The horse in folk poetry. From the answers to the first Survey of the Romanian Language Museum

Poems written in imitation of the motifs and melodies of Scottish folk-songs take an eminent place in Burns's literary heritage. The poet's interest in and acquaintance with the Scottish songs was determined by different biographical and historical factors. Burns recorded and transformed the Scottish folk-songs in different ways and forms: sometimes the poet made only slight alterations in the text of the songs, sometimes he changed the structure of the song by adding new stanzas to it or by reducing it, sometimes he took only some elements of the previous song (the title, the chorus, one or several lines etc.) and created a new song, sometimes he made quite original songs based on folklore and traditional images etc. There is an evident connection between the lyric and the music in Burns's songs. The poet would never write the lyric until he had made himself completely familiar with the melody. Burns was well acquainted with the life of simple people and with their spiritual world. It helped him to penetrate into the very essence of folk-song and to catch its main features: simplicity, unaffected beauty, spontaneity and humaneness. He differs from many folk-song collectors of his time, who didn't consider folk poetry as such but tried to revise it in the spirit of literary laws. Burns absorbed the very idiom of the folk-songs and transmitted them as if he himself were an anonymous popular bard. Burns has managed to infuse into his songs different folk elements. He knew how to recreate lyric, humorous and heroic aspects of the folk-songs, their poetic imagery and genuine folk feeling. At the same time they bear the stamp of his own personality. They reflect his social and moral principles, his poetic vision of life.

In the review article the theories of the Arabic origin of West European chivalrous poetry were analyzed. The article deals with the problem of the direct interaction between Arabic and European literary traditions, in particular, the probability of the impact of the Arab-Spanish strophic poetry on Provencal troubadour's lyrics and the possibility of the influence of Andalusian poetry on Spanish and Provencal. So that it is established that al-Andalus was a multilingual society in which the Andalusi Romance dialects were spoken and written alongside Arabic. In Europe, and from scholars working in departments of modern national languages, this usually means the discussion of what it means to write in Middle English, or German, or French instead of Latin. The Andalusian poets could easily convey in Romance the motives and themes inherent in Arabic classical literature, and with the help of the Arabic language they expressed elements of Roman folk poetry. The analysis of various researches showed that the issue of the historical and geographical formation and development of Arab-Spanish poetry during the Middle Ages were studied by Arab and European sceintists of past centuries, as well as by the modern literary scientists. Modern studies of the Arab-Spanish medieval stanza do not deny the existence of an interaction between European and Arabic lyrics, but the role of this interaction on the scale of the history of world literature remains unclear. Lyrics of the troubadours of the 11th–14th centuries was a unique synthesis of many literary elements of church Latin poetry, folk poetry and Arab influences, and strongly influenced on the history of Italian, Spanish, English, Portuguese, German literature.

The goal of this research lies in the analysis of romantic motifs and corresponding poetic images in the works of the prominent Turkish ashik of the XVII century Karacaoğlan, as well as in determination of the nature of interaction of the folklore and his original tradition therein. The article employs literary text analysis, as well as the method of description and comparison. Using the specific examples, the author examines the key motifs of Karacaoğlan’s romantic lyrics (praise and admiration of the beauty of the beloved; infidelity of the beloved; separation; doubting the feelings of the beloved, etc.), and the imagery system associated with these motifs: a nightingale, rose, grus, a “burning heart”, a “wounded soul”, landscape sketches (snowcapped mountains, light breeze, etc.). Analysis is also conducted on the artistic means of creating the portrait of a beauty: her face, eyes, eyebrows, hair, manner of walking, clothes, and accessories. Literary works of the Turkish ashik Karacaoğlan have not previously become the object of separate research within the Russian science, which detfines the novelty of this article. The conclusion is made that the traditions of folklore and Diwan (Sufi) poetry are organically intertwined in the works by Karacaoğlan, which determines the specificity of poetics of ashik literature not only of the XVII century, but also the entire time continuum. This study contributes to clarification of the typology and poetics of ashik poetry, as well as the nature of interaction of the folklore and the author’s individual tradition within a single work.

The poetry of distant country with different culture and language is always distinctive and fascinating. Chinese and Romanian belong to Sinitic languages of the Sino-Tibetan language family and Romance languages of the Indo-European language family, which have relatively different syntax and general imagery of literature. Therefore, in this study, we make an attempt that was rarely involved in previous poetry generation research, using modern Chinese as the carrier, and generating modern poetry with Romanian style based on pre-trained model and direct preference optimization. Using a 5-point grading system, human evaluators awarded scores ranging from 3.21 to 3.83 across seven evaluation perspectives for the generated poems, achieving 76.2% to 91.6% of the comparable scores for the Chinese translations of authentic Romanian poems. The coincidence of the 30th to the 50th most frequently occurring poetic images in both generated poems and Romanian poems can reach 58.0–63.3%. Human evaluation and comparative statistical results on poetic imagery show that direct preference optimization is of great help in improving the degree of stylization, and the model can successfully create Chinese modern poems with Romanian style.