Győző Ferencz

A New Life of Radnóti

Zsuzsanna Ozsváth: In the Footsteps of Orpheus: The Life and Times of Miklós Radnóti. Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 2000, 264 pp.

 

It is a savage irony and yet a reassuring atonement of literary history that of all Hungarian literature perhaps Miklós Radnóti's poetry stands the fairest chance of becoming part of the "Western" canon. To put it more simply, among Hungarian poets it is Radnóti whose oeuvre attracts the most interest abroad. The attraction of his poetry is in part undeniably due to factors outside its aesthetic qualities. His work has irreversibly become one with his life and tragic death, just as in the case of the great Romantics Petőfi or Shelley. There is no divide between life and work, they continue to exist in an interplay, mutually interpreting one another.
Translations of Radnóti have appeared in at least half a dozen versions, including one issued by the respectable Princeton University Press, containing translations by Zsuzsanna Ozsváth and Frederick Turner.¹ Emery George has translated the complete poems.² Zsuzsanna Ozsváth's new book on Radnóti is the third English-language monograph, after Emery George's and Marianna D. Birnbaum's,³ which is more than Hungarian literary historians have been able to produce. There is also a fourth book, edited by George Gömöri and Clive Wilmer, which collects individual studies.⁴ But Radnóti makes repeated appearances in what is after all the most living form of literary presence, direct inspiration, as well. George Szirtes included in one of his early volumes a translation of a late Radnóti poem, "Erőltetett menet" (Forced March);⁵ contrary to the Anglo-American convention, this version was not a loose rewriting (though Szirtes's book does contain such pieces) but an accurate, true-to-form rendering. Along with a number of other poems by Radnóti, Edwin Morgan also included his version of "Forced March" in his Collected Translations (Carcanet, 1996). The Scottish poet Douglas Dunn evokes Radnóti in a longer poem, "At Lake Balaton".⁶ All of which is not to say that Radnóti's name rings with any of the familiarity of Lorca's, Ahmatova's, Milosz's or Celan's. But for those interested in Hungarian poetry, he is certainly the most emblematic figure, beside Pilinszky and Attila József.
What makes the afterlife of his oeuvre seem unpredictable (and what constitutes the savage irony) has its roots in the tragic contradiction of Radnóti's life and poetry. It was Radnóti's most fervent desire to be a Hungarian poet, while the country, which he never ceased to consider his home and to whose culture he contributed so much in his short life, adopted a political system which created laws that prevented him from doing so; laws whose conscientious application ultimately lead to his destruction. His work, however, became, in defiance of that murderous system, an indelible part of the body of Hungarian poetry. His death came to be a symbol, a universal memento of a horrible age.
Zsuzsanna Ozsváth's book addresses this duality. It is, as indicated by the title, a portrait of a man and an age. It would have been useful, nevertheless, to give a hint in the introduction of what this volume adds to the available Radnóti literature. Its standpoint is, of course, clear enough, but it would have been to the merit of the volume if the contours of the Radnóti portrayed here, which distinguish it from earlier attempts, had been drawn more sharply. As a biography it follows Radnóti's poetic development. It starts out with the assumption that Radnóti's art possesses high literary quality, and it apparently does not wish to add to the aesthetic analysis of his art. Quotes and interpretations are usually employed for the sake of their interaction with biographical and historical data: they illustrate the age and different phases of the career; the biography and the history are written to throw light upon and to interpret his poetry, an art of great importance. Though the book appeared in the Jewish Literature and Culture series, I don't think Ozsváth assigns Radnóti's poetry to Holocaust literature. Although if she did, that would be completely defensible.
The novelty in Ozsváth's approach is that she considers horror and the struggle for human dignity in the face of horror as the leading motif of the oeuvre, and divests the poet's death of the aura of heroic sacrifice, which later interpretations and recollections often drew around it. Radnóti died, she says, because he-like hundreds of thousands of others-was given no help to flee. Ozsváth, nevertheless, refrains from being too explicit here, as she knows it could easily sound like an accusation, when only history could possibly be accused. So she confines herself to providing historical facts, statistical data, events of the private life. And if she enumerates facts with undeniable passion, she reserves the most overt formulation of her own opinion for an endnote: when, contending with the view that the poet died because he wanted to enlist for forced labour, she remarks, citing Mrs Miklós Radnóti's letter to the literary journal Kortárs in July 1988, that "between the arrival of the German troops in Hungary on 19 March, 1944, and Radnóti's draft card's being delivered to him on 18 May, no one offered help to the poet, nobody was there to provide shelter" (p. 230). Radnóti, claims Ozsváth, was a sufferer and involuntary observer of nationalism arriving, with a relentless logic, at its own conclusion.
