The Poet and the Woman

Miklós Radnóti (1909-1944) was a major Hungarian poet of the interwar period and Holocaust. Like his various volumes of poetry, the prose in this collection also combines traditional and modern themes and styles-and often produces unexpected results. Radnóti studied at what is today the University of Szeged and, in 1935, published his dissertation on the work of the novelist and poet Margit Kaffka (1880-1918). Born into a Jewish family in Budapest, Radnóti also spent time in France and Czechoslovakia before World War II. After periods of forced labor in Ukraine and Serbia, he was executed near Győr on one of the death marches in 1944.This set of pre-war prose pieces spans a wide variety of settings, from peasant huts in Hungary to a bohemian nightclub in Venice, and from a ceramics studio to airports and battleships. The forms of the stories range from fables to triptychs of naturalistic vignettes, from spare, conversational narratives to a silent drama. As always, Radnóti’s emphasis is on emotions and people, whether they are writers, grieving children, booksellers, prostitutes, porters, or apprentices. More than anything, these are stories of lovers and love, dogged, irrepressible, illusion-free, and content-or at least natural.John K. Cox, the translator, is a professor of East European History at North Dakota State University.