Great Poetry Research Articles

Close, but No Cigar

Close, but No Cigar

REFLECTION OF THEMATIC REPRESNTATIONS OF GHALIB’S POTERY IN ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS

Literature, art and all its genres are always engaged in creating a vast landscape by transcending the oppression and limitations of history and civilization. The sphere of expression of the greatest human emotions is not confined to any class, region or scenario and is always immortalized on the scale of time. While great poetry organizes the feelings of an individual, it also becomes a means of exposing them to new feelings and then harmonizes these feelings with nature and civilization by giving them modesty and purity. Ghalib's poetry is also great, in the sense that Ghalib has created his own unique poetic universe with creative essence, collective memory and poetic innovations. Ghalib's greatness rests on the fact that he has seen life through his eyes and is the spokesperson of the basic values of our civilization. The culture created by Subcontinent in centuries, the heart of this civilization is felt in Ghalib's personality and poetry. Kalam-e- Ghalib is a great asset of this civilization and culture.
 The most important problem for the interpreter of any literary and poetic text is the recovery of cultural values ​​and identity, and it is not so easy to capture it in translation. In the background of every word of the language, there is its own culture, its own history, and with the passage of time, the same is reflected in its meanings. In the translation of poetry, the reflection of cultural exchange and cultural context is hard task for the translator. However, the aspect of discovery and non-discovery remains in interpretation.
 The creative use of symbols, metaphors, and similes in Ghalib's poem has put the translators in a difficult position. In translation, it is very difficult to carve out alternatives to capture the state of meaning and gestures and impressions that arise from the interplay of symbols, metaphors, and similes. In such a case, cultural exchange and interpretation of the cultural context and the passing of the meaning in the translation is not easy anyway. This Article is an attempt to highlight the difficulties and uncertainties that faces translators while the process of translating Mirza Ghalib’s poetry.
 In the article under review, an attempt has been made to compare and analyze the translations of Kalam-e-Ghalib so that in the form of comparison and analysis, the competence of the translators can be displayed as well as the standard patterns can be reflected. This comparative study will also make it clear which translators are familiar with the classical tradition of the Urdu ghazal, its lyricism, contexts, themes, and how successful they were in representing the Ghalib’s poetry.

Pro-Kontra Terjemah Tafsiriyah Al-Qur’an Bacaan Mulia Karya H.B. Jassin

This study aims to describe the discourse on the controversial translation of the Koran Bacaan Mulia by H.B Jassin. To achieve this goal, this study uses a qualitative method with analysis using content analysis. The results of this study that the translation of the Koran H.B. Jassin is unique because it displays the aesthetics of the Qur'an which is manifested in the form of a poetic translation. This work caused a stir in the country and invited the controversy of Muslims in Indonesia. Various accusations and criticisms were directed at H.B Jassin who was considered incompatible in the field of the Qur'an because he did not master Arabic and other sciences that supported the process of translating the Qur'an. The debate about whether the Qur'an tends to be poetic or prose, long before H.B Jassin's work related to the poetry of the Qur'an appeared. The majority of scholars are of the opinion that the Qur'an without being poetic already contains elements of very great poetry. Regarding the rhyme contained in the Qur'an, not only Muslim scholars have studied it. The orientalists also discussed it, such as Richard Bell, who argued that there are hidden rhymes. Differences in understanding the verses in the Koran itself have sometimes led to pros and cons, plus there have been translations in poetic form whose content sometimes does not match the original text. Apart from that, the translation of the Qur'an H.B Jassin; The Noble Readings of the Qur'an should be appreciated because it has colored the treasures of Islamic scholarship in Indonesia as well as a form of creativity in receptive to the Qur'an.

