Poetic Retelling Research Articles

The Spartan King Leonidas and the Delphian Prophecy

The article examines the Delphic prophecy, which, as ancient authors believed, concerned the Spartan king Leonidas and was associated with the events at Thermopylae in 480 BC. Herodotus quotes this oracle both in prose and in poetic retelling (VII. 220. 3–4). Researchers have considerable doubts about the authenticity of both versions. We sought to prove that the two versions of the prophecy arose at different times: one, prosaic, and most likely authentic, appeared before Thermopylae, and the second, fabricated in Delphi, probably by order of the royal family of the Agiads, appeared after Thermopylae. It is important to emphasize that the Delphic prophecy, in which the death of the king was declared a condition for the salvation of Sparta, became an integral part of the myth of Leonidas. With the help of this heroic myth, Sparta skillfully transformed the defeat at Thermopylae into a victory for the Spartan spirit. The myth of Leonidas became a central part of the patriotic education of Spartan citizens.

Potential Energy of Pretext: Structural and Compositional Features of “Isaac and Abraham” by Joseph Brodsky

An interpretation of the well-known, but rarely used for a holistic analysis of the work of I. Brodsky “Isaac and Abraham” is proposed in the article. If Brodsky’s text is traditionally viewed as a poetic retelling of the Old Testament history in a modern way, then the authors propose a different perspective of textual perception - free reflections of a lyrical subject, a modern hero, over an ancient sacred text. As a result, the claims of critics regarding the “chaotic” and “congested” Brodsky’s text are removed, in contrast, the harmony and depth of reflection of the lyrical subject, the modern heropoet, are demonstrated. In the course of the analysis, the genre qualification of “Isaac and Abraham” was clarified - not as a poem (the traditional point of view), but as a “great poem” (I. Brodsky’s autopresentation). Deciphering of the “difficult” places of the poem - images of a bush, a board, a train, etc., as it seemed to critics, was artificially introduced by Brodsky into the text and violated the integrity of the work. It is argued that the poem “Isaac and Abraham” was not a transcription of the Bible, but an attempt by the maturing Brodsky from today to comprehend the sacred text and on its basis comprehend himself, penetrate into the dark past in order to see the present more clearly.

Magic, metaphysics, and methods

Magic, metaphysics, and methods

New Books across the Disciplines

New Books across the Disciplines

The Reception of Petrarch\u2019s Africa in Fascist Italy

In his 1877 Storia della letteratura (History of Literature), Luigi Settembrini wrote that Petrarch’s fourteenth-century poem, the Africa, ‘is forgotten …; very few have read it, and it was judged—I don’t know when and by whom—a paltry thing’. Yet, just four decades later, the early Renaissance poet’s epic of the Second Punic War, written in Latin hexameters, was being promoted as the national poem of Italy by eminent classical scholar, Nicola Festa, who published the only critical edition of the epic in 1926. This article uncovers the hitherto untold story of the revival of Petrarch’s poetic retelling of Scipio’s defeat of Hannibal in Fascist Italy, and its role in promoting ideas of nation and empire during the Fascist period in Italy. After briefly outlining the Africa’s increasing popularity in the nineteenth century, I consider some key publications that contributed to the revival of the poem under Fascism. I proceed chronologically to show how the Africa was shaped into a poem of the Italian nation, and later, after Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia, of Italy’s new Roman Empire. I suggest that the contestations over the significance of the Africa during the Fascist period, over whether it was a national poem of Roman revival or a poem of the universal ideal of empire, demonstrate more profound tensions in how Italian Fascism saw itself.

V. BRUSOV’S POETIC RETELLING OF «A LION AND A PIG», A FABLE BY FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY

The paper focuses on «A Lion and a Pig» by V. Brusov, a poetic retelling of an Indian fable told by Fyodor Dostoevsky in «The Writer’s Diary» in 1873. The paper’s author outlines the reasons for V. Brusov’s interest in the fable. Primarily, the writer’s grandfather published a collection of fables; V. Brusov himself experimented on various poetic genres, including fables. The author concludes that V. Brusov did not merely transform the fable into poetry but infused new vitality into F. Dostoevsky’s protagonists and ideas.

