Bálint Balassi

• 1. Introduction

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  Bálint Balassi was born on the 20th of October 1554 in Zvolen, in the Kingdom of Hungary, a land where soldiers and scholars were sometimes the same person. He wrote poetry in nine languages: Latin, Italian, German, Polish, Turkish, Slovak, Croatian, Magyar, and Romanian. He fought the Turks as an officer at the fortress of Eger, married his own cousin, converted religions under duress, and died from a cannonball wound at the siege of Esztergom-Víziváros in 1594. His manuscripts circulated for generations without ever being printed. The questions his life raises are worth sitting with. How does a Renaissance soldier become the founder of modern Slovak lyric and erotic poetry? What kind of love drives a man to pursue a married woman with gifts and verses for years? And why did it take nearly three centuries for his poems to reach the page?

• 2. A Soldier's Education

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  Peter Bornemisza, the reformer, shaped Balassi's early mind, alongside his mother Anna Sulyok, described in the sources as a highly gifted Protestant zealot. From 1565 onward, Balassi studied in Nuremberg, absorbing the intellectual currents of the Reformation from a city at their center.

  His first published work emerged not from ambition but from compassion. His father, Joannes Balassa, had gone into Polish exile, and Balassi translated Michael Bock's Wurtzgärtlein für krancke Seelen, which translates roughly as Little Herb Garden for Sad Souls, to comfort him. That translation was published in Kraków. It was an act of filial devotion dressed as literary work, and it set the tone for a life in which private feeling and public action were never entirely separate.

  When his father was rehabilitated, Balassi accompanied him to court and was present at the coronation diet held in Pressburg, today's Bratislava, which served as the capital of Royal Hungary at the time, in 1572. Shortly afterward, he enlisted and took up his post at Eger, the fortress in North-Eastern Hungary where he would encounter the force that would drive much of his poetry.

• 3. Anna Losonczi

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  At Eger, Balassi fell violently in love with Anna Losonczi, the daughter of the captain of Temesvár. His verses make clear that the feeling was mutual. But when her first husband died, she gave her hand to Kristóf Ungnád instead.

  Balassi only began to grasp the depth of his attachment after losing her. He sent gifts and wrote verses, a sustained campaign of longing that she refused. She remained, as the sources put it, true to her pique and to her marriage vows. The poems that came out of this rejection were not merely grief but the material from which he built a lasting literary reputation.

  The frustration of that love did not exhaust itself quickly. Balassi enshrined Anna Losonczi in what the sources call immortal verse, and the pursuit of an unattainable woman became one of the organizing themes of his poetry. The captain's daughter who chose another man left a deeper mark on Hungarian literature than she could have imagined.

• 4. Captivity and Conversion

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  In 1574, Balassi was sent to join the camp of Gáspár Bekes, to support him against Stephen Báthory. His forces were scattered before they arrived, and Balassi himself was wounded and captured. His captivity lasted two years, and it was not especially harsh. During that time he traveled with Báthory, and was present when Báthory was crowned King of Poland.

  His return to Hungary followed the death of his father. In 1584 he married Krisztina Dobó, the daughter of István Dobó, commandant of Eger. She was also his cousin. The marriage brought immediate legal trouble. Her relatives pursued him through the courts with what the sources describe as greed, nearly ruining him in the process.

  In 1586, under pressure from those persecutions, Balassi converted to Catholicism. His wife's relatives turned this against him, spreading the slander that he and his son had embraced Islam. After deserting his wife and navigating years of legal entanglement, he spent time at the Jesuit College of Braunsberg. He returned to Hungary in 1591, somewhat disappointed, according to the sources, after a spell in Poland where the anticipated war with Turkey had not materialized.

• 5. The Balassi Strophe

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  Balassi's poems sort into four categories: hymns, patriotic and martial songs, original love poems, and adaptations from Latin and German. Across all of these, he was working in a structure of his own invention.

  The strophe that carries his name consists of nine lines arranged in the pattern a a b c c b d d b. Three rhyming pairs alternate with a single rhyme that falls on the third, sixth, and ninth lines, tying the whole stanza together. It is a demanding form, one that requires a poet to sustain two interlocking rhythmic schemes at once.

  That he developed this form while writing in nine languages, while soldiering, while pursuing Anna Losonczi with gifts, while fighting legal battles with his wife's relatives, makes it stranger and more impressive. His manuscripts circulated among readers for generations after his death. They were never printed during his lifetime. It was not until 1874 that Farkas Deák found a copy in the Radványi library and brought the work into print for the first time.

• 6. Death and Remembrance

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  Balassi died on the 30th of May 1594. A cannonball struck his leg during the siege of Esztergom-Víziváros, and the wound killed him. He was buried in Hybe, in what is today Slovakia, the same country where he had been born.

  The Bálint Balassi Memorial Sword Award was established in 1997 by Pál Molnár. It is presented annually to an outstanding Hungarian poet and to a foreign poet recognized for excellence in translating Hungarian literature, including Balassi's own work. The prize keeps his name in circulation among working poets today, nearly four and a half centuries after his death.