French Poet Research Articles

Apollinaire, G. (2022). Zone. In Russian translations and ‘Russian mirror.’ Ed. By Y. Fridstein and O. Tsareykina. Foreword by N. Zubkov. Moscow: Tsentr knigi Rudomino. (In Russ.)

The review examines a publication of the poem ‘Zone,’ which counts among the most famous works by the innovative French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, in the original language and seven Russian translations, two of which were made in 2022 under the auspices of the Pushkin programme funded by the French Institute of the French Embassy in Moscow to promote book publishing. The book’s structure can baffle the reader, just like Apollinaire’s poem does. Opening with a double dedication to the 110th anniversary of the poem’s original publication and the centenary of M. Kudinov’s birth, the book then displays the original French version of ‘Zone,’ followed by the publisher’s colophon. The subsequent sections of the book seem to follow the conventional logic: N. Zubkov’s foreword discusses the unique characteristics of the French poem’s poetics and outlines the key points for a comparative analysis of the translations. The sequence of the printed translations is at odds with their chronological order, a conscious decision made by the publisher. The final section entitled ‘In the Russian mirror’ features insightful comments on the poem offered by distinguished scholars of French poetry such as N. Balashov, S. Velikovsky, Z. Kirnoze, and M. Yasnov.

STÉPHANE MALLARMÉ’S POETRY IN RUSSIAN AND TRANSLATION ISSUES

The article regards the problems concerning the Russian translations of S. Mallarmé’s (1842-1898) poetical works. Different methods and systems of translation, various approaches to rendering of mallarméan poetics and style are introduced and compared. The difficulties of translation are associated with the originality of the French poet’s aesthetic program, as well as with the singularity of his revolutionary approach to language. Different variants and directions of resolving the main translation problem are taken into consideration, while the problem itself is formulated as a search for a language adequate to the aesthetic, philosophical and poetical pursuits of the French poet.

Translation motivation and foreword by Charles Baudelaire "Edgar Poe, sa vie et ses œuvres" to the edition of E. A. Poe's texts

Charles Baudelaire is primarily known as a French poet, the author of the internationally acclaimed poetry collection "Flowers of Evil" ("Les Fleurs du Mal"). However, he is also known as a translator: it was he who created the translations that changed the literary fate of the genius not recognized at the time – Edgar Allan Poe. He wrote a 24-page preface to the collection of his translations "Histoires extraordinaires", on the basis of which the author analyzes the poet's approach to translation, records his argumentation and motivation. Within the framework of this article, the author provides an analysis of the preface by Sh. Baudelaire studies why the connection between these figures has been repeatedly called absolutely exceptional by researchers. The subject of the study is the motivation of Sh. Baudelaire's translation of E. A. Poe's texts, which he explains both in the preface to the publication of the texts of the American writer and in personal correspondence. The object of the study is the preface under the heading "Sa vie et ses œuvres", written by Sh. Baudelaire's edition of E. A. Poe's texts in his own translation, published by the publishing house "Michel Lévy" in 1869. The main research method was a detailed analysis of the text of the preface by Sh. Baudelaire's "Edgar Poe, sa vie et ses œuvres" to the edition of E. A. Poe's texts in his own translation of 1869. A special contribution of the author to the study of the topic is a detailed study of the preface by Sh. Baudelaire as an artifact containing the formulation of translation motivation directly by the translator himself. The artifact is presented to the author all the more valuable because the translator is a famous poet with a special, recognizable style, which obviously leaves its mark on his translations. The main conclusions of this study are: the need to study the phenomenon of the Baudelaire translator not only from the prefaces to the translations, but also from his statements in correspondence, as well as in the study of the cultural era accompanying the creation of these translations and containing events such as the confrontation of the Romantics and the Parnassian school. The scientific novelty lies in the creation of a detailed analysis, based on which more specific episodes of the life and work of S. Baudelaire as a translator can be studied.