Complex Anachronism: Peter Porter's Jonah, Otherkind, Ancient and Contemporary Tempests, and the Divine

Australian poet Peter Porter collaborated with artist Arthur Boyd to produce their collection Jonah (1973) based on the biblical book. Porter writes of the style of the sequence of poems as “complex anachronism,” bringing together biblical resonances with contemporary social, ecological, and political themes. The contemporary context of anthropogenic climate change invites complex questions concerning relations between humans, other species, climate, and the divine. There are no easy correspondences between the biblical Jonah narrative and the contemporary challenges of climate change. But my reading of Jonah 2:1-11 in conversation with Porter’s poetic retelling of Jonah’s sojourn in the whale and Shakespeare’s Caliban, is suggestive for reimagining our own complex hybrid agencies and their implications for divine-human relationships as humans face the contemporary tempests of, and accompanying, anthropogenic climate change.

A Poetic Re-Telling of the Orphic Myth: A Political Study of Denise Levertov’s “A Tree Telling of Orpheus”

Modern poets, such as William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Rainer Maria Rilke, have used classical myths in a modern context to explain modern issues and to feed up from the rich material of Greek and Roman mythology. Denise Levertov takes the right of all authors to knock into the heart of Western and classical traditions and to reinvent them for her time. Though Levertov’s early poetry expresses her appreciation of nature and of the epiphanic moments of daily life, during the late 1960s her work became progressively concerned with political and social issues. She conveys her offense in poems of distress over Vietnam and of commonality with the alternative culture that opposed the war. Levertov insists upon the connectedness of public and private spheres. The Vietnam War was a major preoccupation of the youth movement of the 1960s, whose protests against it caused the occasional disruption of Levertov’s “A Tree Telling of Orpheus.” This paper aims to retell the Greek myth of Orpheus and his famous song of perception and revitalization, which includes all the aspects of life and rebirth, with a modern revision. Levertov compares the awaking trees captivated by Orpheus’s song along with the awakening of the revolutionary consciousness that lays at the heart of` the countercultural movement of the 1960s.

ТРАДИЦИИ ВОСТОЧНОЙ СЛОВЕСНОСТИ В ТВОРЧЕСТВЕ Н. ШЕЛЕБИ

The article studies the traditions of oriental literature, typical of the creativity of the Chuvash poet N. I. Polorussov-Shelebi. The material for the analysis is the poet’s literary works written at the beginning of the ХХ century. In the course of the research, structural and typological methods are applied. The images of a bird and a snake used by the poet are an echo of Sumerian mythology. He could get acquainted with them through books published in the Tatar language. Poems about the history of the Volga Bulgaria, the history of the Huns are built by the stringing method. The poet uses consonant cognates in the depiction of the rich peaceful life of the Bulgarians, scenes of trading in the Tsivilsk Fair. Many publicistic poems are poetic retelling of events, description of environment. The reconstruction of the image of the Volga Bulgaria, its idealization, comparison of the modern reality with the glorious past of the Chuvash people is an echo of the influence of oriental literature.

Scrounging and Salvaging: Literary Guidance and the Descent into the Underworld in the Inferno, Paradise Lost, Frankenstein and Heart of Darkness

