Cherishing Hungary's Heritage [antikvár]

Miklós Radnóti: HOW OTHERS SEE... How others see this region, 1 cannot understand: to me, this little country is menaced motherland with flames around, the world of my childhood swaying far, and I am grown from this land as tender branches are from trees. And niay my body smk into this soil in the end. When plants reach out towards me, I greet them as a fnend and know their names and flowers. I am at home here, knowing the people on the road and why and where they are going - and how I know the meaning when by a summer lane the sunset paints the walls with a liquid flame of pain! The pilot can't help seeing a war map from the sky, can't teli below the home of Vörösmarty Mihály; what can he identify there? grim barracks and factories, but I see steeples, oxen, farms, grasshoppers and bees; his lens spies out the vitai production plants, the fields, but I can see the worker, afraid below, who shields his labour, a singing orchard, a vineyard and a wood, among the graves a granny mourning her widowhood, and what may seem a plánt or rail line that must be wrecked is just a signalhouse with the keeper standing erect and waving his red flag, lots of children around the guard, a shepherd dog might roll in the dust in a factory yard, and there's the park with the footprints of past loves and the flavour of childhood kisses - the honey, the cranberry I still savour; and on my way to school, by the kerbside to postpone a spot-test one certain morning, I stepped upon a stone: look! there's the stone whose magic the pilot cannot see, no mstrument would merge it in his topography. True, guilty we all are, our people as the rest, we know our faults, we know how and when we have transgressed, but there are blameless lives here of toil and poetry and passión, and infants alsó, with growing capacity for compassion - they will protect its glow while in gloomy shelters till once more our land is marked by the fingéi" of peace: then they will respond to our muffled words with new voices fresh and bright. Spread your great wings above us, protective cloud of night. January 17, 1944 Translated by Thomas Ország-Land