Bilingual Poem Research Articles

Selected 10 Bilingual Poems: luck of the draw; widowed; the old woman; love and breath; Edeilweiss áo dài; colonization of the Vagina; the dark space under the bed; my first April thirtieth; reversed sub-thoughts; seeing Gram

Selected 10 Bilingual Poems: luck of the draw; widowed; the old woman; love and breath; Edeilweiss áo dài; colonization of the Vagina; the dark space under the bed; my first April thirtieth; reversed sub-thoughts; seeing Gram

Dérimer la lettre bilingue de Grâce de Dieu (Guillaume de Digulleville,Le Pèlerinage de l’âme, vers 1593 à 1784). Jean Galopes et ses mises en prose française et latine d’un morceau de bravoure

Between 1422 and 1427, Jean Galopes adapted Guillaume de Deguileville’s Pèlerinage de l’âme (14th c.) into prose before translating his own French prose into Latin. These concatenated rewritings suggest that, during the 15th century, using prose was still a meaningful option. Indeed, while adapting Deguileville’s octosyllables, Galopes meddles with them more than when he translates his own French prose into Latin. His prose renderings of the highly sophisticated bilingual poem inserted by Deguilleville into his Pilgrimage shed light on his procedure: Galopes has abbreviated, dropped images and brought out underlying connexions. Such changes attest to his awareness of the specific potentials of prose, used for conveying moral teaching since the 13th century.

Mobile Texts and Local Options: Geography and Editing

The seeming opposition between local and mobile texts has guided, in sometimes inadvertent ways, our methods for editing works often defined by the notion of fixity — of lectiones and/or material structures — or its absence. This essay investigates two examples of the interplay between remarkably fixed local options and the mobility of textual transmission: Raimbaut de Vaqueiras’s parodic, bilingual debate poem Domna, tant vos ai preiada and Francesco Petrarca’s ballata Donna mi vene spesso ne la mente and his madrigal Or vedi, Amor, che giovenetta donna, both of which are emblematic of compositional and compilational strategies in the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta.

Of Earth You Were Made: Constructing the Bilingual Poem “Erþ” in British Library, MS Harley 913

The bilingual version of the mortality lyric “Erthe upon Erthe” preserved in the Kildare Manuscript (BL, Harley 913), edited and translated here, is the only known copy to alternate between Middle English and Latin stanzas. The article demonstrates that while each Latin stanza translates the preceding Middle English stanza, the translation also substitutes new poetic devices and alters the visual layout of the poem to emphasize different aspects of this multivalent poem. In addition to encouraging readers to meditate on these nuances, the bilingual poem also lent itself to being incorporated into sermons in both English and Latin.

The prologue to the gloss on the Sachsenspiegel – A bilingual poem as a document of transition

Article The prologue to the gloss on the Sachsenspiegel – A bilingual poem as a document of transition was published on August 1, 2013 in the journal Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte: Germanistische Abteilung (volume 130, issue 1).

Fuzziness and Perceptions of Language in the Middle Ages

This is the final part of a three-part essay on fuzziness in medieval literary language. Each part corresponds broadly to Clifford Geertz's trifold instances of blur as involving “face-to-face interaction” (“life as game”), “collective intensities” (“life as stage”), and “imaginative forms” (“life as text”). Part 3 considers what Geertz might mean by describing text as a “dangerously unfocused term,” through discussing how bilingualism is negotiated in poetry. Three areas of vagueness are explored: the linguistic boundaries in a bilingual poem, the definition of a poem in the trilingual culture of insular medieval writing, and the relationship between literary and ordinary language. Examples are taken from a fifteenth-century bilingual carol, an early fourteenth-century trilingual poem, a bilingual sermon, a passage of love-writing discovered in the midst of a fifteenth-century legal roll, and finally a pair of French poems about the death of the English commander, Thomas Montagu, fourth earl of Salisbury, at the English siege of Orléans in 1428, contrasted with some English translations of poems by Charles d'Orléans. The essay argues that blurriness in medieval bilingualism gives us a fresh way of approaching primary questions about poetry and the literary.

