János Batsányi's Early Translations of Ossianic Poems

'The Death of Oscar’

Abstract

The translation of "The Death of Oscar" is János Batsányi's second Ossianic work published in Magyar Museum (1788/1789), and the only one among the altogether seven extant fragments in which he experimented with the hexametric form. Although two Hungarian scholars of Ossian in the early 20th century, Gusztáv Heinrich and Sándor Maller, do point to Michael Denis's rendering as a possible source, the critical editors of Batsányi's complete works, Keresztury and Tarnai, believed the poem could not be found among Denis's Ossianic translations and thus located two German prose translations as source-texts. This paper, besides offering an explanation of why Batsányi chose this poem, aims to prove through a close textual analysis that the main source for his translation was Denis's Latin hexametric poem, "Mors Oscaris." As the textual analysis shows that even if Batsányi, despite his own established rules of translation, followed Denis almost verbatim, he did enrich and paraphrase the original and probably made the poem more available to the Hungarian reader.