Folk Verse Research Articles

ВАСИЛЬ ГОЛОБОРОДЬКО – МАЙСТЕР НЕКЛАСИЧНИХ ВІРШОВИХ ФОРМ: ВІРШОЗНАВЧИЙ АСПЕКТ

The article explores the creative work of Vasyl Holoborodko, particularly his book of poems "An Apple of Good News". This topic has not been extensively researched in Ukrainian literary studies, although Holoborodko's work has been studied in other aspects, such as folklore, in Yulia Shutenko's dissertation. This article specifically focuses on the analysis of non-classical verse forms in the author's poetry. According to one accepted classification, non-classical verse is divided into dactylic, taktovyk's, and accentual verse, depending on the change in the number of intrastressed syllable intervals. These forms have different productivity in Ukrainian poetry in general and in the work of Vasyl Holoborodko in particular. The polymetric superform of the non-classical verse is the vers libre, and Vasyl Holoborodko is the most productive author of this form among his contemporaries. This is related to the feature of his work as folklore trend. Among the examples of poetry presented in the article, there are samples that refer to the folklore sources of his poetry, spoken folk verse, which is the source for non-classical verse forms, and particularly vers libre. Additionally, there are interesting examples of dactylic, taktovyk's, and accentual verse, which are analyzed in detail in the article, including the poems "Spring", "Mother was cleaning potatoes", "Linen Birds", and "Hungry tongues tied in a knot...". The analysis of these pieces of poetry allows us to trace the tendencies of his creative work, such as a tendency toward irregularity, a slight predominance of taktovyk verses in non-vers libre verses, folklore as a leading principle both in vers libre and in the rest of the poems, and the alternation of expressive and meditative motifs in poetic creation, the reproduction of conversational speech and folk verse rhythms in the poetry, the transmission of unique features of the Ukrainian language and authentic imagery. The article is a part of an author's larger study of non-classical verse in Ukrainian poetry of the second half of the 20th century.

Рекламный сериал в печатных СМИ рубежа XIX–XX вв.: путешествия Дяди Михея в рекламе Товарищества «Лаферм»

The article is focused on a series of advertising texts united by a common character and story. Having emerged in print advertising of the turn of the 19th–20thcenturies, such series can be seen as the first manifestations of the advertising series genre,in which, along with the dominant tendency to in-formativeness, typical for the early 20thcentury, new techniques appear, these strengthening the expressive and manipulative components of the text. The advertisements analyzed in the paper are texts placedin the regional newspaper Uralskaya Zhizn(1903). In the array of the advertising texts examined, only one series united by the story and the character, published in November-December 1903, was found. It is devoted to the cigarettes of the Laferm company.Instead of the same text repeatedly published for several months, which was typical of advertisements of that period, the reader receives a new text in each issue. The texts are de-signed and laid out so as to resemble telegrams, and each individual text is stylized as a rayosh folk verse. Together they form a kind of travel novel or travel notes in verse. Important components of the text are the character (a representative of the company) and his interaction with the readers. It is they, not the product itself, that come to the fore. The non-provision of detailed information about the product is also an innova-tive feature of evolving advertising. The character uniting all the texts is presented by the authors as a sym-bol of the advertised products and the Association, which indicates not only a new form of advertising but also a more complex way of presenting goods, specifically the basics of brand formation.

Formulas in Folk Verse and Folk Prose

The existence of formulas in traditional songs of various kinds has been long recognized by scholars, and the presence of formulas in traditional tales has increasingly become a subject of discussion too. This prompts the question whether an individual who has a substantial repertoire of both songs and tales would use some of the same formulas in both these two modes. Or would it be the case that, as tales and songs have their own separate norms and rules, their formulas will not involve any significant similarities? To provide an initial response to such questions, this article draws upon verbal art documented in the third quarter of the twentieth century from one remarkable Newfoundlander, whose recorded repertoire included nineteen different tales and more than thirty songs.