Metalepsis and Stevens’ Abstraction

Metalepsis and Stevens’ Abstraction

Pain by Miroslav Maksimović

Reviewed by: Pain by Miroslav Maksimović Biljana D. Obradović Miroslav Maksimović Pain Bloomington, IN, USA: Three String Books, 2021. Translated from Serbian by John Jeffries and Bogdan Rakić. Illustrations by Svetlana Rakić. 104 Pp. Introduction, Appendix. ISBN 978-0893575083 Miroslav Maksimović's, Pain, was translated from Serbian by John Jeffries and Bogdan Rakić and illustrated by Svetlana Rakić. This facing page translation of sonnets (Serbian original on the left and English on the right) has a forward by Bogdan Rakić, and an appendix, "Sweet Fear: Down the Ancestors' Path," presumably by the author, Maksimović. although this is not clearly stated. The appendix is both in English and Serbian, not facing page; it should have been reversed, with the original language first and the target second or just made facing page as the rest of the book. Interspersed throughout the book, are twelve moving response drawings to the sonnets by Svetlana Rakić. There are no biographical notes of the author (although B. Rakić gives us information on him in his introduction), translators nor the artist. The sonnets are divided into three parts: part one containing only one, part two twelve, and part three also one, so altogether fourteen sonnets. The sonnets have a rhyme scheme, in Serbian and in English divided into four stanzas: two quatrains and two tercets. Translating rhyme is not easy at all, so kudos go to the great translators' efforts. Miroslav Maksimović (b. 1946) is the author of fourteen collections of poetry, four collections of essays, a volume of polemics, according to B. Rakić in his introduction who says that Maksimović wrote, "about seemingly trivial details of everyday life" (p. 1), in his pre-nineties books. Then "prompted by the Yugoslav[ian] wars and their devastating consequences—[he] turn[ed] to … much larger issues: the never-ending cycle of violence in the Balkans" (p. 1). [End Page 184] It's unfortunate that he turned to the past, if I may add, instead of looking at the future. Those seemingly trivial issues he wrote about before are what writers strive to look out for and what makes great poetry. Instead, and for an important reason, his most recent book, Pain, is "a perfect example of his change in focus" (1), about "real events that took place in August 1941, when the entire population of the ethnically mixed village of Miostrah near Cazin in Western Bosnia were massacred by their Muslim neighbors, the supporters of the Croatian Ustashe" (p. 1), which was part of a "genocidal campaign and the complete extermination of the Serbs from the so-called Independent State of Croatia" (p. 1). One hundred-eighty women and children and all the remaining members of Maksimović's family: his mother Stoja Uzelac, her mother and six siblings (which included a two-year-old brother). She was wounded, mistaken for dead, yet she survived by crawling out of the pit she was thrown in. She then joined the partisan forces fighting fascism and that's how she met Maksimović's father. Her own father had been killed before the rest of teh fmaily members. Maksimović was only vaguely aware of his mother's tragedy, but once his mother died in 2017, he finally pieced the story of his mother's trauma together and it became his own. The introductory sonnet, "I Remember This," was written thirty years before the middle, second part, while the final sonnet predates them by ten years. He wrote the middle, cathartic outburst in twelve days, one a day. All fourteen sonnets (like the fourteen lines of each sonnet) are thematically connected, but the last line of each sonnet is not the beginning line of the next, and there is no master sonnet containing all first lines, as is the case in sonnet wreaths. He has created his own hybrid genre here, as Bogdan Rakić says, which still does adhere to some of the strict formal requirements. So these twelve sonnets were written in February 2016. They deal with the story of Stoja Uzelac's first life. The second sonnet discusses the deadly weapons used in the massacre (axes and knives), the third describes the parts of mutilated human bodies, the fourth introduces the victims...

The Therapist’s Voice: Discussion of “Expressivity and Transformation through Language in Work with Serious Disorder”

ABSTRACT Director points out that language has been somewhat sidelined by the modern emphasis on the importance of procedural non-verbal encounters. She recounts some clearly life-saving words she uttered to a very despairing patient. The review cites several literary critics commenting on the arousing, even exciting, effect of the inner rhythms contained in great poetry: the reviewer suggests that a related effect on the therapist’s voice may have added power and much-needed strength to the words themselves in this clinical situation.

