The Modern Adaptation of the Orpheus Myth in the Poetry of Veno Taufer
The Modern Adaptation of the Orpheus Myth in the Poetry of Veno Taufer

Summary/Abstract: In Greek legend Orpheus is a pre-Homeric poet, said to have lived before the Trojan War. His story is well known from the Roman poets Virgil and Ovid, who have contributed to Orpheus’ standing as a source of inspiration for many authors and works of world literature and other arts, from the opera to, for example, painting (cf. Frenzel 1992: 603– 608). Slovenian literature is no exception. The earliest vestiges of classical myth may be discerned even in the folk poetry of the Early and High Middle Ages and in ecclesiastical literature from the 16th to the 18th centuries. Subsequently, the reception of Greco-Roman mythology may be traced through the periods of the baroque, enlightenment, and romanticism down to the modern and post-modern Slovenian literature of the 20th and 21st centuries (see Kos 2003). It is no coincidence that it was the key figure of the Slovenian literary canon, the romantic poet France Prešeren, who laid the foundations for the whole subsequent reception of classical myth in Slovenian poetry. The main impulse “given by Prešeren to the Slovenian reception of classical myth has been the subjective appropriation, conversion, and interpretation of the myths – with ever new literary, mental and ideological approaches, to be sure, but always on the basis of identifying a given mythical character or event with the fate of the present-day subject, be it personal or poetic, individual or collective” (ib. 156).

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