Fraternity-Testvériség, 1955 (33. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)

1955-11-01 / 11. szám

16

TESTVÉEISÉG

The Canadian translator remarks that “the verse is rough-hewn but frequently attains power and a sense of reality.”16 One may add that while Zrínyi is given to moralizing, nonetheless he succeeds in characterization. His male and female characters alike are plausible, his portrayal of the contrast of a Christian and a Mohammedan woman convincing; so are the battle scenes, the suspense that carries the story along and certain questions which are implicit in the plot and answered by the words and acts of the central character. The atmosphere is consistent with the traditions of the heroic epic. Zrínyi violates the Aristotelian concept of “concrete completeness,” yet his epic leaves little doubt about his narrative ability. On the whole, despite imitations, the Zrinyiász is dominated by the creative personality of the poet himself. The irrational elements contribute to the magic effect, and the primacy of Christian and national motives serves the voice of human agents who stand out as representatives of a conflict where taste and style illustrate the rhetorics and simplicities of a civilization in which complications are not to be mistaken for complexities. The descriptive parts affirm the nobility of the subject matter; they also show a range of understanding in which common and heroic material, ephemeral and eternal longings support the ordinary and unusual aspects of the plot.

Zrinyi’s lyrical poems, modelled after Italian examples, communicate somewhat artificially and in the indirect manner of the Secentismo, his feelings as a lover, father and man of faith and good faith. His epigrammatic verses are concisely expressed tributes to Hun and Hungarian heroes.

IV.

“Zrinyi’s sense of form cannot be compared with Tasso’s. But in a way his work is unique. The author himself is an epic hero. Let us imagine the Iliad as if written by Achilles, or the Aeneid by the child Ascanius, whom his father saved from burning Troy, or that Alexander the Great himself should have recorded his military expedition to India. Something like that happened in the creation of the Zrinyiász.” 17 The rather ingenious observation of the Hungarian literary historian would not be a sufficient reason for our perusal of Zrinyi’s epic. There is a literary reason, namely “Zrinyi’s talent of having raised dull and literal chronicles to the artistic plane of an epic poem.”18

The politically minded Hungarian poet, conscious of the ebb and flow of every nation’s history, sensed with the insight of a creator that much sublime literature is inspired by ill fortune;

16 Ibid., p. 38.

17 Antal Szerb, op. cit., p. 136.

18 János Horváth, MAGYAR VERSEK KÖNYVE (Budapest, 1937), p. XV.

there are periods when confusion reigns supreme and only the poet extracts order from disorder. It is to be regretted that we possess very little of Zrinyi’s correspondence. “Most of it is lost, and there are few written personal documents which wmuld unfold his intimate thoughts and feelings.”19 But Zrinyi was a poet, therefore his creative writings count as personal documents; as a poet, he resolved his subjective problems in a seemingly objective form. His isolation was not that of a recluse who appreciated seclusion, but of a creative individual in an age of incessant hostilities.

In his collection of critical essays on European literature Ernst Robert Curtius states that “the essence of Vergil is as untranslatable as that of Dante.”20 A translator of Zrinyi’s epic does not meet with such unsolvable difficulties. But it would be a mistake to presuppose that the not very elaborate structure of his work would make the translation easy. No translation is independent of the difficulties with wdiich the original poem confronts it. Zrinyi’s epic presents an added difficulty to a translator, an unalterable vitality, an eluding reality and magnitude, which no translation can faithfully reproduce. His ornate sentences or strained style are, of course, defects; these shortcomings or contradictions, which one immediately detects, may be more accentuated in a translation. The epic’s associational elements produce for the Hungarian reader moods which would escape the foreign reader in a literal translation.

The Zrinyiász is not “a tragedy in epic dress like the Iliad.” 21 But the main argument is stated with tragic implications, and with some power. It has what E. M. W. Tillyard, the English literary scholar, defines as the essential epic requirements, i. e. “high seriousness, amplitude, controlled organization, and choric or representative spirit.”22 The work is comparable with the heroic epic Osman by Ivan Gundulic, the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century Southern Slav poet, who tells about the struggle of the Poles with the Turks, defending Europe and Christendom. The Croatian literary historian, Franjo Trognancic, finds in the Ragusan poet qualities which seem to overshadow those of the Hungarian poet. A detailed examination of Zrinyi and Gundulic on a comparative basis is still to be written. At this point it should be valid to refer to

19 Sándor Takáts, RÉGI MAGYAR ASSZONYOK (Budapest, 1914), p. 79.

20 Ernst Robert Curtius, KRITISCHE ESSAYS ZUR EUROPÄISCHEN LITERATUR (Bern, 1951), p. 23.

21 Bryllion Fagin, FREEDOM AND THE TRAGIC LIFE (The Hopkins Review, 1953), Baltimore, Maryland, Vol. VI., Number 3-4, p. 212.

22 J. C. Ghosh, THE ENGLISH EPIC AND ITS BACKGROUND (Contemporary Review, 1954), London, Number 1064, p. 125.