“A New Age for the Living Dead”: Palestinian Nation-Building Through Theater

This article is an attempt to trace the emergence and development of Palestinian theater in the shadow of the Israeli-Arab conflict and against the background of the Nakba and Palestinian nation-building. It examines the first dramatic and theatrical attempts made during the first half of the twentieth century, the uprooting and the decline of these efforts after the 1948 War, the repression of Palestinian cultural activities during the 1950s, and the new start and subsequent growth of professional Palestinian theater after 1967, espe- cially with regard to the al-Ḥakawātī troupe. The founder of this troupe was François Abū Sālim (Abu Salem) (1951-2011), the son of a Hungarian-born French poet and a French painter and sculptor, who integrated himself into Palestinian identity and culture. The pro- fessionalization of Palestinian theater in general has been taking a line parallel to the escalation of resistance and has lived up to numerous historical challenges, defying the hardships imposed on the Palestinian people by Israeli government censorship, geographical isolation, and lack of education.

Сандрар и Достоевский: функции литературных реминисценций

This paper examines the presence of literary reminiscences in the writings of Blaise Cendrars (1887–1961), a French poet of Swiss descent. The biographical factors that shaped the poet’s interest in Russia and the works of F. M. Dostoevsky are presented. This study examines the impact of Dostoevsky’s character, personality, and literary works on the development of Blaise Cendrars’s artistic identity. It is shown that Cendrars’ poetry, novels, and biographical prose demonstrate a continuous conversation with the writings of the Russian author. This conversation is especially noticeable in his description of the urban landscape: Cendrars’s St. Petersburg aligns perfectly with what literary scholars later referred to as the St. Petersburg text in Russian literature. It is worth mentioning the transition from the development of descriptive elements commonly found in the works of the Russian writer to his very characters and images, which undergo a novel interpretation in Cendrars. The analysis discloses the resemblance between little Jeanne of France in “Prose about the Trans-Siberian Express” (1913) and Sonya Marmeladova. The main character in “Moravazhin” (1926) is depicted as a modern Prince Myshkin derived from Dostoevsky’s drafts. A conclusion is drawn that Dostoevsky proved to be a talismanic author for Cendrars. Dostoevsky’s influence was not limited to the text. It was multifaceted, affecting not only the characters, plot lines, and artistic means of depiction but also the creation of a literary biography of Cendrars, with the motif of resurrection and rebirth to eternal life borrowed from Dostoevsky appearing as fundamental.

Hedonist and Theologist Narratives in French Baroque Poetry and Spiritual Verses by the English Metaphysicals: Poetising Author’s Experience vs Sacralising Privy Feelings

In the poetic diversity of Western European Baroque, the worldview was dominated by the search for unity in the contradictions of existence, which almost always immersed the man in a theological context. This is especially evident in the works by the seventeenth-century English Metaphysicals, whose unique style is considered from the perspective of the European continental poetic tradition. At the same time, appealing to French Baroque poetry as a specific literary phenomenon compared to Donne’s school in England is determined by the historical and creative process that produces individual strategies of poetising an author`s experience vs sacralising privy feelings. The article discusses the originality of the means of poetic expression of worldview principles in French Baroque poetry and English metaphysical school, which are expressed in close connection with the author’s paradigms of hedonistic-religious vs spiritual vision of reality. These means are actualised at the image-plot and structural levels that determine the methodology based on conceptual approaches to comparative analysis with elements of hermeneutic, imagological, stylistic, and cultural-historical methods. The article emphasises that the profound considerations about the origins of the universe in love poems with hedonistic motives bring the works of the French authors (Théophile de Viau) closer to the verses of the English ones, who discuss serious issues of human existence, religion, world order, etc. (A. Marvell) even in love poems. The religious works of the French poets (d’Aubigné, de Sponde, La Ceppède) contrast with metaphysical ideas about the transcendent world (J. Donne, G. Herbert, F. Quarles, Н. Vaughan) precisely by interpreting the Baroque themes of the transience of earthly existence, imperfection of human being, that are represented defectively from the perspective of style. Metaphysical tension and emotional release of the most secret movements of the soul raise the spiritual verses to the level of contemplative poetry.