There seems to exist a curious parallelism between his fate and that of Petőfi, the great Romantic poet. The appearance of Sándor Petőfi, as well as the 1848 Revolution, were cathartic moments in the development of the Hungarian romantic sense of national identity. Petőfi is widely known to have come from an assimilated background, his father being an assimilated Slovak and his mother a Slovak who spoke Hungarian with some difficulty, a fact Ozsváth herself refers to (p. 131). But the analogy can be extended. The nation had no hesitation in accepting Petőfi as the spokesman of the cause of its self-fulfilment. Assimilated to the Hungarian nation, the poet lost his life in 1848 in a battle during the war waged for the nation's independence. A century later Miklós Radnóti, the descendant of assimilated Jews, also decided to be a Hungarian poet. Here the ever more rigorous anti-Jewish laws made those parallel fates diverge, by excluding him, who considered himself a Hungarian until the very end, from the nation; racism put into practice ignored not only his sense of national identity but his baptismal certificate as well, and eventually claimed his life. Almost a century after the Slovak Petőfi sacrificed his life for his Hungarian homeland, his nation, the assimilated Jew Radnóti became the victim of an extremist version of the same nationalism. Petőfi marked out his life role, his task as a poet and even his death with an uncompromising deliberateness. Radnóti too defined his own poetic role, but it was not he who called the shots concerning his own life and death. A fact which creates a painfully wide gap between Petőfi's "Egy gondolat bánt engemet..." (There's one thought that troubles me) and Radnóti's "Járkálj csak halálraítélt" ("Just Walk On, Condemned to Die!").
Whether it was out of reverence for the Petőfi tradition, so powerful in Hungarian literature, or for some other reason, a view developed which tried to conceal this gap, one which Ozsváth now seeks to dismiss. It is misleading, she says, that Radnóti saw what would happen to him so early and so clearly, expressing this knowledge in a great many poems. This in no way meant that he willingly accepted the role of the victim. Ozsváth convincingly argues, on the basis of a broad historical overview in which she uses Holocaust research, that Jews were well aware of what was happening around, and to, them. It is the very peculiarity of Radnóti's poetry that he faced this bravely and consistently. He had to live with an awareness of impending violent death, but up to the last months of his life, he was never willing to accept it as his fate.

Yet, Radnóti's complete life is a calvary. His poetry follows the stations of this passion with the sincerity of a confession. Whichever way we look at it, Radnóti died a martyr's death. He did not consider himself a Jew: he considered himself a Catholic, a socialist, and above all, a Hungarian poet. Various aspects of his life and death bear the symbolic power of a passion. He was taken off to forced labour service three times; on the second occasion, in 1942, he was released thanks to the intervention of prominent personalities. His relief was short-lived: he was drafted for the third and final time. His last poems survived miraculously. Some of these were written in a forced-labour camp, fair copies of which were made on squared paper, and were rescued by his fellow prisoner Sándor Szalai, who survived the ordeal. They were published in journals and then in a posthumous volume, Tajtékos ég (Foamy Sky), 1946. That same year the mass grave at Abda was exhumed, and the Bor notebook was found in the pocket of Radnóti's trench coat. Those eighteen months under ground damaged much of the notebook, humidity made many verses illegible. But the five poems which were not copied
onto the pages given to Sándor Szalai, "Gyökér" (Root) and the four "Razglednica" (Razglednicas), were miraculously preserved. The story of the manuscript is placed in a special light by the fact that Radnóti's poetic career experienced a steep rise, as steep as the decline in the conditions of his life. When he made his debut, Radnóti did not display the fullness of his poetic prowess. It is not debunking to say that his first attempts promised a rather mediocre poet. When in 1934 he says in his diary, "yet this is a Radnóti generation,"⁷ it is scarcely more than adolescent boasting. Even now, when his poetry is well known to have risen from the depths of sufferings to heights which few have attained, his name is not used to label his generation as that of Sándor Weöres, István Vas, and Zoltán Jékely. Radnóti's achievement is a lone one. His poetry is so moving precisely because the succession of the poems vividly represents his development towards the poet and person he eventually became. There is no evidence what-ever to show he had to die for this to take place. Zsuzsanna Ozsváth is right in making this claim, yet a remark on the uncertainties of the early poems would have been useful. It could also have brought more into relief the dramatic quality of the end.