PROSIMETRICAL COMPOSITIONS IN THE WORKS OF VIKTOR PUL’KIN

The article deals with the problem of prosimetry (prosimetrum) in a work of literary fiction. Viktor Pul’kin’s works in the literary tale genre (narration in the first person, or skaz) from “The Kizhi Stories”, “The Bronze Horseman”, and “The Royal Fingers” literary collections were analyzed. A hypothesis is put forward that Viktor Pul’kin’s works can be classified as prosimetrical compositions. Literary tales (skaz) are proven to be an important material for the study of prosimetry and are of particular interest for verse studies. The author discovers that Viktor Pul’kin relies on the spoken and chanted folk verse traditions. Various genres of Russian (and, in rare cases, Karelian) oral folk art act as sources of poetic elements in Viktor Pul’kin’s prose. These genres include proverbs, sayings, riddles, lyric songs, byline (heroic epics), spiritual verses, incantations, runes of the Kalevala metrics, etc.Prosaic fragments with increased rhythm were also discovered, specifically, these include constructions with syntactic parallelism and most often with grammatical rhyme, which cannot be conclusively qualified as poetic elements. An important aspect of the poetics of Viktor Pul’kin’s skaz is comprised by the experiments with folklore spoken verse, or the so-called rayoshnik. Such texts are numerous, but they almost never reach a significant length. At the same time, the rayoshnik occupies the intermediate place between verse and prose: usually the tales (skaz) written in rayoshnik are, strictly speaking, rhymed prose, rather than verse.This applies both to direct folklore quotations and to folklore and literary experiments. The article attempts to correlate the poetics of Viktor Pul’kin’s works with the poetics of the literary tale (skaz) genre as such. The presence of folklore poetic fragments in a prosaic text seems to be largely predetermined by the poetics of the literary tale (skaz), which is characterized by an orientation towards the “living” word, stereotypes of everyday speech, and the colloquial-speech basis of traditional popular culture.

Stikh Umilitelen and Its Folk Versions: A Syllabic-Accentual Interpretation of Literary Syllabic Verse

This paper examines a folklore interpretation of literary culture at the verse level. The author studies the structural transformation of syllabic text in a culture in which the syllabic-accentual system of versification has become standard. This is what makes the study innovative, as, traditionally, comparative studies focus on images and motifs. The goal of the research is to identify the prerequisites, directions, and mechanisms of the folklorisation of literary verse. It refers to several editions of a syllabic poem dating back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and folk versions of this text that existed in the Russian north, known as Stikh Umilitelen (About Death, On Life Ending, etc.). The author uses audio recordings of folk texts made during expeditions, which makes it possible to get a more accurate idea of the norms of folk accentuation. The analysis is carried out at a multidisciplinary level, involving literary studies, folk studies, and linguistics. The author carries out a comparative description of the literary and folk texts. He also provides a metrical analysis based on methods and approaches suggested by M. L. Gasparov and T. V. Skulacheva and uses the rules and techniques of the study of folk verse developed by J. Bailey. Additionally, the article describes the basic structural features of the literary syllabic poem, identifies the main parameters of the transformation of syllabic verse into syllabicaccentual verse, and discusses the techniques and possible structural prerequisites of folklorisation in both the literary and folk traditions.