Contrastive analysis of the two translations of Shota Rustaveli’s aphorisms into the English Language

Our article is an attempt to represent a contrastive analysis of the two translations of Shota Rustaveli’s aphorisms from his timeless epic poem The Night in the Panther’s Skin into the English language; those of by Marjory Scott Wardrop and Venera Urushadze. Our study revealed that though very conscientiously done, both translations lack the lustre and rhyme and rhythm of the poetry of the great poem and the compensation is often rendered on behalf of other stylistic or lexical devices; namely it is alliteration and consonance, parallel structures, in most cases. We have also come to realize that the second translation, by Ms. V. Urushadze is certainly greatly indebted to the first one for both: choice of wording and structure of a phrase. However, it should be noted that Ms. V. Urushadze took more liberty at rendering the aphorisms into English, making them more extended and stylistically more expressive. We hope our little study will be of interest to those individuals who are fascinated by translation challenges and especially that of almost impossible task– translation of great poetry.

‘But Freebourne loved its steel’: American Great War poetry, modernity, and mobilization

ABSTRACT Considerable attention has been given to American writers, including poets, who in the 1920s expressed disillusionment with US participation in the war. As such, these writers participated in a Modernist critique of the ideologies that supported US efforts to use the war as a lever to propel the United States into pre-eminence in a global capitalist system. My article focuses, rather, upon the ways that some poets during the war were already satirizing or otherwise resisting the US world hegemonic project. This iconoclastic work appeared in two distinct forms. On the one hand, some poets often affiliated with marginal political groups, sought intentionally to expose the socio-economic and self-interested underpinnings of ideologies of family loyalty, social altruism, democracy, and the rule of law that were promulgated to justify US intervention. Most vociferous in these critiques were socialist poets, particularly Arturo Giovannitti and Ralph Chaplin, but other critics were affiliated with the most militant branches of the Woman’s Peace Party, such as Florence Tuttle and Bernice Evans. On the other hand, an implicit critique of the idealistic rhetoric justifying US intervention might also be found in certain poems honestly depicting the technologies of modern warfare, even if the poets in question sought a neutral or supportive stance towards the US war effort. Such work was produced both by soldier poets such as John Allan Wyeth and Baker Brownell and by civilians like John Curtis Underwood, a voluminous Whitmanian chronicler of the war. Exposing the hollowness of patriotic cant already during the war years, these poets stressed the cruel facts that the war would not be won by that side with the better principles or less hypocritical ideological formations, but by that side more successful in employing the killing potential of industrial tools and mass organization.

Yeats’s A Vision and Sri Aurobindo’s Life Divine: The Essence of Poetry

The works of Yeats and Sri Aurobindo offer the perennial theme, source, and structure for poetry, particularly in the later phases of their lives: Yeats’s last phase makes him create his great poetry while Sri Aurobindo’s helps him write his great epic by looking into the transformation of soul, a journey of soul until it merges with the Supermind. Yeats’s A Vision is geometrical symbolism showing 28 phases of Moon and the Principles and faculties of human and civilization, while Sri Aurobindo’s Life Divine is about spiritual evolution, efforts of superhuman kind towards super mental consciousness by two ways: one to lift mind through matter, to Overmind, and then to Supermind, sat-chit-ananda. Yeats’s A Vision is a system, the myths for his poetry with which Yeats is to get to excellent poetic achievement; Sri Aurobindo’s Life Divine based on eternal and spiritual exploration achieves ultimate reality. Life is continuous: breath is necessary for life; when man is dead and his body’s organism is no longer active, life withdraws.

Comparison of Mahwi's and Plato's Philosophical Texts on Theology

This study deals with the comparison between Mahwi’s poems and Plato’s philosophical texts on theology. It draws the assimilations and the differences between both views by analyzing Mahwi’s selected poems and Plato’s selected works including; The Timaeus and The Republic. It shows how a Kurdish poet delivers a philosophical idea within his poetry, and that great poetry is often deeply philosophical. The paper also proves that there is a strong relationship between literature and philosophy. However, many do not see the correlation between them, but if we look back into history, we see that some philosophers delivered their philosophical ideas through one of the literary genres. Such as Voltaire, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Maulana Jaladini Romi, and Plato himself at first attempted to write tragedy in verse and he was reading great Greek poetry.