Ozsváth has adopted a historical-sociological approach to outline Radnóti's poetic career. She preferred this to a text-based or psychological strategy, as being more suitable for her purposes. She, of course, considers Radnóti's confessional poetry of documentary value, and often cites it to illustrate events in private life and in politics. Ozsváth, a sound expert in Holocaust literature, is fully aware of the effectiveness with which psychoanalytic approaches are used to interpret the Holocaust. There is an extensive literature available on the processing and analysis of traumatic experiences; Geoffrey H. Hartmann, among others, wrote an outstanding analysis of the literary use of the method,⁸ discussing also the possibilities of analysing the traumatic experiences of Jews. The use of a psychoanalytic approach could have furnished Ozsváth with solid arguments.
Ozsváth makes a succinct statement about the theoretical aspects of her approach in the chapter called "Growing Shadows." She rejects the formalism of New Criticism, claiming "it makes no sense to impose such a process on the large volume of works created by people who lived under the pressure of, felt threatened by, and wrote against the backdrop of the Holocaust" (p. 102). She also renounces the approaches of postmodernist schools of theory: "Clearly, such questions as post-modern criticism poses (e.g., whether all experience is 'self-enclosed' or whether 'meaning is incommunicable') are irrelevant to the discussion of a poet who lived under severe psychological and physical assault during most of his adulthood" (p. 102). With this she touches upon an old problem of literary criticism. As John Bayley puts it, interpreting the poems of John Berryman, the American confessional poet: "How judge someone who while talking and tormenting himself is also writing a poem about the talk and the torment?"⁹ Can a work of art which creates itself from the stuff of real sufferings be judged on aesthetic grounds only? If Ozsváth's dislike of a theory-based interpretation of literature can be respected, it is nevertheless unwise to give up any means which can facilitate a better understanding. A good example for the latter is Gábor Schein's analysis of Gábor Halász and György Sárközi's letter from the Balf forced-labour camp to Sándor Weöres, in which they ask for help and relate the death of the novelist and literary historian, Antal Szerb.¹⁰ Schein employs a hermeneutical approach to show that the victims of the Holocaust did not possess the appropriate language to relate their experiences. This insight would not be alien to Zsuzsanna Ozsváth either, as she repeatedly remarks on how Radnóti only alludes in his diary to the horrors he experienced (p. 199). "Whatever his tormentors did to him, his diary, like a lattice, filters out all traces of torture and degradation" (p. 171).
While this repudiation of theory is unfortunate (in that it offers an unnecessary ground for criticism), it can nevertheless be accepted as a mode of accounting for the approach of the volume. There is every justification for refraining from the textual analysis of translated poems. Indeed, when she attempts to show Radnóti's virtuoso use of form, she immediately comes up against serious difficulties; unable to illustrate this properly, she resorts to not very efficient paraphrase of the text to point out the peculiarities of linguistic and stylistic layers, as in her interpretation of "Mint a bika" (Like the Bull) or "Ötödik ecloga" (The Fifth Eclogue) (p. 105 and p. 185, respectively). Since the tricks of the critical trade could be used only with limitations, the book abounds in ready made value judgments, and it uses more powerful attributes than customary in the Anglo-American critical tradition. Hungarian readers will probably concur with judgements like "images of great beauty and nobility" (p. 132) or "delightfully designed structure" (p. 103), but those who do not know Radnóti's works in the original may well be sceptical. Since the volume does not set out to reinterpret the poet's works, such evaluative analysis should have been used more sparingly.
All the more so, as the main novelty and merit of Zsuzsanna Ozsváth's volume is that it discusses Radnóti's life within a broad historical and sociological context, established with the use of a wealth of sources. The historical background is presumably drawn up with more than usual elaborateness, so as to provide those unfamiliar with Hungarian history and literature with a context for Radnóti's poetry. But the amount of data thereby processed is far too large to supply merely general information. Ozsváth reviews not only the literature on Radnóti and the Hungarian Holocaust, but also political and literary journalism between the 1920s and the middle of the 1940s. Historical and political data are resolutely enumerated to provide a precise and tangible representation of the atmosphere at the time.
