The Eclogues of Miklós Radnóti: A twentieth-century Vergil

Takács, László (2013) The Eclogues of Miklós Radnóti: A twentieth-century Vergil. Acta Antiqua, 53 (2-3). pp. 311-322. ISSN 0044-5975

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Abstract

At the beginning of the 19th century, when the poets wanted to create the national epic poem of Hungarians, they followed the Aeneid; at the end of the 18th century, when the agricultural reform was established in Hungary under the Habsburgs, the poets wrote agricultural poems in Vergilian form and translated and modernized his Georgics. The world of Vergil depicted in the Eclogues and in the Georgics became the idealized Arcadia, and poets and writers or the aristocracy — influenced by Vergil — wanted to create their own Arcadia. The pastoral theme and the bucolical forms were very popular in Hungarian literature of this period, at the end of the 18th century. The poets had pastoral names, and very different topics were expressed in eclogues (e.g. actual events of politics). In the first half of the 20th century Vergil had a new renaissance connected to the bimillennium of his birth. And this renaissance reached the most expressive element of the presence of Vergil’s Bucolics in the poetry of Miklós Radnóti (1909–1944), whose eclogues are the most tragic expression of cruelty of war. My paper focuses on the influence of Virgil’s Bucolics in Radnóti’s poetry, but his examples can attest to the deep influence of Vergil on Hungarian literature.

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