Ostatni

Andrzej Walicki, the last Polish world-renowned humanist of the 20th century, passed away in August this year. The article offers a concise description of his personality and work, which partly undermines some aspects of his autobiography published in 2010. Walicki, who, like Leszek Kołakowski, was a member of the 56’ generation, also known as the “thaw” generation, became famous, first and foremost, as an expert in Russian thought. His publications, devoted to, among other things, retrospective utopianism and liberalism in the 19th and 20th century Russian philosophy and social thought, were novel on a world scale. Equally novel were his works on the history of Marxism, where he challenged Kołakowski’s standpoint. Moreover, Walicki signifi cantly contributed to research on the history of Polish romantic philosophy, which had previously been overshadowed by great poetry. Walicki is considered to be one of the personalities who, in the 1960s and 70s, the time when Poland was part of the Soviet empire, made Polish humanities flourish. However, no matter how highly one estimates Walicki’s achievements, the impression that humanities were thriving in the communist Poland aft er de-Stalinization is an illusion. The illusion is an eff ect of the crisis in which humanities in Poland found themselves aft er the change of the regime, under neoliberal and populist governments.

The mind’s magic lantern: David Brewster and the scientific imagination

ABSTRACT The imagination has always been thought to operate primarily in conjunction with the sense of vision, imagined objects and scenes being conjured up before the ‘mind’s eye’. In early nineteenth-century Scotland the natural philosopher David Brewster developed a theory of the imagination that explained its operation through a reversal of the normal processes of visual perception. These ideas were rooted in the mental philosophy of the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment. For Brewster the mind’s eye was also the eye of the body, and images from the memory and imagination were projected onto the retina in the same manner that images were projected onto the screen in a magic lantern show. This theory underpinned his belief that imagination played an essential role in scientific discovery. Brewster believed that this process was as essential to the discoveries of science as it was to the creation of great poetry. The writings of Brewster can tell us a great deal about the connections between science and literature in the early nineteenth century, as well as showing that the philosophy of science in contemporary Britain was far from monolithic.

‘I like to think of my comics adaptations as my own recitations … ’: in conversation with Julian Peters

ABSTRACT Julian Peters is a comic book artist and illustrator living in Montreal, Canada. In the last few years, he has focused on adapting classic works of English, French and Italian literature into comics. His works have been featured in anthologies, magazines, and school textbooks. Poems to See by: A Comic Artist Interprets Great Poetry (2020) is his recently published book featuring comics adaptation of 24 classic poems. His adaptations of poems by Arthur Rimbaud and François Villon were included in The Graphic Canon (Seven Stories Press, 2012), and his adaptation of T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ was featured in Slate Magazine. In spring 2015, he was ‘Cartoonist in Residence’ at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Julian holds a master’s degree in Art History from Concordia University and takes his creative inspiration from the great and minor masters of all artistic periods. In this interview, Julian Peters discusses his creative process, his love for classic poetry, and his comics adaptation of his beloved poems.

“Sacred Calling” in Nineteenth-Century Authorship: Wordsworth, Emerson, Thackeray

