The Mythopoetics of Sándor Weöres

My presentation investigates the evolving modalities of rewriting and recontextualizing Akkadian, Jewish, Ancient Greek, and Christian myths within the oeuvre of Sándor Weöres, a preeminent figure of 20th-century Hungarian poetry. These processes are inextricably linked to the poet’s prolific activity as a literary translator. In the 1930s, the pursuit of reconstructing a universal tradition materialized as a synthesis of Platonist readings of Greek tragedies, the translation and rewriting of the Gilgamesh and the re-interpretative methodologies of Romantic poetry applied to archaic folk texts. Until the mid-1950s, Weöres’s mythopoetics was grounded in two primary models: the depersonalizing and space-constituting operations of Orphic objectivity, and an allegorical composition derived from mythic fragments—a method he predominantly employed to revitalize the formal discourse of Greek choral lyrics. The defining characteristics of this period include innovative rhythmic experimentation, a profound impulse to return to the (ostensibly extra-European) origins of dramatized text types, and the systematic establishment of the conditions for a decentralized poetic discourse. Furthermore, in his mythologically grounded texts, Weöres accorded a privileged role to female subjectivities and interrogated the permeability between voices marked by diverse gender indices. In the 1960s, Weöres radically reformulated his mythopoetics in the poem Salve Regina, interweaving the aesthetic findings of his Mallarmé translations with the poetic appropriation of key metaphors and spatial configurations found in Gnostic scriptures. To facilitate a communion with the transcendent, the poem juxtaposes mythic fragments held in mutual tension and utilizes stylized, defamiliarized, and syntactically complex poetic structures that diverge significantly from the registers of colloquial language.