AUC Philologica (Acta Universitatis Carolinae Philologica) is an academic journal published by Charles University. It publishes scholarly articles in a large number of disciplines (English, German, Greek and Latin, Oriental, Romance and Slavonic studies, as well as in phonetics and translation studies), both on linguistic and on literary and cultural topics. Apart from articles it publishes reviews of new academic books or special issues of academic journals.
The journal is indexed in CEEOL, DOAJ, EBSCO, and ERIH PLUS.
AUC PHILOLOGICA, Vol 2021 No 4 (2021), 57–66
The Poetics of Transformation: Ovid’s Metamorphoses as Thematic Inspiration, Model of Mythologization and Poetic Model in the Poetry of Sándor Weöres
Mária Bartal
DOI: https://doi.org/10.14712/24646830.2022.12
published online: 24. 05. 2022
abstract
The Metamorphoses is one of the most productive and complex intertext in the poetry of Hungarian poet Sándor Weöres. This paper addresses some models of complex rewriting of the Ovidian text in the 1950s, analysing the radical poetic rewriting of the Ovidian metaphors, mythical prosopopeias and the poetic figures of metamorphosis in Weöres’ poetry. The epic mythological poems of that decade (Medeia, Minotauros, Orpheus) connect and contrast fragments of the disparate mythic narratives of the characters. The textual and narrative discontinuity and the mixture of epic, lyric and dramatic discourses allow to read these poems as a simultaneous experiment with transformation and interchange of the dramatic functions of the characters, dissolving and establishing the borders of their identity, testing the capacity of the co-reading of contrasting and distant mythologems. Ovid’s characteristically ironic move from admiring the beauty to a distinctly rapacious love of having, the reciprocity of the distant characters’ narratives and the poetical utilization of the sonority (the metaphorisation of the sound, and the out of control of the own speaking, invoking the voice at the moment it is lost) are very fruitful for the Echo (1954).
keywords: Sándor Weöres; Ovid; Metamorphoses; Orpheus; Echo; Medeia; literary criticism; classical studies; 1950s literature
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The Poetics of Transformation: Ovid’s Metamorphoses as Thematic Inspiration, Model of Mythologization and Poetic Model in the Poetry of Sándor Weöres is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
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