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MELINDA SEBŐK
Augustine to the present day, has provided opportunity for various ways of
interpretation in its search for the justification of subjectively transformed
variants of any given authorial experience of faith. György Rönay’—the most
versatile lyricist of the third generation of Nyugat’—belonged, in his thinking,
to the modernizing masters of Hungarian Catholic poetry. He possessed the
most classical taste of his generation of poets, while his literary horizon was
wide enough to include the most modern surrealist-expressionist poetry. As
an intellectual lyricist, he was able to compound the neoclassicism of Babits*
with the surrealist vision in his colourful poetic world. As a true “poeta
doctus”, he acquired the erudition of various eras and cultures. Experientially,
he harmonised the literature of earlier periods with contemporary art. His
exemplary career can be regarded as traditional modernity, that is, the
synthesis of classicism and modernity. As he explained in his critique of
Babits’s literary translations, published in the review Nyugat: poetry was
a “moment of grace” for him. In The Faith of Babits (Babits hite), an essay
theologically discussing Babits’s notion of classicism, he quotes Babits’s
confession of faith describing his internal doubts and struggles: “I was born
a Catholic; it was in the halls of that religion where I met and wrestled with
God; it was Catholicism that gave body, colour and words both to my doubts
and to my most mystical hopes. I could not keep these colours and words
external to my writings: but lyric and religious confessions are different.”®
The differentiation between literary and denominational selves is discussed
by Pilinszky’® as well, a contemporary of Rénay: when stating that “Iam a poet
anda Catholic”, he intends to picture the interrupted nature of the theological
tradition of interpretation in literature.
In the thinking of Rónay, faith and literature form an indivisible unit; he
calls attention to the parallel deliberation of theological and literary-aesthetic
ideas in his essay, On Issues of Our Modern Catholic Literature (Modern
katolikus irodalmunk kérdéséhez): "Concerning whether a poet is Catholic or
not, only one definitive principle is acceptable: namely, whether the experience
György Rönay (1913-1978) was a Hungarian poet, writer, literary translator, essayist, literary
critic, literary historian, and member of the third generation of the seminal review Nyugat.
He translated much from French.
Nyugat (“West,” 1908-1941) was an important Hungarian literary journal in the first half of
the 20th century.
Mihaly Babits (1883-1941) was an epochal Hungarian poet, writer and literary translator,
and an editor of Nyugat. He also wrote essays and translated much from English, French,
German, Greek, Italian, and Latin. His poems were also translated into several languages.
5 György Rónay, Babits hite (Ihe Faith of Babits), in Pók, Lajos (ed.), Babits Mihály száz
esztendeje (Mihály Babits s hundred years), Budapest, Gondolat, 1983, 412.
János Pilinszky (1921—1981) was a Hungarian poet, His poems were translated into several
languages. Most notably, his English translator was Ted Hughes, while most French
translations were made by his friend Pierre Emmanuel.
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