Her basic assumption is that fear was the fundamental experience of Radnóti's entire life. She provides detailed documentary evidence for its causes, like anti-Semitic articles, the physical assaults on Jewish students tacitly tolerated by university administrations, the "populist-urban" debate flaring up in the thirties, and of course the "Jewish Laws" sanctioned by the parliament of a country increasingly dominated by Fascist ideology. Radnóti, who abhorred violence, had a more and more acute sense of where all this would lead, whether speaking of himself or the country. Ozsváth makes repeated mention of the beating up of Jews at the University, which put Radnóti under physical threat, and which she describes in detail on page 48. Later she says "These scenes must have shaken and frightened Radnóti. He could not yet view himself as totally apart from the Jews. He was their undeniable descendant, his family still part of the larger Jewish collectivity. He must have felt threatened by this regular display of violence that could target him personally at any moment. For no matter how he defined himself in the world at large, to the members of the anti-Semitic student organizations he was a Jew" (p. 90). The last sentence summarizes, as it were, the tragic contradiction in Radnóti's life: his spiritual self-definition was brutally annulled by anti-spiritual racism.
In his diary he himself transposed, time and again, his humiliations as a forced labourer onto a higher plane, revealing a moving concern for the socially handicapped. "I'm ashamed. For the nation,"¹¹ he writes, when seeing the abject poverty of the peasants. On seeing the privation of an old workman in the Hatvan sugar mills, the family domain of a great patron of Hungarian literature, where he was doing forced labour during his second term, he bursts out: "So this is how the sponsoring of modern Hungarian literature became possible, I mutter, and feel glad I never received anything from Lajos Hatvany. Though I dined at his table several times, I recall, and when Thomas Mann was there..."¹² The naivety of the last sentence is a heartbreaking proof of his incorruptible honesty: in the midst of the mental and physical sufferings of forced labour he tries to determine whether a few dinner invitations compromised him morally.
He speaks about his Jewishness in an often-quoted letter, which survived in his diary, and in which he justifies his refusal to contribute to a Jewish anthology to be compiled by Aladár Komlós. He recorded the letter in his diary on May 27, 1942.
"I never renounced my Jewishness, I still belong to that 'Jewish denomination' ... but I don't feel a Jew, I was never instructed in the religion, I don't need it and don't practice it, I find race, blood, roots and the ancient sorrow trembling in the nerves rubbish, things that don't define my 'intellect,' 'spirit' and 'poetry.' Even socially speaking I find Jews a community malgré lui."¹³ Later he adds: "My Jewishness is my 'life problem' because it was made one by ircumstances, by laws, by the world. It is a problem by necessity. Otherwise I'm a Hungarian poet, I have listed my relatives, and I don't care (only practically, 'lifewise') what the current Hungarian prime minister thinks about it..."¹⁴ And, as if to leave no room for doubt whether he is aware of what awaits him, he says: "And if they kill me? Even that won't change this."¹⁵ Untimely death, as a possible and likely outcome of the situation, appears as early as a 1937 letter fragment, written on August 24 to an unidentified person. The recipient-whom Ozsváth incidentally holds to be imaginary (p. 131)-asks "a Hungarian poet who has to be careful to save his skin" to give his opinion on the political situation. Radnóti rephrases the description: "You could just as well have put it this way: whose life is at stake."¹⁶
Which means Radnóti refused to acknowledge his Jewishness while being aware of having to share the fate of the Jews. István Vas also recalled that between them the topic of Jewishness "was a constantly returning cause of disagreement. Briefly, my position was that if one was born a Jew one only had two options left. One can either say 'I'm a Jew' or say 'I don't want to be a Jew'-I of course opted for the latter-but under no circumstances can one say 'I am not a Jew.' But that was what Miklós said: let Hitler and the whole world do whatever they will, he was not a Jew. Miklós was right in this too-as far as he was concerned, of course: he became the martyr of this truth. It is true he was killed as a Jew, but he didn't die as one: his last eclogues, elegies and razglednicas were not written by a Jew, and not by someone who wanted to be rid of Jewishness-these masterpieces of purity, sealed with blood, soar to heights where this yes or no question is not even heard."¹⁷
Typically, Radnóti represented the most sensible view on the issue of Jewishness. When an ultra-rightist poet, József Erdélyi, "accused" the then already dead Attila József with being half Jewish, and József's sister prepared to confute the statement with a birth certificate, Radnóti wrote in his diary: "nobody wrote or said anything about the heart of the matter. Attila was not half Jewish. And if he had been? Would that make him smaller? Would his work immediately lose its value, even its national value? Does no one think about this in connection with the whole issue? Are we really beyond recall?"¹⁸ The entry is dated February 7, 1943, and the last entry was made two months later: during the last eighteen months of his life he recorded nothing in his diary.