Dabkeh al Djoufieh: Exploring the Sustainability of Jordanian Folklore

The authors of this paper analyze the Dabkeh al Djoufieh (Dabkɛ ālǧwofyɛ) in its capacity as an inherent part of Jordanian folklore that has been seldom studied. Whereas contemporary Jordan has experienced a rapid burst of cultural globalization, the rural song and dance of Dabkeh al Djoufieh can be observed as a highly dynamic manifestation of belonging and as a symbol of national solidarity. One of the defining features of the Dabkeh al Djoufieh is that it is immanent in every social event in Arab communities. Secondly, as a sample of folk music, Dabkeh al Djoufieh continues to be a vibrant resource for contemporary audiences. The paper focuses on the main musical and poetic characteristics of Dabkeh al Djoufieh. The qualitative analysis applied integrates ideas concerning semantics as a representation of the social context and ethnic identities, whereas music is viewed as an indicator of local heritage. This paper probes the questions: What is Dabkeh Djoufieh? Where does it originate? And how is it implemented in Jordanian folklore culture? Furthermore, the study discusses the social power found within poetic folk verse, specifically, the role of the metaphor as a tool for expressing communal realities and individual experiences. Likewise, the study analyzes the musical features of the traditional Dabkeh al Djoufieh and how it moved across generations, sacred and social boundaries, becoming a symbol of Jordanian folk tradition.

From the Latin short story to the Russian spiritual verse: From the history of one folk plot

The article considers the history of the poetic versions of the plot of “The Enchanted Monk” in the Russian poetic tradition. These versions were not previously subjected to a special study. In the article, the poetic versions of the plot are arranged in chronological order among the entire corpus of literary and folk texts, a brief historical commentary is provided to each text, the verse of each text is analyzed, and a picture of the history of the plot in its poetic form is presented. The methodology of the research includes the elements of the “Russian method” (quantitative assessment of verse parameters, rhythmical analysis, etc.). In certain cases, a semantic interpretation of the meter is used. The metre and rhythm of the poetic versions are considered in the historical and cultural context, against the background of the poetic tradition. The main points in the poetic history of the text are as follows: literary syllabic verse (17th century); transitional poetic and prosaic forms (18th century); the first trochaic literary imitations of a folk verse (18th century); classical iambic tetrameter (19th century); free iamb in a literary translation with a predominance of five-footed lines (20th century); four-footed amphibrach in the folk tradition (20thcentury). An attempt is made to identify the literary source of the origin of the four-footed amphibrach in folk verse: such a source was probably the Russian ballad verse at the beginning of the 19th century.

The Problems Associated with Studying Folk Verse

The Problems Associated with Studying Folk Verse

‘These shirts I borrow from the Finnish’: the Kanteletar and the fabric of loss in Peter Sirr’s ‘A Journal’

This essay examines the personal, cultural and linguistic exchanges explored through textile metaphors in Peter Sirr’s 1994 poetic sequence “A Journal” (from the collection The Ledger of Fruitful Exchange ). In this sequence, Sirr draws on The Kanteletar , a collection of Finnish folk verse originally published 1840-1841 by Elias Lonnrot, who also compiled the more widely known folk epic The Kalevala . Sirr’s adoption of the Finnish poems’ textile imagery allows him to interrogate the complexities of personal and cultural communication, as the sequence charts the end of a relationship between the poem’s speaker and his Finnish lover. Textiles assume multiple functions as metaphors and material objects: they act as personal and cultural references, as formal and structural devices, and as symbolic manifestations of intimate, emotional crisis. Sirr’s engagement with Finnish folk verse is thus thematic as well as formal, and articulates a desire to inhabit the lost lover’s idiom through numerous attempts of linguistic and cultural translation, and the literal and figurative processes of stitching and weaving.

‘These shirts I borrow from the Finnish’: the Kanteletar and the fabric of loss in Peter Sirr’s ‘A Journal’

This essay examines the personal, cultural and linguistic exchanges explored through textile metaphors in Peter Sirr’s 1994 poetic sequence “A Journal” (from the collection The Ledger of Fruitful Exchange). In this sequence, Sirr draws on The Kanteletar, a collection of Finnish folk verse originally published 1840-1841 by Elias Lönnrot, who also compiled the more widely known folk epic The Kalevala. Sirr’s adoption of the Finnish poems’ textile imagery allows him to interrogate the complexities of personal and cultural communication, as the sequence charts the end of a relationship between the poem’s speaker and his Finnish lover. Textiles assume multiple functions as metaphors and material objects: they act as personal and cultural references, as formal and structural devices, and as symbolic manifestations of intimate, emotional crisis. Sirr’s engagement with Finnish folk verse is thus thematic as well as formal, and articulates a desire to inhabit the lost lover’s idiom through numerous attempts of linguistic and cultural translation, and the literal and figurative processes of stitching and weaving.

