Mihály Babits - Creative Imitation
Mihály Babits: Creative Imitation 1 Written in the June of 1938 Creative imitation . - No matter how much of a death-sentence this is on today’s literary market: I have to confess, that I too have imitated foreign writers. But not while unaware of it, like how everyone is usually under someone’s influence, at least in the beginning, because the act of self-creation and immaculate conception could be counted as a miracle. No, I imitated consciously and on purpose! All my effort went into being perfectly akin to my selected model, or at least akin to the image of them that lived in my mind. My only excuse could be the fact that this image hardly resembled the original. Because I imitated a bunch of writers who I’ve not read. As soon as I read them, it was possible that I didn’t find them interesting any more. But as long as only a name remained – mostly a pretty, elegant and enigmatic foreign-sounding name – and if I only read newspaper articles and heard fragmentar...