44th National Táncház Festival & Fair • 4–6 April 2025
Issue:
Starting page: 40
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Writings From the Past: An article on Hungarian folk poetry written by Babits Mihály (the Hungarian poet, writer and translator of Dante’s Divine Comedy). Published in Pesti Napló on June 25th, 1918, it is a three part argument against the following statement made by Schöpfl in Aladár in relation to a collection of miltary folk songs of the time: “Folk song is drowning. The new folk poetry is, in essence, half-educated or the work of completely uneducated, uncultivated people.” Babits writes: “A city person has studied a lot about culture, but also lost and forgot so much, when he forgot the ancient traditional life of his own people. The ancient, ancestral primitive life, the ancient word and culture has been preserved by the village people. Folk poetry springs forth from this culture.”