“Sacred Calling” in Nineteenth-Century Authorship: Wordsworth, Emerson, Thackeray Günter Leypoldt (bio) To be “called,” as a prophet or priest, requires a gift, “grace,” which entails special powers—a privileged sensibility—combined with special obligations, such as public service for a higher good. In this essay, I wish to examine the discourse of higher calling in two nineteenth-century spaces of literary practice, one defined by poets and what some have called sage writers (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Emerson, Longfellow, Ruskin, Arnold, Carlyle, Whitman), the other by journalist novelists (Dickens, G. H. Lewes, W. M. Thackeray, George Eliot, W. D. Howells, Henry James, Mark Twain).1 The sage network cultivates a notion of “literature as world-disclosure” that frames writers as spiritual virtuosi who compete with traditional religion. The network of journalist-novelists, by contrast, leans toward entrepreneurial concepts of writing as disciplined work for a democratic marketplace. My claim is that these two tendencies do not reflect successive historical periods (one more religious or idealist, the other more secular and realist) but rather modalities shaped by network-specific writerly sensibilities and performative genre conventions. The nineteenth-century shift in conceptions of authorship from an art-religious visionary poetics to a tough-minded [End Page 599] secular realism, I argue, meant only a shift in the quest for authentic higher principles. In what follows, sections one and two will outline the sage-specific concepts of vocation with a view to Emerson’s and Carlyle’s literary-religious Transcendentalism and Wordsworth’s monumental Recluse project. Section three places Wordsworth and Scott and some of their US successors (Whitman, Longfellow, Stowe, Melville) in the “laureate position” in the literary system, a space that defines how writers of literary ambition mediate between higher and lower aspects of professionalization (peer-based vocational principles vs. economic gain).2 Next, I chart how the rise of quality cultural journalism in the 1830s complicates the discourse of vocation, giving literary authors a sense of leading a “double life” to keep breadwinning and peer-orientation in a meaningful relationship. Finally, section five traces the discourse of vocation in midcentury artist novels of disillusionment (Balzac’s Lost Illusions and G. H. Lewes’ Ranthorpe) and the more pronounced anti-vocational and yet still authenticity-pursuing stance in W. M. Thackeray’s criticism and his novel Pendennis. For all his manifesto-level debunking of Transcendentalist concepts of vocation, I will claim, Thackeray is no less oriented toward higher purposes than the Emersonian sage. Emerson’s and Thackeray’s notions of higher calling follow from their investment in the laureate position, rather than from metaphysical certainties (spiritual, religious, logocentric) that the detranscendentalizers within Emerson criticism frame as a historical naivety to be superseded by modern thinking. The effort of retranscendentalizing nineteenth-century literary culture requires us to see that strong notions of literary vocation reach across the religious-secular divide. [End Page 600] 1. emerson’s “ministry of song” The sage network participates in the visionary turn in romantic-period poetics that blurs the borders between religion and art established by Enlightenment thinking. The new poetics suggested that great poetry requires extraordinary powers of ontological vision, that major poets differ from minor ones mainly by their ability to produce a higher language (a poetic music beyond concepts), and that poetry provides better access to sources of transcendence than theological speculation and religious dogma. These beliefs did not dominate romantic-period literary culture (Lord Byron and Walter Scott had little use for them), but they were central to a tradition that ran from German romanticism to Wordsworth, Coleridge, Carlyle, Longfellow, Fuller, Emerson, and Whitman. Consider, for example, how Emerson describes his vocation to Lydia Jackson, his second-wife-to-be, during their courtship in 1835: “I am born a poet [. . .]. That is my nature & vocation. My singing be sure is very ‘husky,’ & is for the most part in prose. Still am I a poet in the sense of a perceiver & dear lover of the harmonies that are in the soul & in matter, & specially of the correspondences between these & those.”3 The context of this passage is Emerson’s transition from a Boston minister to a literary intellectual. His 1832 resignation from his pastoral appointment...