«Цветы зла» Шарля Бодлера в переводах и под редакцией Николая Гумилева (неосуществленный проект издательства «Всемирная литература»)

Based on hitherto unpublished archival documents from the Gorky Archive at IWL RAS and TsGALI, the article analyses the work of Gumilyov as a compiler, translator, and editor of the book Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire, prepared for publication in “World Literature” in 1918–1921. For researchers, the most significant activity of Gumilev of this period was his work on preparing for publication outstanding French poets, widely represented in the Catalog of the publishing house “World Literature” (1919). The example of the poem “Death of Lovers” demonstrates the particular attitude of Gumilyov as an Acmeist to Baudelaire’s poetics associated with his religious spiritualism. An analysis of the translation of this poem shows that Gumilyov “narrowed” Baudelaire, abandoning the mystical component of his poetry, which caused criticism from the symbolist poet Alexander Blok, whose opinion remained in the protocols of the publishing house. The article establishes the number of translations by Gumilyov: 18 instead of the previously known 16. The appendix provides a reconstruction of the composition of the book Flowers of Evil by Baudelaire, which Gumilyov was preparing for publication: of the six sections, one remained untranslated (“Wine”); of Baudelaire’s 151 poems, almost half were translated (73).

Foreign Poems

The article begins by considering Giuseppe Ungaretti’s fascination with an early Canzone by Leopardi, “Alla Primavera, o delle favole antiche” (1822). The poem draws on old superstitions about the so-called demonio meridiano said to haunt the earth at noontime. Ungaretti takes this “blind hour” when vision becomes mirage as the inaugural moment of a new poetics, Leopardi finding in the “uncertainty” of modern experience an alternative to the comfortable clichés of neoclassicism. Mallarmé and Valéry later perceive these intensities of light and heat as conditions of a poetry the latter describes “à la fois étranger et étrangère.” Valéry develops this idea of “foreignness” by describing the poet as “un espèce singulière de traducteur qui traduit le discours ordinaire … en ‘langage des dieux’.” The article considers ways in which some later French poets develop this nexus of poetry, painting and translation to explore the kinds of “foreignness” said to animate poetic language.

NoOnesRose: An Interview with Pierre Joris

Abstract Pierre Joris discusses his literary journey from Luxembourg to Bard College to Algeria to Paris and London and finally New York. Joris focuses on his translation of Paul Celan, his engagement with the poetry of the Maghreb (culminating in his coediting of The University of California Book of North African Literature, volume 4 of Poems for the Millennium), and the importance of French poet Edmond Jabès. He goes on to address his choice to write in his fourth language, English, and the formative readings of American poetry and his connection to some of the New American Poets of the generation older than him. In the course of the interview, Joris discusses his sense of a nomadic community—or perhaps better to say “negative” or “inoperable” community. Throughout, he comes back to his commitments to writing poetry and to translation as the core the practice of poetry.

Cemal Süreya’da Apollinaire Etkisi

Influence is a common situation in the literary field in every period. Authors were influenced by the authors and literary works of previous periods and rewrote similar ones or provided a rich source for their own original texts. Cemal Süreya, one of the most important poets of contemporary Turkish literature, was also influenced by the famous French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who is considered the founder of Surrealism; He even avoided being influenced and became a creative poet who could write "new" and "other". This study is an impact study. In the study, the influence of the French poet Apollnaire on the Turkish poet Cemal Süreya will be examined and the traces of Apollinaire will be tried to be traced in Cemal Süreya's poetics. The influence among the poets will be revealed with a text-based comparative method. An eclectic attitude will be displayed in the study, as the data of hermeneutics, stylistics, psychoanalysis and archetypal criticism theories will be used. Key Words: Apollinaire, Cemal Süreya, Comparative Literature, Poetics, Influence-influence

