Chapter 6

“How Others See …”

Miklós Radnóti’s poem “How Others See …” is often recited in Hungary as a poetic expression of patriotism, a prayer for a victimised nation. Carrying out a stylistic analysis of one translation and comparing it to two others and the original, more textual evidence was found in favour of a humanistic pacifist interpretation than the standard patriotic reading, both at the level of structural patterns and of intertextual pointers. The poem contains a pattern of contrasts between the landscape as seen by the war pilot from above and the internal landscape viewed by the poet from below. The lexical choices of the translation analysed modify attitudes to the landscape and to the war in constructing identities, and argue for only individual innocence.