding on marshes of irretrievable hours?
Where are the nights when exuberant friends were cheerfully drinking
auvergnat gris out of bright-eyed, thin-stemmed, delicate glasses?
Lines of verse swam high round the light of the lamps, with bright green
epithets bobbing up-down foaming crests of the meter;
those now dead were alive and the prisoners, still at home; those
vanished, dear friends, long since fallen, were writing their poems;
on their hearts the Ukraine, the soil of Spain, or of Flanders.
You can read the remaining five stanzas and get much more information on Radnóti’s life (and of course the usual gorgeous collection of images) at Poemas del río Wang, where I found this. And while I’m at it, let me also recommend an earlier río Wang post about the Holocaust, May it be bound up: “By reading this text, I feel it dreadfully beautiful that in the wasteland of Nagykónyi there has been standing for a hundred and thirty years a sophisticated poem carved in stone which has not been read by anybody in the past sixty-five years, because there is nobody there who could read it any more. It is like the well of the Little Prince which is hiding in the desert until somebody finds it again.”
Incidentally, I discovered in my googling that Emery George edited what looks like a fine anthology, Contemporary East European Poetry. This edition “offers a massive selection of over 500 poems from 160 poets spanning ten countries and 15 languages, including Yiddish and the four languages of the former Yugoslavia. For cultural and artistic reasons, the former Soviet Union is not included…”
Thank you very much, Language, for the quotation. The Complete Poetry of Miklós Radnóti translated by Emery George was published in 1980 by Ardis, Ann Arbor. The translator writes this in the foreword:
“My attention to Radnóti’s work was first drawn in the fall of 1963 by Professor Paul Varnai of Carleton University, then a fellow graduate student in Ann Arbor. From the very first, as I read especially the «Eclogues» and the Bor poetry, I was witnessing with amazement how a postmodern poet dispels a stubborn, extreme avantgardiste myth of the separation of past from present and how he reasserts the timelessness of craft, the enduring validity of beauty and order in verse. This, even today, is as close as I hope to come to a man and poet who could still be with us, but whose reality to his audience is now defined by the oeuvre itself.”
The translations of Emery George are textually extremely faithful to the Hungarian original, and besides he was the only one who translated all the poems of Radnóti to English. This is why we have selected his translations for the English version of the site presenting his bequest. However, Radnóti’s monographer Győző Ferencz who is also professor of English at the University of Budapest has just informed us that recently a new translation of the complete Bor Notebook has been made by a Californian poet which he feels poetically superior to Emery Georges’ version. He promised to help us to get in contact with him and to have his permission to publish his translation as well. I will give news in Río Wang if we will manage to do so.
Whoever is interested in Radnóti’s poetry is invited to follow the course of Río Wang for a while, as we will gradually present some never published original documents, illustrations and poems from the bequest that for editorial reasons were not included in the site.
Another wonderful contribution from Poemas del río Wang, thank you both. And not to malign this here medium, but dammit, this screams for publication in a hardcover by a prominent academic publishing house.
Re: Contemporary East European Poetry
Of the nine names in the ‘Czechoslovakia’ chapter, there’s only one Slovak (not counting Daniel Simko, who I think was Slovak, but moved to the US at a very early age) and that just has to be Miroslav Válek, who at the time of the compilation held the post of the Minister of Culture. Not that there’s anything wrong with his poetry, in both written and sung form, but surely Slovak poetry would have been better represented by Vojtech Mihálik (my personal favorite), Ján Smrek (a true classic) or the great Milan Rúfus.
bulbul: this screams for publication in a hardcover by a prominent academic publishing house
Firstly, I’m so glad you of all people read Poemas. But second, I too said this to Studiolum and he said he prefers the way it appears on the screen to the printed page. I believe him, I’m sure he could get it published by whomever he wanted.
I meant to say at the time it came out at Poemas del rio Wang that I was reminded of the overgrown, untended little Jewish cemetery in Hamburg. It’s right in the middle of a vast highly-manicured municipal cemetery. It’s so sad and beautiful.
bulbul: this screams for publication in a hardcover by a prominent academic publishing house
Firstly, I’m so glad you of all people read Poemas. But second, I too said this to Studiolum and he said he prefers the way it appears on the screen to the printed page. I believe him, I’m sure he could get it published by whomever he wanted.
I meant to say at the time it came out at Poemas del rio Wang that I was reminded of the overgrown, untended little Jewish cemetery in Hamburg. It’s right in the middle of a vast highly-manicured municipal cemetery. It’s so sad and beautiful.
Wow. You’re right: I’ve never seen English hexameter handled so beautifully.
Emery Edward George is a poet as well as a translator / editor: WorldCat.
Hexameters don’t come naturally in English, and to make them sound this effortless takes a lot of work
Mr. Hat, you are within an endständiges iamb of not practicing what you preach. You’re a poet and don’t know it:
Bravo, Grumbly!
and he said he prefers the way it appears on the screen to the printed page
No, not at all! I deeply revere the printed page. But, exactly for this reason, I think twice before making one. That’s why I love the blog form where you can irresponsibly publish things that are ready only to a certain degree. However, I do hope that when this degree is reached, they can be also published “in a hardcover.” With Radnóti this will happen soon in Hungarian, and also with Río Wang’s emblematic thread in Spanish.
the stones story is as beautifl as it is sad – great article on ‘Poemas’.
My Hungarian friends introduced me to Radnoti Miklos in 1970s. They had an LP of his poems read by someone, if not Radnoti himself, I cannot remember now, which we listened to again and again. What I do remember is that they all seemed to think that Radnoti was under a very strong influence of Mayakovsky. I wonder if this view is supported by critics.