German Poetry Research Articles

ОСОБЕННОСТИ УПОТРЕБЛЕНИЯ СТИЛИСТИЧЕСКИХ ПРИЕМОВ В ДРЕВНЕАНГЛИЙСКОЙ ПОЭЗИИ НА ОСНОВЕ ДРЕВНЕАНГЛИЙСКОГО ПИСЬМЕННОГО ПОЭТИЧЕСКОГО ПАМЯТНИКА «БЕОВУЛЬФ»

Statement of the problem. Learning the canons of the Old German art of poetry is the main instrument for forming the skills of poetic syllable as a source of new cultural information for the specialists in the field of the history of the Old English language and German Philology in general. The object for the analysis is the mythological praising epos with its strictly limited lexical models and metric rules. The Old English metrics is considered as a result of a linguistic experiment absolutizing the principal of conditional stylistic figures as language signs. Extraordinary stylistic devices such as hending, scothending, aldahending, and kenning present a great interest for understanding the opportunities in the old English poetry and demand a thorough textual analysis. The purpose of this article is to consider the canons of the old English poetry in the aspect of comparative historical language study for overcoming intercultural dissonance in the cognitive perception of the epos by a modern reader. The methodology of study is based on comprising the materials of the old English epos using the comparative historical method and the method of the purposeful search of examples of stylistic devices which are not typical for present day poetry. The method of their etymological analysis corrects the notion of the poetic form used in the literary creation. Research results. The textual material of the old English epos researched by the authors leads to the conclusion that a poetic form is shown in the diachronic interaction of a poetic word and old English culture. Conclusion. The methodology of the study allowed pointing out the main directions of using metric rules on the phonetic level and lexical patterns on the level of language usage. The research of extraordinary stylistic devices contributes to the development of methods for studying old English and old German poetry in general.

WORKS OF F. SCHILLER IN THE CHUVASH LITERATURE: FEATURES OF TRANSLATION INTO CHUVASH LANGUAGE

The article is devoted to the features of translation of German poetry into the Chuvash language. Using the example of F. Schiller’s ballad “Der Handschuh” (“Glove”) and its translation into Chuvash, performed by the Chuvash poet S. Shavly, a comparative analysis of the translation and the original is carried out, and the quality of the translation of the work is determined. The purpose of the study is a comprehensive analysis of the translation of F. Schiller’s poem “Der Handschuh” into the Chuvash language, consideration of the linguistic features of the poetry translation. When translating a work, different types of lexical and grammatical transformations are used: omission of lexical units, transliteration, lexical addition, replacement of parts of speech, generalization, etc., which helped to reveal the content of the work and preserve the structure of the poetic work in the target language. S. Shavly made the German work accessible to the Chuvash audience, using the words and expressions most often found in colloquial speech of his native language.

Немецкоязычный поэтический дискурс в когнитивно-коммуникативном интернет-пространстве ХХI в.

The development of computer technology had a great influence on the structuring of modern discursive practices and led to the introduction of new types of discourse. In particular, the Internet discourse was founded, as well as a number of genres explicated in the Internet space. The purpose of this work is to identify the features of modern German poetry Internet discourse that is an underexplored phenomenon in the context of a cognitive-discursive paradigm. The author deals with the actual questions of study of dichotomy “discourse — (Internet) text” of the poetry discourse, Attention is also focused on Flarf poetry, Google Lyrik, Found poetry, Spoetry / Spam poetry - the main genres presented in German Internet space based on “ready made” technology.

Vom Annex zum Atelier

Abstract In 1960, two competing anthologies of modern poetry were published in an attempt to renew and internationalize German poetry: Günther Steinbrinker’s Panorama moderner Lyrik and Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s Museum der modernen Poesie. This essay argues that the success of Museum over Panorama was based on Enzensberger’s comparative approach to modernist poetry in the first half of the twentieth century as a “chrestomathy” (a textbook) for a “world language of poetry”. This chrestomathy also provided the blueprint for his own German-language poems, which he published the same year in a collection titled Landessprache.