Fleshing out the Facts: Cognition and Kinesic Specifications in Legal and Literary Reasoning

We produce kinesic specifications when we cognitively process sensorimotor concepts. For example, the sensorimotor concept of falling may be processed as a life-threatening event or a mere cause of fleeting embarrassment. This article considers the cognitive production of kinesic specifications in legal and literary reasoning, focusing on the acts of reading and judging as they appear in early modern amplifications of the Book of Genesis, written by the French poets Maurice Scève and Guillaume de Saluste Du Bartas. Because of the historically situated religious belief system of the two poets, the latter considered Adam and Eve’s act of transgression to be the cause of their own reality. By means of kinesic specifications, they narratively “fleshed out” their understanding of the Fall of mankind, evincing the role that embodied cognition and movement-based meanings play in the human ability to reason about, and understand action and causation.

Standard Forms: Modernism, Market Research, and “Howl”

Before he was a famous poet, Allen Ginsberg was a market researcher. He stopped only when he managed to persuade his employer to automate his job out of existence (using one of the commercial computers that had first become available four years earlier); the resultant unemployment benefits enabled him to write “Howl.” This article reconsiders this iconic text of the nascent US counterculture as a product of the postwar structures of informatics, automation, and precarity that are sometimes now referred to as surveillance capitalism. But it also asks what relation those structures had and have to poetry, and why poetic technique—specifically, a repertoire of techniques inherited from an earlier generation in Europe—became so crucial to how Ginsberg’s generation responded to the emergent surveillance-capitalist terrain. The period of unemployment when Ginsberg wrote “Howl” also marked his first significant encounter with the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who would become a key formal and imaginative model, and the coincidence makes visible a strange parallel between modernist poetry and market research. The paranoid aesthetics of information management that “Howl” puts into motion, it is shown, had been contained as a potential within modernist poetics all along.

Tristan Corbière and T. S. Eliot’s Salt-Encrusted Poetry

Abstract The name of Tristan Corbière (1847–1875) appears repeatedly in T. S. Eliot’s criticism, notably in his Clark and Turnbull lectures where Eliot characterized Corbière as a metaphysical poet and observed that he is a ‘finer poet, though a lesser intellect, than Laforgue’. Corbière’s influence on Eliot has long been recognized, but few critics acknowledge the particular resonance of his maritime poems. It is time to revisit Corbière’s crucial influence on Eliot, who drew on his writing for Poems (1920), and most significantly in the draft sea passages of The Waste Land. Identifying Corbière’s presence in the draft allows us to hear the French poet in the final version of ‘Death by Water’, and reveals that Eliot owes more to Corbière than has previously been acknowledged. I argue that Eliot was captivated by Corbière’s resolutely unsentimental depiction of maritime elements in Les Amours jaunes, and that this Breton poet offered Eliot a new voice.

Edutainment as a Modern French Language Teaching Technology of Prospective Philologists and Translators

Introduction. The development of the system of teaching foreign languages and cultures in institutions of higher education requires regular updating of the components of this system, in particular, modern technologies for teaching foreign languages and cultures to the students of various specialties. Among such technologies, the edutainment technology stands out for the formation of foreign language linguistic / linguo-sociocultural competences. Purpose. To present the technology of edutainment on the example of a specific exercise using a support, a poem by the French poet Paul Verlaine, as one of the means of this technology and justify the feasibility of using this means. Methods. Reviewing the studies that have already been conducted, analyzing the feasibility of using this technology on the example of specific exercises. Results. The study showed that the edutainment technology, namely its specific means, a poem, can be used during online and offline classes on learning foreign languages and cultures. This technology will contribute to better assimilation of the material, and will enhance student’ interest and motivation. Conclusion. To sum up, the use of poetry in classes as one of the means of the edutainment technology for teaching the French language and culture contributes to the effective formation of students’ lexical and phonetic components of the French-language communicative competence. Further research involves the study of other means of the edutainment technology for teaching the French language and culture to students – prospective philologists and translators, teachers.

