Mihaly Babits

Mihaly Babits Poems

Mihaly Babits Biography

Mihály Babits (November 26, 1883, Szekszárd – August 4, 1941) was a Hungarian poet, writer and translator. Babits was born in Szekszárd. He studied at the University of Budapest from 1901 to 1905, where he met Dezső Kosztolányi and Gyula Juhász. He worked to become a teacher and taught at schools in Baja (1905 – 1906), Szeged (1906-1908), Fogaras (1908 – 1911), Újpest (1911), and Budapest (1912 – 1918). His reputation for his poems in the literary life started in 1908. He made a trip to Italy in the same year, which made him interested in Dante; he made several other trips in later years. This experience led him to translate Dante's Divine Comedy (Hell, 1913, Purgatory, 1920, and Paradise, 1923). Briefly after the Hungarian Revolution of 1919 he became a Professor of Foreign Literature and modern Hungarian literature at Eötvös Loránd University, but was soon removed for his pacifism after the revolutionary government fell. In 1911, he became a staff writer on the magazine Nyugat. In 1921 married Ilona Tanner, who later published poetry under the name Sophie Török. Two years later he moved to Esztergom. In 1927 he became a member of the Kisfaludy Társaság (Kisfaludy Society) and in the same year he was made a trustee of the Baumgarten Prize. He became the editor-in-chief of Nyugat in 1929 (sharing the role until 1933 with Zsigmond Móricz), a position he held until his death. In 1937, he was diagnosed as having laryngeal cancer. He died in Budapest in 1941. Babits is best known for his lyric poetry, influenced by classical and English forms. He also wrote essays and translated much from English, French, German, Greek, Italian, and Latin.)

The Best Poem Of Mihaly Babits

Jonah’s Prayer

Words have become unfaithful things to me,
or else am I an overflowing sea,
goalless and hesitant, without a shore.
Vain words, articulated once before,
I carry like dikes, or signposts made of wood,
torn hedges carried by a straying flood.
Oh if the Master only would provide
a bed for my brook’s current and thus guide
my steps on sheltered pathways toward the sea;
if only He would carve a rhyme for me,
a ready-made rhyme, I would avail myself,
for prosody, of the Bible on my shelf,
so that like Jonah, lazy servitor
of God, we hid from Him and later bore
not three brief days or months of agonies,
but three long years of even centuries,
when he went down into the living Fish,
in dark hot torments more than he would wish,
I too, before I disappear, might find
in an eternal Whale whose eyes are blind
my old accustomed voice, my words arrayed
in faultless battle order; as He made
His whispers clear, with all my poor throat’s might
I could speak out, unwearied till the night,
so long as Heaven and Nineveh comply
with my desire to speak and not to die.

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