Backlands Bards: From Fine Folk Verse to Lofty Lapidary Lyric

Backlands Bards: From Fine Folk Verse to Lofty Lapidary Lyric

Jarai formulaic sayings: Hook rhyme & the nature of binarity in folk verse

Formulaic sayings in Jarai (Austronesian; Vietnam) are a folk poetic form with lines joined by hook rhymes. The first member of each hook-rhyme pair is line-final, and the second member is line-initial, as in this poem excerpt: t?u? p?a ra / ?ia p?a nao / plao p?a do? 'different mountains / walking along different waters / living on different islets.' By means of hook rhyme, each line except the first and last is a member of two couplets. This overlapping couplet structure--a binary organizing principle--often results in a poem with an odd number of lines.

Religion and the Politics of Identity in Kosovo by Ger s> Duijzings (review)

REVIEWS 791 history,where it exists,points to some alternativeconclusionsabout the nature and directionof Hungariansocialdevelopment.Tibor Valuchin an impressive yet provisional social history of Hungary since I945 has argued that behind the impact of the grand strategies of the Stalinist, Kadarist and liberal democratic regimes some remarkablecontinuitiesin society can be discerned. The time has come for more complex conceptualizations of social change in Hungarywhich allow for the autonomy of social groupsvis-a-vis the state. Department ofHistoy M. D. PITTAWAY TheOpenUniversity Duijzings, Ger.Religion andthePolitics ofIdentity inKosovo. C. Hurst&Company, London, 2000. XV+ 238 pp. Notes. Illustrations.Maps. Bibliographical references.Index. ?35.00; Ci6.50. GERDuIJzINGS claims that his anthropological work in Kosovo gave him insights which offer a corrective approach to the more characteristic and widely publicized characteristicstudies of South-East European politics. By 'enteringsmalland unknownside-paths'as a participantobserverhe attempts to 'open up new perspectiveson old problems'(p. 2 Io). Duijzings has researched widely and surveys a range of views, besides detailing and analysing his own extensive findings; he completed a project very differentfrom that upon which he had set out to complete. His originally projected micro-studyof a small ruralKosovar Croatian community close to the Macedonian border was eroded shortly after his arrivalby the exodus of thatcommunity in responseto theviolence Croatiancommunitieshad already experienced elsewhere in the by-then-former-Yugoslavia.This led to what Duijzings termed 'ethnic unmixing'which is the subjectof his second chapter. Thereafter the author's focus widened to include other ethnographic casestudies which are collected in the present volume, thereby portraying the 'tension between conflict and symbiosis [... .] and the role played by religion in the local, regional and national politics of identity' (p. x). One of his chaptersis on the revivalof popular Sufismin Kosovo (basedon his I989 MA thesis). Commenting that religion is a major source identification in the Balkans (P. 157),he qualifiesthat due to theirfluctuatingplace in Europe,the Kosovar identity also fluctuates. A range of groups with various oppressors have occupied the same geographicalarea.Albanianshave been Serbianized,Serbs have been Albanianized. The Turkishlanguage is widely spoken, leading to the labeling of some as 'Turks'. This in turn made it easier to demand the removal of such groups to 'return' to Turkey. Duijzings spent time visiting shrines, especially at times of pilgrimages, and found that Muslims and Gypsies regularlyvisited Orthodox shrines, that ethnic syncretism,although not sanctioned by the church authoritieswas not only tolerated, but actually encouraged locally. There areparallelsin Albania and elsewhere. The way divisions emerged in particularperiods also varied; for example during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the widest division was between landlords and others. In the I950S the divisions were political: 792 SEER, 79, 4, 200I communists versus irredentists (Albanians sentenced fellow Albanians as 'counter-revolutionaries'). Clear labels are a recent phenomenon (p. 24), especially as a form of manipulation through the use of categories in census gathering. Dominant groups attempted to include smallergroups to increase their power. As an example of this Duijzing's chapter on 'The Making of Egyptans in Kosovo and Macedonia' recordsthe remarkableemergence of a group whose first claims were made in i99i. Some considered these were merely Gypsies, but Serbs and Macedonians were keen to disclaim their Albanian origins;the resultwas the manipulationof as many as 83,000 people in one study. Duijzings analysesboth Balkanand Westernmythsabout the Balkans,even going so far as to state that European nation-stateshave encouraged most of the violence (p. 208); he cites the excessive resort to nationalist discourseby journalists and scholars. He devotes a chapter each to the Serbian myths of the Battle of Kosovo and to the Albanian Qerbalaja (or Kerbela) myth. He finds they have much in common: each have been portrayed through epic song and folk verse, both record a lost battle where righteous forces were overcome by evil ones, and the main hero was sacrificed, leading to the necessity for followersto accept sufferingas a step to redemption and a revolt against tyranny. Both lent weight to growing nationalism during the nineteenth century. For Albanians, 'religion is almost irrelevant in (official) political life' (P. I59); Albanian nationalism is not clothed in religious terms. Albanian nationalism never became entwined with its religion, nor were Kosovo's...