West-East Divan: The Poems, with “Notes and Essays”: Goethe’s Intercultural Dialogues by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Book Reviews Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. West-East Divan: The Poems, with “Notes and Essays”: Goethe’s Intercultural Dialogues. Translated by Martin Bidney. Binghamton, NY: Global Academic Publishing, 2010. Pp. liii+468. $30.95. Entirely in the ludic mode of the author of the West-dstlicher Divan (1819, revised and expanded, 1827), the American poet Martin Bidney has journeyed east ringing the questing bell of his own caravan, issuing call and response to his brother Goethe and Goethe’s adoptive “twin,” the fourteenth-century Persian ghazalist Hafiz of Shiraz, in both translation and independent verse. This translation sets a new standard for Goethe’s Divan. Set alongside Bidney’s wit and concision, the prosody of John Whaley, whose 1974 bilingual Poems of the West and East: West-Eastern Divan [West-dstlicher Divan] (3rd ed., 1998) had greatly improved upon ear­ lier attempts, often feels stuffily overdressed. One of Goethe’s sauciest, but wisest, strophes: Trunken mussen wir alle sein! Jugend ist Trunkenheit ohne Wein; Trinkt sich das Alter wieder zu Jugend, So ist es wundervolle Tugend. Fur Sorgen sorgt das liebe Leben Und Sorgenbrecher sind die Reben. which found its finest musical adequation in Hugo Wolf’s lied bacchanal in ripping 6/8 time, becomes a real party-pooper in Whaley’s hands: To drunkenness all of us must incline! Youth is drunkenness less the wine; Age may its youth in drinking renew, Wonderful virtue so to do. Dear life for cares enough will care, And the grapes will all our cares repair. Bidney blows the dust offthe bottle, and we rediscover a nice 1819 Goethe that dances idiomatically on the happily tipsy English-language tongue: Drunk is what all of us ought to be! Youth’s being drunk without wine, you see? SiR, 52 (Summer 2013) 311 312 BOOK REVIEWS If age can drink itself back to youth, That’s wonder-virtue, too, in truth. Dear life brings worry all the time— A worry-breaker is the vine. (125) This is the tavern scene as Goethe—and Hafiz (“Wine! bring me wine, the giver of mirth!” Hafiz exults in Gertrude Bell’s delightful rendering of “From the Garden of Heaven,” one of his Divan1s early ghazals)— imagined it: the poet’s praise of the Qur’anic wine served up in Prophet Saki’s overflowing flasks, life’s weighty anxieties lifted in the light oenoatmosphere . Gone the ponderous nominal abstractions (“drunkenness”), moralisms (“must incline”), pedanticisms (“so to do”), and archaisms (“all our cares repair”). Enter the naive spirit-consumer in search not of ideas but immediate experience (“drunk”), toasting to jussive verbs (ought to be) and insisting on dialogue with his fellow revelers (“you see?”). The exam­ ples could be multiplied. At 474 pages, this is a brick of a book and includes a good deal more than “only” a translation of Goethe’s Divan. For readers not well ac­ quainted with the Divan, it offers a semester’s worth of instruction, begin­ ning with a thirty-page scholarly essay on Goethe’s relationship with Islam and including reflections on the postcolonialist theory of “Orientalism” of which Goethe has been sometimes unfairly accused. Bidney further offers his own divan in twelve books that imitate and reflect on Goethe, which he calls “Commentary Poems for Goethe’s West-dstlicher Divan” (289—468). He “comments” on the first strophe of the drinking song quoted above as follows: “Enivrez-vous!” urged Baudelaire— Emphatic he, and hortatory— “Get drunk!” On what? He didn’t care, If it but led from gloom to glory. thereby hinting at an apt connection between Baudelaire and Goethe in their use ofprovocative, often erotic or ostensibly heretical, themes and the official bourgeois outcry over it. Several of the poems in Baudelaire’s 1857 Les Fleurs du mal were famously censored by the Ministry of the Interior, Public Safety division, a condition that held for nearly a century in France; Goethe’s Divan was cited in certain quarters as evidence that the seventyyear -old had at last gone senile, a response only somewhat less outraged than at the publication just a few years before of his adulterous, partner­ swapping novel Wahlvenvandtschajicn [Elective Affinities], Sidney’s commen­ tary poems deserve the...

