The Root
Power glides in the root,
drinking rain, living in the earth,
and its fantasy is white snow.
It rises and breaks through the soil,
it crawls along secretly.
Its arm is like rope.
On the root’s arm a worm sleeps
and a worm sticks to its leg.
The world is rotten with worms.
But the root goes on living below.
It is the branch, laden with leaves,
that it lives for, not the world.
This is what it feeds and loves,
sending exquisite tastes up to it,
sweet tastes out of the sky.
I am a root myself now,
living among the worms.
This poem is written down there.
I was a flower. I became a root.
A lid of black earth locks me in.
The workers on my life are done.
A saw wails over my head.
—Miklós Radnóti (1909-1944 )
from Clouded Sky
Translated from the Hungarian by Steven Polgar,
Stephen Berg, and S.J. Marks.
The Sheep Meadow Press (2003 revised edition)
COMMENTARY
Radnoti, a Hungarian Jew, was murdered by Nazi sympathizers while on a death march; it appears his scribbling
poems was the last straw for one of the guards in charge of shooting the stragglers. When his wife retrieved his body from a mass grave, she found the notebook in which he composed poetry on the death march. Many of the poems written then are translated in Clouded Sky, a testament to enduring humanity.The poem “Root” bears witness to the poet’s clear-eyed vision of what was happening to him; it is analytically complex and has the completeness of great poetry; it is the opposite, then, of the imperial fantasies of his temporal masters. The poem recapitulates basic symbolisms of the analogical-participatory world view with great finesse.
“The imperial style, deveoped to perfection by Hegel, is in general characteristic for the modern egophanic revolt against Reason in its ideological varieties and subvarieties. Beyong the individual cases of existential disorder, the style becomes a public grostesque when, with the lapse of time, the social scene fills up with little emperors who each claim to be the possessor of the one and only truth; and it becomes lethal when some of them take themselves seriously enough to engage in mass murder of everyone who dares to disagree.” Eric Voegelin, Published Essays 1966-1985 (Collected Works, Vol 12,) 285.