The Enlightened Judas: the "New Testament" Cycle of Anton Vodnik

Abstract

The paper deals with a corpus of poems with New-Testament motifs from an unfinished poetry collection by Anton Vodnik, Talitá, kumi, that was published recently in the second volume of his collected works (Zbrana dela). The question of defining the literary trend is left aside and instead the matter of Vodnik's poetry of revelation in the poems, which he prepared through a spiritualized poeticization of eros in the first two collections, is concentrated upon. His poeticization in the "New-Testament cycle" reaches its zenith in the image of Judas Iscariot, who loses the traditional characteristisc of Christ's betrayer and becomes, like Christ himself, an image of revelation otherness.