Elective Affinities. The Journal Nyugat and Hungarian Cultural Memory
Elective Affinities. The Journal Nyugat and Hungarian Cultural Memory

Summary/Abstract: In his Nyugat essay on Rilke (1909), after drawing a portrait of his subject, Dezsô Kosztolányi finds it necessary to illustrate what he has said: I’ll quote a poem here in Hungarian; it is for months that I carried the burden of this poem with me wherever I went, on evening walks, on travels, on aimless loitering; I kept repeating it in my mind and in my heart until once in a fifteen-minute span of listless indolence it gave itself up to form and demanded a voice in my mother tongue. And then he quotes the poem “Du bist der Arme, du der Mittellose” from Das Stunden-Buch in his excellent translation. During that long period of gestation, when seemingly nothing was being done to the foreign text, the unconscious was busily doing its own work of appropriation until the poem unexpectedly rose in front of the translator as the perfect rendering of the original in another language.

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