In the light of the above it seems important that Radnóti's poem "Nem tudhatom" (I Know Not What) was received with utter incomprehension, as many survivors later recalled. Gyula Ortutay describes a 1943 New Year's Eve party,¹⁹ and István Vas another meeting of January 7, 1944.²⁰ Those who knew him expressed their shock on both occasions that Radnóti should have chosen that particular moment to confess his love for his country. In her discussion of the anti-Semitism of the 1920s, Zsuzsanna Ozsváth points out that "the reaction of Hungarian Jews differed from that of their Central or Eastern European counterparts. In Czechoslovakia, Romania, Poland, or the Baltic States, national Jewish parties responded vigorously to the new anti-Jewish actions. In Hungary, however, there were no parties or organizations of similar significance. In Hungary the relationship between Jews and Christians had been defined for generations by the Jews' intensely patriotic attitude. Although there was some Zionist activity, by and large the Hungarian Jewish community had always wished to be seen as indisputably Hungarian" (p. 47). The writers István Vas, György Sárközi, Antal Szerb, Gábor Halász, Miklós Radnóti and a great many other known and unknown victims and survivors of the Hungarian Holocaust were at various stages of assimilation. (Antal Szerb for instance was born a Catholic.) Radnóti's standpoint was radical but consistent. This is what lends his death such an unsettling tension, and if it is a sacrifice, it is so because of this. In one of her most important paragraphs, Ozsváth comes to the conclusion that Radnóti's wish to belong among Hungarians had its roots in the core of his existence: "By the time he started to find his place in the ranks of the Hungarian literati, he was a Hungarian poet and considered no other country, no other emotional and cultural space, as his own. And there was a particularly urgent, almost desperate, edge from the beginning in his stance, stiffened by the constant slander racists heaped on the Jews, a slander which must only have intensified his strong drive 'to prove' both his patriotism and his 'rootedness.' He considered himself a scion of the great Hungarian lyric tradition, and any doubt, question, or rejection of his right to identify himself so was a threat to his very existence" (pp. 48-49).
This also means this biography does not confine Radnóti's poetry to the realm of interpretation outlined by the threat his Jewish origin meant. Yet it certainly provides a valid interpretation for the tragic basic motif of his lyric poetry, represented so emblematically by the title of his 1936 "Járkálj csak halálraítélt!" (Just Walk on, Condemned to Die!) But as for the horizon of Radnóti's lyric poetry, "wracked with concerns for the suffering Hungarians, he successfully 'transformed' his fear of anti-Jewish atrocities into visions of the universal struggle between good and evil, between progress and stagnation, between humanism and orthodoxy" (p. 113). And as for his personal fate, "Radnóti's refusal to acknowledge that he was a target in a grandscale pogrom revealed itself through his adherence to the myth of the grand cosmic struggle in which Good is perilously close to falling victim to the armies of Evil" (p. 178). Ozsváth's interpretation consistently situates Radnóti's lyric poetry in this force field. From this perspective the poet's death, though necessarily resulting from the horrible logic of the events, was nonetheless not inevitable. When she comes to discuss the Shoah, Ozsváth provides article numbers and statistical data, but rescue operations are no longer mentioned.
It is almost certain, however, that an episode in Radnóti's private life, which so far has almost wholly remained in obscurity, was an intensive act of relieving the unbearable physical and psychological terror of those years. Ozsváth's is the first biography to deal with Radnóti's affair with Judit Beck in 1941. Though István Vas alludes to it in Mért a vijjog a saskeselyű, Ozsváth is the first to actually speak about it, and very discreetly. She elegantly does not mention that this moment in Radnóti's life has been left in obscurity. On the other hand, she makes certain to emphasise that the interpretation of such great love poems of the Hungarian lyrical canon as Radnóti's Levél a hitveshez (Letter to My Wife) remains unaffected by this episode, making at most their gentle tone more sincere. On the basis of the diary entries of those months, Ozsváth uncovers the relationship, discusses its possible psychological motivations; analysing the love poems of 1941 and 1942 ( this time touching upon deeper layers of the text as well), she concludes that three of them, "Csodálkozol barátném..." (My Friend You Wonder...]) "Harmadik ecloga" (The Third Eclogue) and "Zápor" (A Gust of Rain), were probably written to Judit Beck. It is through an analysis of motifs that she distinguishes these poems from the others. She finds chiefly psychological explanations for how these three poems could possibly appear in the vicinity of "Együgyű dal a feleségről" (Silly Song about My Wife), "Két karodban" (In Your Arms), "Tétova óda" (Vague Ode) and other love poems to his wife. Radnóti scholarship will probably have something to say about this, yet it is to the credit of Ozsváth to speak about this issue with the same openness as about Radnóti's views on Jewishness.