Quatrain form in English folk verse

Quatrains in English folk verse are governed by laws that regulate the patterns of truncation (nonfilling of metrical positions) at the ends of lines. Each truncation pattern (we claim 26) is adhered to consistently through multiple stanzas and defines a verse type. Our descriptive goal is to account for why these and only these truncation patterns exist. Our crucial hypothesis is that the function of truncated lines is to render SALIENT certain layers in the natural constituency of the quatrain: the line, the couplet, or the quatrain as a whole. All three cannot be rendered salient at once, so the saliency constraints conflict. Each saliency constraint also conflicts with metrical constraints, which require that metrical positions be filled with appropriate syllables and stresses. The twenty-six well-formed quatrain types each represent a particular prioritization of the conflicting constraints. We formalize this in optimality theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993): the inventory of types is derived as the factorial typology of our constraint set; namely, the set of outputs of all grammars obtained by freely ranking the violable constraints. We also account for differing text frequencies in our data corpus by assigning each constraint a range of possible strengths, and from this develop an optimality-theoretic account of gradient well-formedness judgments.

Quatrain Form in English Folk Verse

Quatrain Form in English Folk Verse

Who Has Been Exalted

Vassily Kazantsev (b. 1935 in Toskino, Siberia) lived along the banks of the Taiga River until the age of seventeen. In 1952 he entered the historical-philological faculty of Tomsk University. His first poems were published in 1953, but recognition as a poet came only fifteen years later. His lyrics combine the natural intonations of folk verse and the high culture of classical nobiliary poetry.