Otro poema bilingüe de José María Arguedas

Uno de los aspectos menos estudiado de la obra de Arguedas es la parte dedicada a la poesía, castellana y quechua, que el escritor peruano compuso de manera circunstancial y apelando a contextos y sentimientos relacionados con su propia realidad. El presente trabajo rescata y contextualiza un poema bilingüe de José María Arguedas titulado «Gabicha» y dedicado a su amiga Gabriela Heinecke. El texto permaneció inédito hasta el año 2000, publicado por Anita Kelley en una revista norteamericana de estudios prehispánicos, y se reedita ahora en castellano, con un estudio introductorio en el que se analiza la transcripción del documento original, las diferentes traducciones, la relación de Arguedas con los protagonistas o el destinatario del texto.

Poetry in translation: A comparative study of Silversteins monolingual and bilingual (English to Persian) poems

Bilingual translations are as important as monolingual ones and can have many advantageous in different dimensions of literature, translation, education and other areas of study. But they are more difficult than monolingual translations, particularly in literary work, such as poem, novel, short story and etc. Translating literary text, particularly poetry is a difficult process as it includes different figures of speech and literary devices and conveys metaphorical and figurative concepts beyond its literally meanings. Difficulties of understanding poet's style and message for the translator is in one hand and techniques of translating poetry and figures of speech which are not appropriate for all types of poems is in another hand. In this article, Silverstein's monolingual and bilingual short poems (English to Persian) were studied on the basis of Newmark (1988) poetry's translation techniques to evaluate qualities of translations and answer these two research questions: 1) Was the qualification of Stein's bilingual poems as well as his monolingual poems in Iran? 2) Were the same translation techniques used in both monolingual and bilingual poems of Stein? The cause of selecting Stein's poems was that his poems have many acceptable Persian translations and also have many followers in Iran. Firstly an introduction on bilingual translation was stated which includes poetry in literature and poetry in translation. Next is the methodology used, followed by results and discussion of the acquired data, and finally conclusion. Key words: Poetry, translation, bilingual poems, monolingual poems, Silverstein.

German–Hebrew Encounters in the Poetry and Correspondence of Yehuda Amichai and Paul Celan

In 1969, Paul Celan visited Jerusalem, where he was hosted by Yehuda Amichai. After Celan returned to his home in Paris, they exchanged two letters. But this does not exhaust the correspondence between them. As this paper shows, Amichai’s conversation with Celan—in a broad sense of the term—began long before they met and continued through his last book, Open, Closed, Open . Interrogating the concept of a poetic encounter or a correspondence in poetry, I argue that the basis for the dialogue between Celan and Amichai was their shared German–Hebrew bilingualism. The paper deals with previously unpublished bilingual poems from the Yehuda Amichai Archive at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University and shows how these materials correspond both with Celan’s poetry and with Amichai’s published work.

Romance in the Age of Cybernetic Conviviality: Hsia Yü's Pink Noise and the Poetics of Postcolonial Translation

In 2007, acclaimed Taiwanese postmodern poet Hsia Yü published a transparent book of bilingual poems generated mostly from weblogs (in English) and from a computer translation program (in Chinese). The book, Pink Noise (now available on Amazon), has ignited enthusiastic responses among Hsia Yü's "lay readers" in Taiwan, but like many other postmodernist works from a postcolonial context, has not yet received much critical attention. The essay begins with the question of locating or localizing Hsia Yü's postmodernism in postcolonial, post-Martial-Law Taiwan, reading the form of layered transparency and the play with (artificial) language and (machinic) translation not as a free play of signifiers or equivalent of concrete or conceptual art but as a realistic representation of digital (uneven) globalization. Reading Hsia Yü's bilingual poems closely through Lacan's theory of alienation and Wittgenstein's ideas on nonsense, the essay shows that the English/Weblish and the Chinese/Translationese can be read as different kinds of language games which are signposts to the questions concerning the status of English as a global language, the loss and love of translation in a postcolonial context, the return from narratology to a musicology of poetry, and the tremendously rich "nonsense" that happens when two heterogeneous and disparagingly hegemonic national languages meet. In conclusion, Pink Noise , unlike modernism with its implicit claim to whiteness, trans-lates negative dialogics into a convivial romance of poetry.