This directness is characteristic of the tone of the book as well. The text suggests the impassioned delivery mode of a practising and proficient university lecturer. The first paragraph already speaks in the tone of a biographical novel, investing with narrative details the circumstances in which Radnóti was born: "The evening of May 5, 1909, did not differ from any other spring night in Budapest. As it deepened, darkness smudged the city's outline, blurring the silhouettes of the apartment buildings, the contours of the hills, the statues in the squares, the cobblestone sidewalks, the churches, and the bridges extending across the river. Now and then, the moon emerged from the clouds, throwing onto the Danube a trembling shimmer" (p. 1). Yet the paragraph ends in an index number which sends the reader to an endnote, wherein we learn that Ozsváth went to the bother to check the publication of the Hungarian Royal National Meteorological Institute for weather conditions in Budapest on Radnóti's day of birth. Chapters on Radnóti's life are written in this narrative tone, while historical-sociological discussions are presented in the more objective idiom of essay writing. This is unusual for academic writing, the mixing of styles does not always pass easily. But it is as if Ozsváth wished to alternate between styles to emphasise the irresolvable ambiguity of Radnóti's life.
This nicely presented book is unfortunately remarkably rich in typographical and spelling errors. Printers were especially hard on Hungarian diacritic marks. Such an abundance of misspelled proper names and inconsistencies undermines the scholarly credibility of the whole volume, which would be a great loss. The serious research and scholarly achievement manifest in this book deserves more careful work from the publisher. Even so, Zsuzsanna Ozsváth's book not only raises a monument worthy of the poet, but has also provided literary history with new perspectives for interpreting Radnóti. We can take it for granted that some critics and academics will argue against these perspectives, but this alone will contribute much to a more detailed and clearer view of Radnóti.

1. Miklós Radnóti: Foamy Sky: The Major Poems of Miklós Radnóti, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1992.
2. Miklós Radnóti: The Complete Poetry. Ann Arbor, Ardis, 1980.
3. Emery George: The Poetry of Miklós Radnóti: A Comparative Study, New York, Karz-Cohl, 1986; Marianna D. Birnbaum, Miklós Radnóti: A Biography of His Poetry, Munich, Veröffentlichungen des Finnish-Ungarishen Seminars an der Universität München, 1983.
4. George Gömöri and Clive Wilmer (eds.): The Life and Poetry of Miklós Radnóti: Essays, New York, Columbia University Press, 1999.
5. George Szirtes: The Photographer in Winter, London, Secker and Wartburg, 1986, p. 51.
6. András Gerevich (ed.): The British Council's Translation Competition Budapest-Tihany 2000, Budapest, The British Council, 2001, pp. 30-34
7. Radnóti Miklós: Napló, Budapest, Magvető Könyvkiadó, 1989, p. 14.
8. Geoffrey H. Hartmann: "On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies," New Literary History, Vol. 26., No. 3, Summer 1995, pp. 537-563.
9. John Bayley: "John Berryman: A Question of Imperial Sway," In: Robert Boyers (ed.), Contemporary Poetry in America. New York, Schocken Books, 1974, pp. 64-65.
10. Schein Gábor: "A csúf anya és az antikvárius emlékezet," (The Ugly Mother and Antiquarian Memory), Pannonhalmi Szemle, 9: 3, 2001, pp. 98-104.
11. Radnóti, Napló, p. 220.
12. Ibid., p. 259.
13. Ibid., p. 210.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid., p. 211.
16. Ibid., p. 22.
17. Vas István: Mért vijjog a saskeselyű? (Why Does the Vulture Scream?), Budapest, Szépirodalmi Könyvkiadó, 1981, Vol. II, p. 177.
18. Radnóti: Napló, p. 277.
19. Ortutay Gyula: Fényes, tiszta árnyak (Gleaming, Pure Shades), Budapest, Szépirodalmi Könyvkiadó, 1973, pp. 231-232.
20. Vas: ibid. Vol. I, p. 352.