HUNGARIAN STUDIES 11. No. 1. Nemzetközi Magyar ... - EPA

FROM CAIN TO NAHUM: SHIFTS AND CHANGESIN RADNÓTIS POETIC VISIONZSUZSANNA OZSVÁTHSchool of Arts and HumanitiesThe University of Texas at Dallas, Texas,U.S.A.The impact of the scene in which the twelve-year-old Radnóti learned aboutthe circumstances of his birth was hard and painful. 1 Magnifying its effect wasanother confrontation three years later, in which he discovered that, besideshis mother, his twin brother died on that night as well. Jolted to the core, theboy searched for ways to reorient himself, to find a "rationale" for so muchsuffering, for so much "injustice," for the spell death cast on his life.And he did so, eventually. Muting the factuality of those ghosts and blurringtheir shapes, he learned to manipulate them in his poetic imagination. In thisway, he found the freedom to search for legends which would help himunderstand what happened in terms of ancient, magical beliefs in guilt andsacrifice. The story of Cain and Abel, with its powerful sweep of emotional andritualistic elements, came to his aid. Embracing it, he generalized the dramaticnarrative and came to view his life as marked by guilt and weighed down by thecurse cast upon him for the murder of his mother and brother, a guilt and acurse through which he conceptualized, and by which he interpreted, the eventsof his birth. In this way, both became part of his identity. Out of them, hispersonal ethos and his moral struggles emerged, affecting, in turn, his experientialresponses and his self-image, shaping his awareness and perceptions alike. 2The imbrication of this primal, symbolic tale with his own life determined,however, not only Radnóti's psychic processes and intellectual development,but also his poetry. It inspired his imaginative structures, and it interplayedwith his other prominent themes. In certain poems only its fragments orinversions appear, arising in fleeting images or slivers of thought; but in othersthe legend emerges full-blown, manifesting the entire line of the rich mythicdrama by which Radnóti stored and worked out the events that surroundedhis birth.He explored them one by one in his prose piece "Gemini", letting thepersona repeat the words that had haunted him since his youth: "You killedthem. You killed them, you kill-ed th-em, you killed them." 3 The voice stuttersHungarian Studies lSjl (1996)0236-6568/96/$ 5.00 © 96 Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest