Variations of intertextuality: the poetry of Mihály Babits

Abstract

Titolo dell’articolo in italiano: Variazioni dell'intertestualità: la poesia di Mihály Babits

Poet, writer, translator (e.g., Dante’s Comedy) and author of a History of European Literature (1936, It. 2000), Mihály Babits (1883-1941) is among the most influential figures of the 20^th-century Hungarian literature. With an intense commitment to the study of multiple literary traditions in their original languages, he landed on two manifestly modern poetic experiments: intertextuality and intermediality. The present study explores how, with his exceptional scholarship, Babits adopted a type of intertextuality that simultaneously alludes to literary texts from different eras and different poetic styles, and how the resulting tapestry (made up of sometimes anachronistically ironic entanglements and juxtapositions) anticipates postmodern works. In a forthcoming article, «Experiments with Intermediality in the Early Poetry of Mihály Babits», I will analyze the even broader references by which Babits poetry constructs allusions to nonverbal media i.e., paintings, sculptures, and buildings.