The Poetics of Transformation: Ovid’s Metamorphoses as Thematic Inspiration, Model of Mythologization and Poetic Model in the Poetry of Sándor Weöres

Abstract

The Metamorphoses is one of the most productive and complex intertext in the poetry of Hungarian poet Sándor Weöres. This paper addresses some models of complex rewriting of the Ovidian text in the 1950s, analysing the radical poetic rewriting of the Ovidian metaphors, mythical prosopopeias and the poetic figures of metamorphosis in Weöres’ poetry. The epic mythological poems of that decade (Medeia, Minotauros, Orpheus) connect and contrast fragments of the disparate mythic narratives of the characters. The textual and narrative discontinuity and the mixture of epic, lyric and dramatic discourses allow to read these poems as a simultaneous experiment with transformation and interchange of the dramatic functions of the characters, dissolving and establishing the borders of their identity, testing the capacity of the co-reading of contrasting and distant mythologems. Ovid’s characteristically ironic move from admiring the beauty to a distinctly rapacious love of having, the reciprocity of the distant characters’ narratives and the poetical utilization of the sonority (the metaphorisation of the sound, and the out of control of the own speaking, invoking the voice at the moment it is lost) are very fruitful for the Echo (1954).