Frontiers in Comparative Metrics 2, in memoriam Lucyllae Pszczołowskae (April 19–20, 2014, Tallinn University, Estonia)

Abstract

The second international conference on comparative prosody was organised by the Department of Cultural Theory of Tallinn University and the Department of Classical Philology of the University of Tartu and held in Tallinn in April 2014. The first such conference took place in Estonia in 2008, and was devoted to the memory of the prominent Russian scholar Mikhail Gasparov (1935– 2005); the proceedings were published three years later (Lotman & Lotman 2011). The present conference was devoted to the memory of another important representative of international verse studies, the Polish scholar Lucylla Pszczolowska (1924–2010). The main topics of the conference included verse theory and methods of verse analysis, frontiers in Indo-European and Fenno-Ugric prosody as well as non-European poetic systems, the poetics of written and oral texts, cognitive poetics, and the analysis of the verse structures of translated texts and their originals. The keynote speakers were Nigel Fabb (University of Strathclyde, U.K.), Tomas Riad (Stockholm University, Sweden), and Paul Kiparsky (Stanford University, USA). The conference was opened by Nigel Fabb’s talk, “Lines and other layers of the poetic text: their differentiated formal, aesthetic and psychological properties”. The speaker developed Roman Jakobson’s distinction between verse design (resp. verse instance) of the poet and delivery design (resp. delivery instance) of the reciter (Jakobson 1960: 366–367), and explored whether metrical verse in performance, when line boundaries are not cued auditorily, is experienced differently from prose in performance. According to Fabb, the surface forms are nevertheless heard relative to the distinct lines required for the formal processing of the metrical verse (a phenomenon sometimes described as “metrical tension”). Tomas Riad delivered a talk on the prosodic metrics of Tashlhiyt Berber songs, in which he silently opposed Jakobson’s bold statement “that versification cannot be deduced in its entirety from a given language” (Jakobson 1923: 118), and analysed the prosody of Berber songs in line with the assumptions of “phonological” metrics, where metre is derived directly from language Studia Metrica et Poetica 1.2, 2014, 144–157