Ariel MagnusChess with My Grandfather by Kit Maude

0 written, and nothing mars the undeniable power of this poignant and very intelligent novel. Rita D. Jacobs New York Arturo Gutiérrez Plaza Intensive Care Trans. Arthur Dixon. Columbia, South Carolina. Alliteratïon. 2020. 213 pages. “POETRY IS THAT WHICH is worth translating,” says Eliot Weinberger in 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, his 1987 treatise on the difficulties of just such an enterprise. “Great poetry lives in a state of perpetual transformation, perpetual translation : the poem dies when it has no place to go.” In other words, translating poetry from one language to another requires a kind of transformation in which the poem succeeds on its own terms not only in its source language but also in the target language. Otherwise, to paraphrase the American poet and translator Robert Bly, the poem is what gets lost in translation. Arthur Dixon’s translation of Venezuelan poet Arturo Gutiérrez Plaza’s Cuidados intensivos succeeds brilliantly as both translation and English- language poetry. Gutiérrez Plaza’s voice in Spanish, his diction and rhythms, are those of everyday speech—earthy, gleaming like a rock in the sunlight. Yet at the same time it is visionary and incantatory, carrying with it poetry’s power to bring something momentous into being. To be at once straightforward on the surface but suggest the deepest human dilemmas and emotions is a hallmark of this book, a paradox Dixon’s translation brings out beautifully. For example, in “A True Story,” Gutiérrez Plaza’s speaker tells us, “It’s true, today you know nothing / for certain, / except that from one dawn to the next / things happen.” This gesture toward the mystery of existence—that our lives are disorderly, random, and mostly unfathomable—is rendered in the most straightforward diction, without the kind of embellishment that would weaken the gravity of the realization. The major themes of Intensive Care accumulate and dovetail throughout the book through such oracular pronouncements . The book’s title suggests illness and mortality but also the vocation of the poet to impose order through language on chaos, even though language has the power both to bring us closer and to separate us. In “Written at the Wrong Time,” the speaker tells us, “Had it been said before, / had it been said without pause, / then maybe, just maybe, all writing / would be in vain and time would do the talking.” Other themes of the book include the mysterious interventions of fate and the difficult situation of contemporary Venezuela at this particular historical moment. Intensive Care is Gutiérrez Plaza’s fifth book of poems but the first to be translated into English. He has won major awards in both Venezuela and Mexico and is currently a professor emeritus at the Universidad Simón Bolívar in Caracas. Given the high quality of both the poems and the translation , here’s hoping Dixon will bring us other of Gutiérrez Plaza’s books in English. Steve Bellin-Oka Tulsa, Oklahoma Ariel Magnus Chess with My Grandfather Trans. Kit Maude. Kolkata. Seagull Books. 2021. 312 pages. WHAT IS CHESS if not a metaphorical microcosm of a myriad of human institutions , conflicts, and systems? In Chess with My Grandfather, Argentine novelist Ariel Magnus (with the help of Kit Maude, his infinitely talented translator), descendant of German immigrants, shows just how honed a tool this tabletop theater has been in acting as a proxy for a vast number of human endeavors, specifically war. And what better war to allegorize than the Second World War, whose star hegemons resemble the command the King and Queen pieces have over the fate of the game? Ariel Magnus’s grandfather, Heinz Magnus , was a German Jew who managed to escape (along with his mother, father, and sister) likely death by fleeing to Buenos Aires, Argentina, after the first rumors of Hitler’s ascent and the ensuing transcontinental conflict. The plot of Heinz’s relatively languid life in Argentina crescendos when the 8th Chess Olympiad takes place between WORLDLIT.ORG 93 BOOKS IN REVIEW Frances Larson Undreamed Shores:The Hidden Heroines of British Anthropology London. Granta. 2020. 352 pages. FRANCES LARSON IS AN anthropologist at the University of Durham and the...

Arturo Gutiérrez PlazaIntensive Care by Arthur Dixon

0 written, and nothing mars the undeniable power of this poignant and very intelligent novel. Rita D. Jacobs New York Arturo Gutiérrez Plaza Intensive Care Trans. Arthur Dixon. Columbia, South Carolina. Alliteratïon. 2020. 213 pages. “POETRY IS THAT WHICH is worth translating,” says Eliot Weinberger in 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, his 1987 treatise on the difficulties of just such an enterprise. “Great poetry lives in a state of perpetual transformation, perpetual translation : the poem dies when it has no place to go.” In other words, translating poetry from one language to another requires a kind of transformation in which the poem succeeds on its own terms not only in its source language but also in the target language. Otherwise, to paraphrase the American poet and translator Robert Bly, the poem is what gets lost in translation. Arthur Dixon’s translation of Venezuelan poet Arturo Gutiérrez Plaza’s Cuidados intensivos succeeds brilliantly as both translation and English- language poetry. Gutiérrez Plaza’s voice in Spanish, his diction and rhythms, are those of everyday speech—earthy, gleaming like a rock in the sunlight. Yet at the same time it is visionary and incantatory, carrying with it poetry’s power to bring something momentous into being. To be at once straightforward on the surface but suggest the deepest human dilemmas and emotions is a hallmark of this book, a paradox Dixon’s translation brings out beautifully. For example, in “A True Story,” Gutiérrez Plaza’s speaker tells us, “It’s true, today you know nothing / for certain, / except that from one dawn to the next / things happen.” This gesture toward the mystery of existence—that our lives are disorderly, random, and mostly unfathomable—is rendered in the most straightforward diction, without the kind of embellishment that would weaken the gravity of the realization. The major themes of Intensive Care accumulate and dovetail throughout the book through such oracular pronouncements . The book’s title suggests illness and mortality but also the vocation of the poet to impose order through language on chaos, even though language has the power both to bring us closer and to separate us. In “Written at the Wrong Time,” the speaker tells us, “Had it been said before, / had it been said without pause, / then maybe, just maybe, all writing / would be in vain and time would do the talking.” Other themes of the book include the mysterious interventions of fate and the difficult situation of contemporary Venezuela at this particular historical moment. Intensive Care is Gutiérrez Plaza’s fifth book of poems but the first to be translated into English. He has won major awards in both Venezuela and Mexico and is currently a professor emeritus at the Universidad Simón Bolívar in Caracas. Given the high quality of both the poems and the translation , here’s hoping Dixon will bring us other of Gutiérrez Plaza’s books in English. Steve Bellin-Oka Tulsa, Oklahoma Ariel Magnus Chess with My Grandfather Trans. Kit Maude. Kolkata. Seagull Books. 2021. 312 pages. WHAT IS CHESS if not a metaphorical microcosm of a myriad of human institutions , conflicts, and systems? In Chess with My Grandfather, Argentine novelist Ariel Magnus (with the help of Kit Maude, his infinitely talented translator), descendant of German immigrants, shows just how honed a tool this tabletop theater has been in acting as a proxy for a vast number of human endeavors, specifically war. And what better war to allegorize than the Second World War, whose star hegemons resemble the command the King and Queen pieces have over the fate of the game? Ariel Magnus’s grandfather, Heinz Magnus , was a German Jew who managed to escape (along with his mother, father, and sister) likely death by fleeing to Buenos Aires, Argentina, after the first rumors of Hitler’s ascent and the ensuing transcontinental conflict. The plot of Heinz’s relatively languid life in Argentina crescendos when the 8th Chess Olympiad takes place between WORLDLIT.ORG 93 ...

