NEITHER MEMORY NOR MAGIC- A documentary about Miklos Radnoti- Directed and Produced by Hugo Perez- Narrated by Patricia Clarkson. Sneak Preview- Benefit for Bowery Arts and Science the non-profit wing of the Bowery Poetry Club, - 9/28 8pm at the Bowery Poetry Club, 308 Bowery, New York. $10-25 sliding scale
When the Hungarian poet Miklos Radnoti was executed and buried in a mass grave in 1944 after a two-month death march, he did not know whether his poems would survive. Eighteen months later, when his body was exhumed, a notebook was found in his coat pocket that contained his final poems. Neither Memory Nor Magic tells the story of a man who believed in the life of his poems even when he knew that he himself would not survive.
Director Hugo Perez will present to discuss the project after the screening.
Here is the opening section of
Radnoti's poem "Forced March,"
translated by Emery George.
The man who, having collapsed, rises, takes steps, is insane;
he’ll move an ankle, a knee, an arrant mass of pain,
and take to the road again as if wings were to lift him high;
in vain the ditch will call him: he simply dare not stay;
and should you ask, why not?; perhaps he’ll turn and answer;
his wife is waiting back home, and a death, one beautiful, wiser
and the poems ends:
Don’t go pass me, my friend—tonight the moon is so round!
shout! and I’ll come around!
M30A FilmsMiklós_Radnóti Wikipedia
