Poetry
Balassi Bálint versei
Not translated into English
Bálint Balassi · 1590
Synopsis
A book of poems that the author himself arranged and numbered, on the model of Petrarch, aiming at the symbolic number of one hundred pieces. It follows the poet's love affairs, addressed to several women, Júlia and then Célia in particular, between adoration and despair, songs of the soldiers of the border fortresses, such as “Vitézek, mi lehet”, and a few religious songs, remnants of another book that he kept apart. The collection is divided into a Hungarian part and a Polish part.
Context
The autograph of the collection is lost. It is known only through a copy made around the 1660s, whose back bears, in an eighteenth-century hand, “Balassi Bálint verseinek fragmentumi”; the copyist left out the pieces already printed, and leaves are missing. Farkas Deák discovered this manuscript, known as the Balassa-kódex, on 21 August 1874 in the library of the Radvánszky castle, at Radvány, during a congress of the Historical Society. Péter Kőszeghy and Géza Szentmártoni Szabó published the critical edition in 1994.
Who it is for
About a hundred short pieces, in sixteenth-century Hungarian; individual poems are translated into English in the online Babel anthology.
Prizes and reception
Its author is held to be the first great lyric poet in the Hungarian language, and the stanza he invented bears his name.
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