A Bilingual Poem by Ḥāfiẓ

A Bilingual Poem by Ḥāfiẓ

Multilingual Poetry Therapy

Poetry Therapy can have even greater clinical impact when used in the native language of the patient. Childhood emotions and early trauma, intellectualized when examined solely in nonnative English, can be vividly summoned through the childhood language. The use of bilingual editions of poems can evoke important emotional material while at the same time providing a structure through rhyme, rhythm and the use of metaphor. The rhyme and rhythm and phonetic associations, essential components of the full impact of the poem, are not fully reproducible in the English translation, but can be captured in bilingual versions. The tension between freedom of expression, raw emotions and highly organized structure, a basic characteristic of Poetry Therapy, is superbly exemplified through the use of bilingual poems.

Men, Women, and Boys: Love and Sex in the Works of SA ‘DI

Comprising some 900 pages in the Furughi edition, the works of Sa'di include a variety of genres. The Kulliyyat (Complete Works) opens with six “Risalahs” (Homilies), containing orthodox religious and moral teachings. The homilies precede the worldly and anecdotal “Gulistan” (Rose Garden) and the more profound and spiritual “Bustan” (Orchard)--Sa'di's best known works. Next are the “Qasa'id” (Elegies, or Odes) in Persian and Arabic, the “Marasi” (Thronodies), and the “Mulamma'at” (Bilingual poems in Persian and Arabic). The “Tarji'at” (Strophe Poems), the “Tayyibat” (Sweet Poems), the “Badayi’” (Cunning Odes), the “Khavatim” (Gems), and “Ghazaliyyat-i qadim” (Old Sonnets)--altogether 300 pages in the Kulliyyat--consist mostly of love poems, covering the whole gamut of this emotion from the secular love of women and boys to the mystical love whose object is union with the divine. Miscellaneous shorter pieces appear at the end of the Kulliyyat under the headings “Sahibiyyah,” “Masnaviyyat” (Couplets), “Qata'at” (Short Poems), “Ruba'iyyat” (Quatrains), and “Mufradat” (One-liners).

The Infancy of Man in a Sumerian Legend

IN 1933 Professor B. Landsberger contributed to a volume' in honour of the seventieth birthday of Freiherr M. von Oppenheim an article which placed in an entirely new light what had, until then, been considered an example, virtually unique, of a musical notation accompanying an Assyrian bilingual poem which related the culminating incident in the genesis of the world, the creation of mankind. He there demonstrated that the syllables accompanying the text, for the greater part meaning nothing and assumed to represent notes of music, occur also in othet places, dissociated from the poem, and sometimes furnished with Akkadian translations of their significance, as though they represented the Sumerian column of an ordinary syllabary. Unwelcome as it may be to give up so attractive a notion, the musical explanation is hereby made almost impossible of acceptance; but this leaves us with the problem of finding a better one. In the article already quoted, Professor Landsberger, as well as pointing out other examples of this strange collection of syllables, studied their structure, the meanings assigned to some of the groups, and the use made of them in the regular series of syllabaries, but came to the conclusion that the compilation must be regarded as a work of ancient literary artifice, the method and purpose of which at present escape us. In particular, there is the'question why this curious accompaniment stands beside the lines of a particular poem, and that not only in a single example (which might have been an individual freak) but in copies found both at Asshur and Nineveh. These are alike not only in the text and arrangement but in bearing colophons which allude expressly to the esoteric nature of their contents. The purpose with which I write these lines does not include an attempt to answer this question fully, but a suggestion will be made, with the utmost reserve, concerning'the matter of the poem and its possible relation with the enigmatic syllables. This can, however, be preceded by a single observation about which there will be far less uncertainty. It was noticed by Professor Landsberger (p. I77 of his article) that the fragment of a tablet in the British Museum, numbered 80-7-I9, i84, belonged to and probably joined another, K. 4I752?Sm. 57, which bears a portion of the text in question. That join having now been made, it follows, as he has pointed out, that this text was numbered as the second tablet of a series, the third of which began with a line partly preserved as a catchline on the reconstituted fragment. This line reads: