Sándor Weöres was a Hungarian

Hungary

Hungary , officially the Republic of Hungary , is a landlocked country in Central Europe. It is situated in the Carpathian Basin and is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine and Romania to the east, Serbia and Croatia to the south, Slovenia to the southwest and Austria to the west. The...

 poet

Poet

A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...

 and author

Author

An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...

.

Born in Szombathely

Szombathely

Szombathely is the 10th largest city in Hungary. It is the administrative centre of Vas county in the west of the country, located near the border with Austria...

, Weöres was brought up in the nearby village of Csönge

Csönge

Csönge is a village in Vas County, Hungary. The earliest known reference to the village was in 1429 under the name Chenge....

. His first poems appeared when he was nineteen, being published in the influential journal Nyugat

Nyugat

Nyugat , was the most influential Hungarian literary journal in the first half of the 20th century. Writers and poets from that era are referred to as "1st/2nd/3rd generation of the NYUGAT"....

("West") through the acceptance of its editor, the poet Mihály Babits

Mihály Babits

Mihály Babits was a Hungarian poet, writer and translator.- Biography :...

. Weöres attended the University of Pécs

University of Pécs

The University of Pécs is the Hungarian university with the largest number of students and faculties.-History:...

, studying law first before moving on to geography and history. He ultimately received a doctorate in philosophy and aesthetics. His doctoral dissertation The Birth of the Poem was published in 1939. It was in 1937 that he made the first of his travels abroad, going first to Manila

Manila

Manila is the capital of the Philippines. It is one of the sixteen cities forming Metro Manila.Manila is located on the eastern shores of Manila Bay and is bordered by Navotas and Caloocan to the north, Quezon City to the northeast, San Juan and Mandaluyong to the east, Makati on the southeast,...

 for a Eucharistic Congress and then visiting Vietnam

Vietnam

Vietnam – sometimes spelled Viet Nam , officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam – is the easternmost country on the Indochina Peninsula in Southeast Asia. It is bordered by China to the north, Laos to the northwest, Cambodia to the southwest, and the South China Sea –...

 and India

India

India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

. During World War II

World War II

World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

 Weöres was drafted for compulsory labor, but was not sent to the front. After the end of the war, he returned to Csönge and briefly lived as a farmer.

In 1948 Weöres again travelled abroad, residing in Italy

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

 until 1949. In 1951 he settled in Budapest

Budapest

Budapest is the capital of Hungary. As the largest city of Hungary, it is the country's principal political, cultural, commercial, industrial, and transportation centre. In 2011, Budapest had 1,733,685 inhabitants, down from its 1989 peak of 2,113,645 due to suburbanization. The Budapest Commuter...

 where he would reside for the rest of his life. The imposition of Stalinism

Stalinism

Stalinism refers to the ideology that Joseph Stalin conceived and implemented in the Soviet Union, and is generally considered a branch of Marxist–Leninist ideology but considered by some historians to be a significant deviation from this philosophy...

 in Hungary after 1948 silenced Weöres and until 1964 little could be published.

Work

Weöres' translations into Hungarian were wide and varied, including the works of Ukrainian

Ukraine

Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...

 national poet Taras Shevchenko

Taras Shevchenko

Taras Hryhorovych Shevchenko -Life:Born into a serf family of Hryhoriy Ivanovych Shevchenko and Kateryna Yakymivna Shevchenko in the village of Moryntsi, of Kiev Governorate of the Russian Empire Shevchenko was orphaned at the age of eleven...

, the Georgian

Georgia (country)

Georgia is a sovereign state in the Caucasus region of Eurasia. Located at the crossroads of Western Asia and Eastern Europe, it is bounded to the west by the Black Sea, to the north by Russia, to the southwest by Turkey, to the south by Armenia, and to the southeast by Azerbaijan. The capital of...

 poet Rustaveli

Rustaveli

Rustaveli may refer to:* Shota Rustaveli , a Georgian poet* Rustaveli Avenue in Tbilisi, Georgia named after the poet* Rustaveli Theatre, a drama theatre in Tbilisi named after the poet...

, the Slovenia

Slovenia

Slovenia , officially the Republic of Slovenia , is a country in Central and Southeastern Europe touching the Alps and bordering the Mediterranean. Slovenia borders Italy to the west, Croatia to the south and east, Hungary to the northeast, and Austria to the north, and also has a small portion of...

n poets Oton Župančič

Oton Župancic

Oton Župančič was a Slovene poet, translator and playwright.Župančič is regarded, alongside Ivan Cankar, Dragotin Kette and Josip Murn, as the beginner of modernism in Slovenian literature...

 and Josip Murn Aleksandrov

Josip Murn Aleksandrov

Josip Murn, also known under the pseudonym Aleksandrov was a Slovene symbolist poet. Together with Ivan Cankar, Oton Župančič, and Dragotin Kette, he was regarded as one of the beginners of modernism in Slovene literature...

. He also translated Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis and Henry VIII, T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot

Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...

's The Waste Land, the nonsense poems by Edward Lear

Edward Lear

Edward Lear was an English artist, illustrator, author, and poet, renowned today primarily for his literary nonsense, in poetry and prose, and especially his limericks, a form that he popularised.-Biography:...

 and Lewis Carroll

Lewis Carroll

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson , better known by the pseudonym Lewis Carroll , was an English author, mathematician, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer. His most famous writings are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, as well as the poems "The Hunting of the...

, the complete poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé

Stéphane Mallarmé

Stéphane Mallarmé , whose real name was Étienne Mallarmé, was a French poet and critic. He was a major French symbolist poet, and his work anticipated and inspired several revolutionary artistic schools of the early 20th century, such as Dadaism, Surrealism, and Futurism.-Biography:Stéphane...

. His translation of the Tao Te Ching

Tao Te Ching

The Tao Te Ching, Dao De Jing, or Daodejing , also simply referred to as the Laozi, whose authorship has been attributed to Laozi, is a Chinese classic text...

 continues to be the most widely read in Hungary.

Legacy

Many of Weöres' poems have been set to music. The Hungarian composer Zoltán Kodály

Zoltán Kodály

Zoltán Kodály was a Hungarian composer, ethnomusicologist, pedagogue, linguist, and philosopher. He is best known internationally as the creator of the Kodály Method.-Life:Born in Kecskemét, Kodály learned to play the violin as a child....

 composed a choir on the poem Öregek (Old People) of the 14 years old poet, György Ligeti

György Ligeti

György Sándor Ligeti was a composer of contemporary classical music. Born in a Hungarian Jewish family in Transylvania, Romania, he briefly lived in Hungary before becoming an Austrian citizen.-Early life:...

, a friend of the poet, set several poems from Rongyszőnyeg and other books in the composition Síppal, dobbal, nádihegedüvel

Síppal, dobbal, nádihegedüvel

Síppal, dobbal, nádihegedüvel is a song cycle by György Ligeti on poetry by Sándor Weöres. The work is scored for mezzo-soprano and an unusual ensemble of percussion and wind instruments...

. Composer Peter Eötvös

Peter Eötvös

Péter Eötvös is a Hungarian composer and conductor.Eötvös was born in Odorheiu Secuiesc/Székelyudvarhely, Szeklerland, Transylvania . He studied composition in Budapest and Cologne. From 1962, he composed for film in Hungary. Eötvös played regularly with the Stockhausen Ensemble between 1968 and...

 has composed two pieces, Atlantis and Ima, with texts from Weöres' poem Néma zene ("Silent Music").

In 1980 the Hungarian filmmaker Gábor Bódy

Gábor Bódy

Gábor Bódy was a Hungarian film director, screenwriter, theoretic, and occasional actor. A pioneer of experimental filmmaking and film language, Bódy is one of the most important figures of Hungarian cinema.- Biography :...

 adapted the poem Psyché to make the epic feature Nárcisz és Psyché.

Poetry

• Hideg van, 1934.
• A kő és az ember, 1935.
• A teremtés dicsérete, 1938.
• Meduza, 1944.
• A szerelem ábécéje, 1946.
• Elysium, 1946.
• Gyümölcskosár, 1946.
• A fogok tornáca, 1947.
• Bóbita, 1955.
• A hallgatás tornya, 1956.
• Tarka forgó, 1958.
• Tűzkút, 1964.
• Gyermekjátékok, 1965.
• Merülő Saturnus, 1968.
• Zimzizim, 1969.
• Psyche, 1972.
• Télország, 1972.
• Priapos, written in 1950, published posthumously in 2001.