NATIONAL PECULIARITIES IN APPROACHING THE CLASSICS: THE CASE OF CATULLUS WITH HUNGARIAN MODERNISM

The Greco-Roman Classics form a body of texts that belong indisputably to world literature, yet they are often left outside the scope of comparative literature because of their ambiguous relationship to the concept of national literature. This article describes the current situation of academia in which the comparative approach to the Classics is limited and tests the possibility of regarding them as a code or a language of comparison. The attitudes of various national literatures towards the Classics in different historical periods are revealing not only of ancient literary traditions but also about modern ones, and provide a solid basis for comparison. The second part of the article discusses the presence of Catullan poetry in Hungarian modernist literature as a case study. Roman poetry was invoked mostly by some progressive circles of the interwar literary field to promote the development of various linguistic facets of the modernist poetic discourse. This example shows how the Classics enter the world literary space through national literatures’ active involvement with them.