Babits Mihály

Babits Mihály (1883 to 1941) was one of the central figures of twentieth-century Hungarian literature: a poet, novelist, and translator, and for many years the editor of the literary review Nyugat. Számadó records him among György Rauscher’s sitters (/bibliography#szamado-2019, pp. 17-33).

Who he was

Babits was a poet of formal mastery and moral seriousness, the author of the novel A gólyakalifa and the long poem Jónás könyve, and the translator who gave Hungarian its standard version of Dante’s Divine Comedy. As editor of Nyugat he was, for a generation, the gatekeeper of Hungarian literary life. Nyugat is also where the critic Rabinovszky reviewed Rauscher in 1927 (see /publications/nyugat).

The connection to Rauscher

Rauscher’s portraits of the Budapest literary world are one of the defining strands of his Hungarian years (see /biography/hungarian-years), and Babits is named among his sitters in Számadó’s survey.

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