Literature and War: A Study of the Film, the Great Poetry

알렉산더 룽긴 감독의 영화 『위대한 시』는 제 30회 키노타브르 영화제 경쟁부문에서 작품상과 남우주연상을 수상하였다. 또한 제 24회 부산국제영화제에서 비아시아권 영화 경쟁 부문인 ‘플래쉬 포워드’ 부문에 선정됨으로써 국내외적으로 영화의 완성도를 인정받았다. 본고에서는 이 작품을 ‘군사적 이미지의 두 남자’, ‘시적인 삶의 산문, 산문적 삶의 시’, ‘‘종결’ 이후를 향한 카메라의 시선’, ‘숏-리버스 숏의 부재’, ‘가해와 피해의 연쇄’, ‘하나의 숏, 두 개의 역설적인 세계’라는 소제목으로 나누어 분석하였다. 이 작품은 문학과 전쟁의 관계, 구체적으로 소연방 붕괴 후 발생한 전쟁, 그리고 시를 소재로 했다는 점에서 동시대 러시아에 대한 구체적인 묘사를 하면서도, 지역성을 넘어서는 일반화와 보편성을 획득하고 있다. 특히 우크라이나, 체첸 등과의 전쟁의 상처에 대한 직접적인 언급은 현대 러시아영화에서 사실상 금기시되어 왔다는 점에서 이 작품은 주제 측면에서 진일보한 것으로 평가할 수 있을 것이다. 영화 『위대한 시』는 사각의 스크린 내부에 문학과 시청각적인 묘사를 공존시키고 있다. 주인공은 전쟁의 상처에서 벗어나기 위해 시를 배우지만, 소연방 붕괴라는 전례 없는 역사적 사건을 겪은 러시아 사회에서 전쟁은 여전히 일상의 한 부분을 차지하고 있다. 즉 평화를 되찾은 듯 보이는 사회에서 빅토르와 료하는 시를 배우지만, 여전히 그들 주위에는 전쟁의 그림자가 어른거리고 있는 것이다. 알렉산더 룽긴 감독은 어울릴 것 같지 않은 전쟁과 시(문학)라는 소재를 사용하여 짜임새 있는 서사를 만드는데 그치지 않고, 적절한 영화 언어를 구사하여 주제와 형식 모든 측면에서 완성도를 이룬 영화를 연출하는데 성공한 것으로 보인다.

