János Garay

This article is about the poet János Garay. For the fencer see János Garay (fencer) .

János Garay (born October 10, 1812 in Szekszárd , † November 15, 1853 in Pest ) was a Hungarian poet.

Life

Statue of János Garay in Szekszárd (1898)

János Garay was the son of a family of petty aristocracy in Szekszárd. His parents led a more middle-class life: the father was a respected trader. He attended his schools in Szekszárd and Pécs , and began studying in Pest. First he studied medicine , later he switched to philology . At the age of 21 he wrote for various magazines and is considered the first well-known professional journalist in Hungary. He married for the first time in 1836, but his wife, Márta Pap, died after six months. In 1837 he married Mária Babocsay. In 1838 he went to Pressburg , where he got a job with a newspaper editor. In 1839 he returned to Pest. From then on he lived in Pest with brief interruptions: in 1845 he found a job at the university library and wrote for the Budapesti Napló newspaper, among others . His last years were marked by illness-related ailments. He suffered from severe gout and became almost blind. In 1850, three years before his death, he was appointed professor of the Hungarian language. Since 1839 he was a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and since 1842 a member of the Kisfaludy Society .

In 1898 a statue of János Garay designed by Ferenc Szárnovszky was unveiled in Szekszárd .

His poetry

In the early 30's he began to write romantic poems. A poem in hexameters about Johann Hunyadi was his first major lyric publication.

Formed through a thorough study of German masterpieces and stimulated by Vörösmarty's poetry, he wrote several dramas, mostly historical ones , among which Arbocz (1837) was particularly appealing. As a playwright, however, his successes were moderate. His strengths were shown in ballads , epics and folk tale adaptations. Among other things, he processed legends from the region of his hometown Szekszárd and from Lake Balaton .

Worth mentioning are the epics Csatár (1834), the legend Bosnyák Zsófia , the poetic story Frangepan Kristófné and the historical poem Szent Laszló (Erlau 1850, 2nd vol .; 2nd edition, Pest 1853).

His best-known work is the epic about János Háry (published in 1843), which is entitled Az obsitos (The Veteran). Its stories were also known through Kodály's Singspiel Háry János and the Háry János Suite . The first half of this poem is written in the verse form of the Nibelungenlied , the second according to the accentuating principle , which was particularly common among Hungarian poets.

He showed himself to be a more talented ballad poet in his cycle of historical ballads, published under the title: Árpádok (Pest 1847, 2nd ed. 1848). His lyric poems Balatoni Kagylok (Pest 1848, Erlau 1851) are also very much appreciated. His stories appeared in Pest in 1845.

Franz Ney organized a complete edition of his poems (Pest 1854, 5 vols.); Kértbeny (2nd edition, Vienna 1857) published a selection of these in German translation. József Ferenczy wrote his biography (Pest 1883).

literature

• Constantin von Wurzbach : Garay, Johann . In: Biographisches Lexikon des Kaiserthums Oesterreich . 5th part. Typogr.-literar.-artist publishing house. Establishment (L. C. Zamarski & C. Dittmarsch.), Vienna 1859, pp. 87-89 ( digitized version ).
• Garay János from. In: Austrian Biographical Lexicon 1815–1950 (ÖBL). Volume 1, Publishing House of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna 1957, p. 402 f. (Direct links on p. 402 , p. 403 ).

Web links

• János Garay in A Pallas Nagy Lexikona (Hungarian)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Garay János-szobor on kozterkep.hu