Reading Europe in the Renaissance: continent, personification and myth in Ronsard's Discours de l'alteration et change des choses humaines

AbstractRenaissance readers were familiar with two traditions of visualizing the continent of Europe as a woman: the myth of Europa and the bull, and personifications of Europe as a queen. This article examines the impact of these traditions on the geographical, political and cultural discourses of Europe through the example of the French poet Ronsard's Discours de l'alteration et change des choses humaines. It argues that the reference in the Discours to the Ottoman Empire assailing Europe the continent would evoke for readers a female figure. The article conducts an analysis of the poem in light of this, exploring how the spectre of sexual violence associated with the Europa myth enhances the political critique of the Ottoman Empire in the Discours. As such, the article shows how the dynamic interplay of myth, personification and geographical space enriched the meanings and associations of the signifier ‘Europe’. In doing so, it articulates a method for approaching how ‘Europe’ was used and understood in Renaissance texts.

METAPHOR AND TRANSLATION, A COMPARATIVE STUDY BETWEEN TWO TRANSLATIONS FROM FRENCH INTO ARABIC, THE POEM "LA MUSIQUE" BY CHARLES BAUDELAIRE AS A MODEL

This research seeks to provide a descriptive, analytical and comparative study of the two different Arabic translations of the poem "la musique" by the French poet Charles Baudelaire from "les fleurs du mal", which are translated by Mustafa Kasri and translated by Rifaat Salama. And I saw the importance of accomplishing this research based on the theoretical achievements of translating the metaphor in order to know its essence and principles for the practice of the translation act, and the proposed methodological and logical solutions to confront those problems that the translator faces, such as meaning, content, form, lexicon, and style. Accordingly, the study aims to explore ways of translating a metaphor with semantic loads, and effective ways to know how to transfer a metaphor that has meaning in French society from the source language to the target language, whose meaning may be contradictory in Arab society. Therefore, the study seeks to find an appropriate solution that preserves the meaning of Borrowing the original text and serving the reader's values for the translated text. The problem is how can metaphors be transferred from one context to another and from one culture to another? Do translators take into account the cultural and ideological loads of metaphors?

Henri Michaux's program for the psychedelic humanities.

This article presents an analytical reading of the extraordinarily rich cultural production around drugs by the 20th-century French poet, writer, critic, and visual artist Michaux (1899-1984). Over about a decade, from the mid-1950's, the otherwise habitually sober Michaux wrote five books, included within which were dozens of drawings, and made one half-hour film, charting his adventures as an initially reluctant yet persistent psychonaut, principally with mescaline, but also with psilocybin, LSD, and cannabis. This has rightly been described as one of the most creative cultural explorations of mescaline. It is more extensive, texturally complex, and esthetically demanding than Aldous Huxley's far better known near-contemporaneous published work on psychedelics in English, which is well-known within and arguably foundational for psychedelic studies. Yet, this very complexity, as well as the national-linguistic context of its articulation-there was no mass psychedelic counterculture in France-have limited wider engagement with it. I argue that Michaux's esthetic reconstruction of psychedelics' effects on his creative brain can be read as a "program" for the emerging field of the psychedelic humanities and that it makes a substantial contribution, which I sketch in outline here, to the following of core concerns: (1) the role of psychedelics in enhancing "creativity"; (2) conceptualization of the politics of psychedelics; and (3) the meaning and value of psychedelic mysticism. I aim to show that Michaux's work on drugs has much to contribute to the cultural understanding of psychedelics today and accordingly that this unjustly neglected classic of French-and global-drug culture deserves to be far better known.