Some observations on Estonian and Russian versification

My paper deals with some problems involved in the transfer of a versification system from one language to anotheran exceedingly common phenomenon. In modern Estonian poetry at least seven different systems of versification are presently current:1 three tonic systems (syllabotonic, accentual, vers libre); three quantitative systems (traditional folk verse; classical quantitative meters used with great success in translations of Greek and Latin poetry, most recently by Ants Oras in a beautiful rendition of Vergil's Bucolics ; and linear-quantitative verse used with equally great success by Aleksis Rannit, a. o.); finally, syllabic verse, which has been used in translations of Romance syllabic poetry with good success. All of these systems, except, of course, that of folk verse, a quantitative trochaic tetrameter, were borrowed at one time or another from the poetry of foreign languages. Today Estonian poetry is flourishing both in Soviet occupied Estonia and in emigration. Emigr/ poets, naturally, gravitate toward the poets of the English-speaking world and the Romance nations. Estonian poets back home are inevitably exposed to a great deal of Russian influence. To begin with, they cannot help becoming familiar with Russian poetry. Many of them translate Russian poetry into Estonian. All the better known Estonian poets are being translated into Russian. Last but not least, the all-pervading pressure of Russification promotes all tendencies toward acculturation, and convergent tendencies in poetry might by expected to be among them. Russian poetry is still dominated by rhymed syllabotonic and accentual verse, while the poetry of the West has largely abandoned traditional metric and rhyming patterns. Therefore, a prevalence in Estonian poetry of rhymed syllabotonic and accentual verse would a priori represent a tendency toward acculturation, while the use of quantitative verse and vers libre would be a tendency in the other direction. In this paper I would like to confront some apparently parallel prosodie traits of Estonian and Russian verse, and try to determine their actual relationship. Let me begin with some statistics. A recent study by J. Pftldmae 2 suggests that in the 19th century 84% of all Estonian Kunstdichtung was still trochaic, and of this 85% in quatrains, 70% with abab rhyme: while in the 20th century, with 71.3% of all poetry syllabotonic, iambs represent 41.5% of the total and trochees a mere 16.8%. I did some counting of my own, using Paul Rummo's large anthology of Estonian poetry (1967) for this purpose.

Zapažanja o opkoračenju u spisima o stihu Svetozara Petrovića

Rad ukazuje na mnoštvo zapažanja i raznih gledišta o anžambmanu u Petrovićevim spisima o stihu koja se u potonjoj prepisci sa inostranim kolegom nadograđuju omogućavajući kompletnu karakterizaciju ovog teorijskog pojma. O opkoračenju kao pesničkom postupku pisao je Petrović različitim povodom; izdvajaju se segmenti različitih radova kojima se argumentuje književnoistorijska situacija i efekti semantika stiha, kao i dva celovita rada posvećena problematici opkoračenja. Ističe se temeljno definisanje pojma u odnosu na postojeće definicije; razlika između uobičajenog smisla (prihvatljivog u praktičnoj primeni većini onih koji se bave pesništvom) i proširenog obima pojma; polemika sa dosadašnjim shvatanjima i tumačenjima, posebno, s jedne strane, po pitanju preciziranja istorijskog razvoja, a s druge strane, po pitanju prisustva opkoračenja u usmenom narodnom stihu.

Arabic folk verse

Arabic folk verse

Nature in Malay Literature and Folk Verse

The earliest Malay literature extant belongs to a time five hundred years ago, when in spite of having embraced Islam the Malay still cared enough for the Mahabharata and the Ramayana to translate them into a vernacular already full of Arabic loanwords. In addition he borrowed from India folk romances tricked out with motifs and descriptive passages from the two great Hindu epics. For example, in one such romance, the Hikayat Parang Puting, when the fairy lover “burning as if he would set fairyland on fire” is rejected by his mistress, he tosses sleepless until “the cocks crow, the birds of paradise sing in the sky, the parrots chatter in the angsoka trees, parroquets on the boughs of the nagasari and mynahs on the chempaka trees, and a drizzle of rain makes all the flowers bloom”. The Indian genius, like our own, will readily sentimentalize landscape to accord with human moods. But turn to the Malay version of a scene in the garden at Hastinapura that “astonished the moon by its beauty”:—“about midnight was seen a portent of the city's imminent doom. It was utterly still and the moon looked like a lovely woman peeping from behind a door. Gentle rain fell and a light breeze stirred in the distance. There were banks of clouds of all shapes and the birds were restless, flying here and there like a man with two wives.” So far as I know that last simile is a gloss by the observant, cynical Malay. In modern jargon, the Indian is an introvert, the Malay an extravert.