Sravnitel´noe stikhovedenie: metrika i ritmika by E. V. Kazartsev (review)

Sravnitel´noe stikhovedenie: metrika i ritmika by E. V. Kazartsev (review)

Formulaic Language in the Livonian Rhymed Chronicle

Abstract This paper investigates formulaic syntax in the Livonian Rhymed Chronicle (German: Livländische Reimchronik), a Middle High German (MHG) verse history composed around 1290. A common syntactical formula is a unit formed with the adjective vrô (‘glad’, ‘happy’, ‘joyful’) or its negative variant unvrô, together with the verbs sîn (‘be’) or werden (‘become’), with a genitive object: NP-Nom + SÎN/ WERDEN + NP-Gen + (un)vrô (e.g. der meister was der rede vrô). In almost every case the adjective (un)vrô occurs in end position, so that it can be rhymed with another common word, e.g. dô (‘then’) or sô (‘thus’). An important variation is introduced with the demonstrative pronoun des: Pro-Dem-Gen + SÎN/WERDEN + NP-Nom + (un)vrô. This construction has the metrical function of filling a complete line, but it also functions as a discourse marker: it comments positively or negatively on an episode it follows or introduces. The high frequency of this construction in this text compared to its occurrence in other genres written in rhyming couplets suggests that the author was more conservative and less inventive than his contemporaries. In addition he also drew more frequently on the vocabulary and conventions of heroic poetry in which formulaic language was very common. It is argued that the employment of formulaic phrasing and syntax are connected with the sociolinguistic circumstances of the recitation of the chronicle.

At the Edge of Being Human: Liminality in Free Meter Hymnic Poetry (Goethe, Hölderlin, Nietzsche, Rilke)

Free meter hymnic poetry is one of the most important sub-genres in German poetry. The tradition includes eminent texts by Klopstock, Goethe, Novalis, Hölderlin, Heine, Platen, Nietzsche, George, Lasker-Schüler, and Rilke. In this article I show that throughout the genre tradition liminal aspects are crucial to these texts, not only in blurring the limits between the human and the divine in particular, but also in social, formal, poetic and communicative respects.

Contracting love versus courtly love: Jans Enikel’s “Friedrich von Auchenfurt,” the anonymous Mauritius von Craûn, and Dietrich von der Gletze’s “Der Borte”

A surprisingly large number of late medieval German verse narratives are deeply occupied with conflicts in love due to the commodifying nature of the relationship established by the male wooer or his beloved lady. Instead of pursuing love in accordance with the ideals and norms of courtly culture, in these texts from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries we observe that suddenly contracts are set up either to force the woman to grant her body to the wooer, or to block the lover from imposing himself upon the lady. Late medieval poets such as Jans Enikel, the anonymous author of Mauritius von Craun, or Dietrich von der Gletze/Glezze present increasingly problematic cases where love is substituted by contractual conditions, bartering, and exchange commercializing and perverting the erotic aspect altogether.

Uczenie poezji amerykańskiej i niemieckiej przez przekład na przykładzie wybranych utworów literackich

Uczenie poezji amerykańskiej i niemieckiej przez przekład na przykładzie wybranych utworów literackich

МОТИВЫ ЭККЛЕСИАСТА И ПЕСНИ ПЕСНЕЙ В ПОЭЗИИ И. К. ГЮНТЕРА (к вопросу о библейской архетекстуальности)

The problem of correlation between literature and the Bible is one of the relevant issues of contemporary literature studies, with the Bible being an 'axial' archetext of the European culture and literature, an ancient text of a crucially high axiological and aesthetical importance, performing the function of meaning- and text-generation. This research paper is focused on the investigation of the archetextual function of The Book of Ecclesiastes and The Song of Songs in J. Chr. Gunther’s (1695–1723) poetry. The concept of dialogue of cultures, especially ‘the dialogue of texts’ (M. Bakhtin), as well as the theory of intertextuality (J. Kristeva, R. Bart, G. Genette) provide theoretical and philosophical basis for the investigation. We employ a combination of cultural, historical, biographical, comparative, hermeneutic, structural and holistic analysis methods. Gunther is constantly engaged in dialogue with the Bible, no matter in what genre he creates his poetry. He is often guided by the Biblical poetics. The Book of Ecclesiastes became highly consonant with the poetry of Baroque , as it investigates tragic antinomies of the world and in a paradoxical way connects the idea of vanity and absurd of life with the call for getting joy and pleasure from its every moment. Gunther preserves the features of the Baroque worldview to a large extent, therefore the motifs of Ecclesiastes naturally permeate his lyrical poetry (spiritual and student songs, love and philosophical poems). Gunther’s hedonism is stronger in comparison to that of the ancient Hebrew poet and the Baroque poets of the 19 th century. However, his hedonism is that of a new type as it is built on the reasonable nature of a human and the natural pursuit of happiness, which is first of all seen in the poet’s student songs ( Studentenlieder ), being the first works of Rococo in German poetry. The new hedonism together with the motifs of the vanity of life, seen through the topoi of The Book of Ecclesiastes and The Song of Songs , manifests itself in Gunther’s innovative love poetry, standing out due to its special confessional manner. In the late works of Gunther, reflections on the irresolvable problem of theodicy from the perspective of The Book of Job and The Book of Ecclesiastes are intensifying and becoming organically interwoven with the aspiration to redemption and Divine love in the world. Therefore, the poet refers to the mystically understood topoi of The Song of Songs. The Biblical archetextuality allowed Gunther to express his individuality and the problems of human spirit in a deeper way during the difficult and life-changing period of time.