‘The Constantin Guys of the atomic era’: on the poetic reception of Robert Rauschenberg by Alain Jouffroy and Surrealism

Robert Rauschenberg is not usually thought to have had much contact with Surrealism and even spoke openly about his disdain for the movement on some occasions. However, through the period 1958–69, the Surrealists showed great enthusiasm for the ‘poetic’, ‘metaphorical’ resonance of Rauschenberg’s work, a positive response that has since largely been lost. In place of that history, the interpretation of Rauschenberg by John Cage as a ‘literalist’ or ‘factualist’ gained ground and even came to define the artist’s œuvre in some quarters, a reading that Rauschenberg himself approved. Caught in the middle of these two versions of Rauschenberg are the largely untranslated texts of French poet, critic, and ex-Surrealist Alain Jouffroy (1928–2015), which form the substance of this article. Jouffroy pioneered the positive critical reception of Rauschenberg in France from 1961 while he continued to be influenced by his Surrealist past, to the point that his writings on Rauschenberg reveal consistent contradiction under close reading. The highest point of tension was reached across 1963–64 when Jouffroy wrote eulogistic poems devoted to Rauschenberg’s massive silkscreen painting Barge (1962–63) and to Surrealism in L’Antichambre de la nature (1966, written in 1964), alongside key texts of art criticism on Rauschenberg. Culminating in an analysis of the silkscreen and poems, this article argues that while Jouffroy’s writings seem ostensibly to further the Cagean interpretation of the artist, they are riven by an awkward dual loyalty that can be read in support of a ‘poetic’ ‘Surrealist Rauschenberg’.

Бодлеровский след в поэзии А.А. Блока: к типологии опосредованных заимствований

In the study of Russian modernism, including the aspect of cross-cultural connections, the question of Alexander Blok's “Baudelaireism” is still open, because his figure is relegated to the background in the general landscape of “Russian Baudelaireism” in the first two decades of the 20th century. This phenomenon owes its characteristic outlines, firstly, to a bright galaxy of poets-translators of the turn of the century, and secondly, to the “senior” symbolists, primarily V. Bryusov, the discoverer of the urban theme in modern lyrics in the pendant Tableaux Parisiens by Ch. Baudelaire, in third, a complex of “modern sensitivity”, in the words of I. Annensky, with a tangible symptom of Baudelaire's melancholy. It’s emphasized that the inclusion of Blok's poetry in the Russian classical canon was carried out at the cost of “straightening” and simplifying the trajectory of his creative path, and a taboo was imposed on the compromising influences of the poètes maudits. At the same time, Blok's acquaintance with the work of the French poet dates back to his earliest youth: his mother A.A. Kublickaya-Piottuch was one of the first translators of the French Symbolists, and Baudelaire's poetry existed in a family environment right up to parody. The article discusses several cases of direct correlations between her translations from Baudelaire and Blok's Adolescent Poems. The legacy of the French poet is actualized by Blok in the period of his “decadent urbanism” through V. Bryusov, but not least, as shown in the article, and through new translations of Annensky, included in the book Quiet Songs, reviewed by Blok. The article reveals thematic, metrical and lexical parallels between Blok's poem Grass in the silver dew... (1906) and Baudelaire's Revinant in Annensky's translation, and traces the transfiguration of Baudelaire's topic.

The Argonauts of the Western Front – Poets as Ethnographers of the Culture de Guerre in the First World War

For over a century, historians and literary critics appear to have been at odds regarding the poetry of the First World War. This schism owes itself to processes of canonization which restrict (in Britain) or completely ignore (in France) the full extent and diversity of wartime poetic practices. Investigating a new corpus of French poets of the First World War, and considering poetry as a social and cultural category and as a wartime practice whose functions go beyond literary value, this article argues that war poets can be read as ethnographers of wartime culture. In proposing this analogy, it aims to present the ethnographic conventions as a common ground where History and Poetics can establish a dialogue. For scholars aiming to investigate how cultural production shapes experiences of armed conflict, this ensures poets are seen as the producers of interpretive knowledge of war and poems as more than either transparent documents or hermetic lyrical creations.