Representation of two Contrary States of Human Soul: Songs of Innocence and Experience by William Blake

It is difficult to ignore the basic point about William Blake that though chronologically he is an eighteenth-century poet, he is a highly gifted and immensely successful lyric poet. While Blake’s poetry may or may not have the pleasantness of great poetry, it is perhaps true that Blake has no notable predecessors and no followers. He consistently stresses the importance of freedom, as opposed to the tyranny that he feels to be characteristic of the government of his day, and attacks negative moralizing, which he associates with the church, as opposed to a true sense of religion. The Songs of Innocence and of Experience occupy a vital place in the corpus of Blake’s poetical writings. This is so because these Songs are as much the product of Blake’s earlier writings as the pointer to his future writings. The kind of philosophical tone that we encounter in The Songs of Innocence and of Experience is indeed astounding. It is said that Blake looked upon poetry as something that is dictated by spirits, or as the result of inspiration, but he was also aware of the role of the poet to bring out certain truths of human life in front of the people in a symbolic way. There is no doubt about the fact that in the corpus of English Poetry no other poet has got as much success, if equal but certainly not more, as Blake. The present paper is mainly focused on the philosophical appeal and symbolic portrayal of human existence that the Songs of William Blake illustrate to us.

Taras Shevchenko in Reflections of the Cyril and Methodius Society Members

The article aims to study the personality of Taras Shevchenko in the reflections of the Cyril and Methodius Society Members. The investigators of the figures of the Cyril and Methodius Society, the epistolary and memoir legacy of the participants of the Ukrainian National Movement and their sympathizers are analyzed. As a result, it is argued that the Cyril and Methodius Society Members had fruitful intellectual contacts with T. Shevchenko, knew well and highly respected his work, realized the importance of the poet as a true Ukrainian populist, who made a significant contribution to the national-cultural revival of Ukrainian culture and the creation of a Ukrainian national consciousness It was proved that the activities of the Cyril and Methodius completely coincided with the meaning of Shevchenkoʼs poetic creativity, while the charismatic personality of Kobzar organically entered into the intellectual core of the Cyril and Methodius Society circle, and made a powerful moral and psychological influence on the conscious Ukrainian youth. Members of the Cyril and Methodius Society appreciated the uncompromisingness, courage, radicalism, and deep folk of Shevchenkoʼs poetry. Ukrainian patriotism, patriotism for the fate of the native people united T. Shevchenko with other figures of the society, despite some ideological differences. Progressive Ukrainian youth valued Kobzar for great poetry talent, artistic plastic, extraordinary melodic singing, penetrating mind, deep vital sensibility and, at the same time, unique comic, humor and satire. At the same time, communicating with ideological supporters gav T. Shevchenko a new creative inspiration. During this period the Ukrainian poet was in a state of creative exaltation. It is concluded that the reflections of the Members of the Cyril and Mefodius Society, especially M. I. Kostomarov, P. O. Kulish, G. L. Andruzsky, V. M. Bilozersky, M. I. Gulak, O. D. Tulub, and others, written as during the life of T. Shevchenko, and retrospectively, is an important historical source of life and activity of Kobzar, one of the most prominent representatives of the Ukrainian national elite. The empirical article is written on various documentary and narrative primary sources, for the first time actualizes the problem of historical memory in the Ukrainian national movement at the beginning of its cultural-political stage, contains the original generalizations and conclusions regarding T. Shevchenko as a Ukrainian nation рорulist and harbinger of the Ukrainian national idea in reflections of the Cyril and Methodius Society Members. The material of the article may have practical application in scientific studios on the history of the Ukrainian national movement and the educational process of higher education.

Towards Redefining Chinese Baroque Poetry

ABSTRACTThe modernity of the Baroque is determined by its non-mimetic, non-symbolic, or, simply, its allegorical form. As allegory, the Baroque undermines and obscures the specific literal meaning of a representation open to (symbolic) understanding. Allegory contains a representational element that allows for understanding but only in order to show that the understanding it reaches is necessarily in error. Chinese poets of the mid-late Tang experienced a similar case of ostracism from their contemporaries. Although their poetry was admired, poets like Meng Jiao, Li He and Li Shangyin went unappreciated and almost forgotten until later poets discovered them and their poetry was recognized not only as great poetry, but also as “Baroque” poetry. Through a comparative translation analysis of three of the mid-late Tang poets and poems, this essay tries to redefine Chinese Baroque poetry and to illustrate a baroque poetics not only in the way they depart from traditional, or symbolic poetic modes but also in how they subvert them.