Animals in Architecture by Sabine Scho

Sabine Scho’s work is hard to pin down. The German publisher of Animals in Architecture—Kookbooks—is largely dedicated to contemporary poetry, perhaps leading one to an over-hasty taxonomy. Upon closer inspection, Scho’s work, in particular Animals in Architecture, is a hybrid combining prose miniatures, poetry translations and fragments, sociological reflections, and photos with a green color filter. Indeed, Scho’s work on this project first started with photography, spanning nearly a decade of visiting zoos across the globe. In 2012, she started a blog as a kind of accountability mechanism for finishing the book. However, there remained questions of form, content, even language. Largely written while living in São Paulo, Animals in Architecture contains many traces of Anglophone and Portuguese influence.In each of the book’s twenty-two sections, Scho closes in on animals, whether camels, bats, penguins, or octopus. A quote from Hans Blumenberg is one of the two epigraphs to her introductory essay—aptly describing a central paradox of zoos: the relationships between the animals in the enclosures and the homo sapiens outside. Many of her poems remind us that it is often unclear who is watching whom. John Berger’s essay “Why Look at Animals?” notes that zoos are simultaneously a “living monument” to the disappearance of caged creatures from our culture. People go to zoos to see animals, but it is unlikely that the animals want to see humans. Animals in Architecture documents an attempt to reconnect with these animals and its ultimate futility.Although I try to keep a close watch on the contemporary German poetry scene and had come across some of Sabine Scho’s work before Animals in Architecture was published in 2013, I was quite surprised by this work’s genre-bending mix of elements. In the following year, I tried my hand at translating these challenging texts and managed to place a couple poems in No Man’s Land, an online journal dedicated to publishing German literature in English translation.Scho’s regard has only increased in current German-language discourse. In particular, the significance of her contributions to debates on human relations with the environment have continued to grow; she was recognized with the Deutscher Preis für Nature Writing alongside the poet Christian Lehnert in the summer of 2018. The following essay is among the most concise German-language takes on the subject of zoos, animals, humans, and the ways in which architecture exemplifies our fraught relationship.

Bertolt Brecht’s Radical Contribution to Pacifist Children’s Lyrics in Interwar Germany: “Die drei Soldaten” (The Three Soldiers) and “Kinderkreuzzug 1939” (Children’s Crusade 1939)

This paper focuses on German poetry for children published during the interwar period and written by left-wing authors such as Bertolt Brecht, Ernst Friedrich, and Edwin Hoernle. Their poems propagated socialist and communist ideals, in line with antifascist and anti-imperialist views that call for class struggle as well as fighting against fascist ideology. Moreover, many poems supported pacifistic ideas which turned against the glorification of war. In this regard, Bertolt Brecht played a significant role. His poems “Die drei Soldaten: Ein Kinderbuch” (The three soldiers: A children’s book), with illustrations by George Grosz, and “Kinderkreuzzug 1939” (Children’s crusade 1939) present prime examples of radical publishing and aesthetics in the interwar period, since they express a sharp critique of the destructive power of war and its effect on afterwar society.

Shaping Multilingual Identity in Angelika Overath's Bilingual Romansh–German Poetry

Shaping Multilingual Identity in Angelika Overath's Bilingual Romansh–German Poetry

О субъектно-объектных отношениях в лирическом стихотворении: на примере немецкой поэзии от фольклора до постмодернистского мейнстрима

О субъектно-объектных отношениях в лирическом стихотворении: на примере немецкой поэзии от фольклора до постмодернистского мейнстрима

Shaping Multilingual Identity in Angelika Overath's Bilingual Romansh–German Poetry

Shaping Multilingual Identity in Angelika Overath's Bilingual Romansh–German Poetry

Cold War Nature: Transforming German Poetry

Cold War Nature: Transforming German Poetry

A Metrical Analysis of Medieval German Poetry Using Supervised Learning

Middle High German (MHG) epic poetry presents a unique solution to the linguistic changes underpinning the transition from classical Latin poetry, based on syllable length, into later vernacular rhythmic poetry, based on phonological stress. The predominating pattern in MHG verse is the alternation between stressed and unstressed syllables, but syllable length also plays a crucial role. There are a total of eight possible metrical values. Single or half mora syllables can carry any one of three types of stress, resulting in six combinations. The seventh value is a double mora, i.e., a long stressed syllable. The eighth value is an elided syllable. We construct a supervised Conditional Random Fields (CRF) model to predict the metrical value of syllables, and subsequently investigate medieval German poets’ use of semantic and sonorous emphasis through meter. The features used are: 1) the syllable’s position within the line, 2) the syllable’s length in characters, 3) the syllable’s characters, 4) elision (last two characters of previous syllable and first two characters of focal syllable), 5) syllable weight, and 6) word boundaries. Additional metrical rules are enforced and marginal probabilities are calculated to yield the most likely legal scansion of a line. The model achieves a macro average F-score of .925 on internal cross-validation and .909 on held-out testing data. We determine that trochaic alternation with a one syllable anacrusis and words carrying clear stress assignment are the easiest for the model to scan. Lines with multiple double morae of syllables with few characters are the most difficult. We then rank all the epic poetry in the Mittelhochdeutsche Begriffsdatenbank (MHDBDB) by the difficulty of the meter. Finally, we investigate the double mora, which MHG poets used to draw attention to chosen concepts. We conclude that poets generally chose to use the double mora to emphasize highly sonorant words.

Sentence judgments and the grammar of poetry: Linking linguistic structure and poetic effect

The present article aims to show that the elicitation of intuitive literary-aesthetic sentence judgments taps into readers’ poetry-specific linguistic register, and how such judgment methods can be used to support and constrain future theory formation in experimental poetics. In two experiments, we examined effects of deviant and parallelistic linguistic features on readers’ grammatical and literary-aesthetic evaluation of single sentences.In Experiment 1, participants rated carefully selected and modified lines of German poetry for either acceptability or poeticity (n = 40 each) on a 7-point scale; original lines featured grammatical deviations that were absent in modified versions. All investigated deviation types reduced the acceptability of the lines, but only routine licenses of German poetry increased their perceived poeticity and showed moderate to strong correlations between poeticity and deviance (i.e., low acceptability).In Experiment 2, participants made forced acceptability (n = 120) or poeticity (n = 120) choices regarding two (out of four) syntactic variants of a single sentence; variants crossed syntactic canonicity (canonical/non-canonical) and sentence rhythm (alternating/non-alternating). Acceptability choices favored only canonical syntax; poeticity choices were sensitive to both variables, and favored non-canonical syntax and alternating sentence rhythms.Our results indicate that poeticity judgments reflect categorical and gradient genre-specific well-formedness (Exp. 1), and that poeticity criteria are similar for traditional verse and for regular sentences without salient genre cues (Exp. 2). The observed prosodic and grammatical preferences suggest that perceptual fluency and conceptual challenge are prototypical characteristics of poetry reading. We conclude that sentence judgments can reveal whether and to which degree specific features of linguistic structure contribute to poetic effects.

Wielość światów. Kilka refleksji o twórczości lirycznej Pavla Straussa

Writer Pavol Strauss is little known in Slovakia and Poland because there were several decades between his first collections of poetry written in the German language in the period between the two World Wars and his Slovak post-war essays, and then his other works (essays, diaries and aphorisms) published sporadically or after 1989 on the other. He published four collections of poetry in German: Die Kanone auf dem Ei (1936), Schwarze Verse (1937), Worte aus der Nacht (published bilingually in 2001) and Bruder Abel lebt ja noch (manuscript).After 1946 Pavol Strauss stopped writing poetry and stopped writing in German.

James Wright: A Life in Poetry

James Wright: A Life in Poetry