Socrates, in Phaedo, posits that the route to Hades is far from ‘straightforward’, and that it is riddled with ‘crossroads’ that demand the presence of a vigilant guide. The possibility of multiple routes culminating in the underworld, and the necessity of guidance, form the bedrock of the interwoven analysis of the Inferno, Paradise Lost, Frankenstein, and Heart of Darkness. Amidst the profusion of pathways, the Inferno and Paradise Lost gesture towards a direction that is replicated and repudiated in Mary Shelley and Joseph Conrad's versions of the descent voyage in Frankenstein and Heart of Darkness. Dante and Milton's ‘prototype’ narratives exemplify the descent – or the fall – into hell, and shape the two novels through ‘literary guidance’. Heart of Darkness emerges as an inversion of the meticulously structured Dantean universe. The Pilgrim's progress in the Inferno is a consistent counterpoint to Conradian chaos and Marlow's wilful yet meandering descent into colonial Africa. Dante's Pilgrim emerges from the underworld to progress onwards, while Marlow remains entrenched in the inescapably infernal condition of twentieth-century imperialism. The Inferno is an unacknowledged spectre that haunts the proceedings of the novella, but Milton's poetic re-telling of Genesis is a recognised presence in Frankenstein. Paradise Lost is re-viewed through the perspective of the hapless Monster, who oscillates between identifying with Satan and Adam. Both poets thus dabble in the attainment (or the elusiveness) of salvation, while the novelists struggle to salvage a semblance of significance with which they can imbue their characters' journeys. While 2016 saw several literary anniversaries, a strand that the organisers envisioned intertwining with ‘salvaging’, the year 2015 marked the 750th birth anniversary of Dante, sparking speculation about the present-day pertinence of the afterlife. This interplay between the theme of Salvage and these four narratives ought to provide unexpected insights that complement BCLA's emphasis on renewing critical perspectives.

‘Teach Us the Secret Runes’. The Lord’s Prayer in Heliand

AbstractThe ninth century Heliand is a poetic retelling of the New Testament in Old Saxon, written by an anonymous monk for the purpose of confirming the conversion his fellow Saxons to the new faith. This conversion had been forced upon them by the Frankish invaders. The author adepts the story of Jesus Christ to fit within the feudal Saxon society and precursory Nordic mythology. This contribution focuses on the Saxon rendering of the Lord’s Prayer as it is situated in the context of the Sermon on the Mount. Several key differences between the Saxon version and its biblical original are pointed out. These mirror and illustrate the attempt of the anonymous author to inculturate Jesus’ message. Finally, it is shown how, by some subtle phrases in the text of the Heliand, the poet of the Heliand is including his Saxon audience to fit themselves spiritually into the biblical story. Through the Heliand, Jesus seems to speak directly to its readers, thus stimulating a transformation of the reader-or hearer-himself.

The O'Neill: The Transformation of Modern American Theater

The O'Neill: The Transformation of Modern American Theater

‘What is Language but a Sound We Christen?’ Poetic Retellings as an Improper Surprise for Biblical Reception History

Although overtly poetic interaction with biblical material has often been deemed beyond the pale in critical biblical scholarship, much work in reception history now positions such literature as part of the afterlife of a biblical text. While this is a welcome turn, this article argues that acts of poetic biblical retelling and recycling are more disruptive, troubling the ways in which critical scholarship operates. Utilising Timothy Beal’s thinking around the ‘cultural history of scripture’ and analysing Roland Boer’s sceptical attitude toward reception-historical practices, the first section teases out the nuances of how certain modes of biblical interpretation are deemed primary (and thus more legitimate) and others secondary (and thus anachronistic). As such, the second section introduces poetic retellings of biblical material that foreground how poetry is a literary space where knowledge is articulated in particularly performative idioms. Reading poems from Kei Miller and Michael Symmons Roberts that appropriate biblical material, this analysis demonstrates that the poetic retelling of biblical material is an act of writing that refuses secondary status and cannot be simplistically yoked to traditional modes of exegesis. In this way, poetry problematizes the originary-secondary binary in reception-historical interpretation and, at the same time, recasts historical-critical exegesis as another form of ‘supplemental’ writing. This opens up the discipline to rethink some of its most protected interpretative paradigms and engage more fully with other forms of biblical ‘supplement’ across the disciplines.

‘What is Language but a Sound We Christen?’ Poetic Retellings as an Improper Surprise for Biblical Reception History

Although overtly poetic interaction with biblical material has often been deemed beyond the pale in critical biblical scholarship, much work in reception history now positions such literature as part of the afterlife of a biblical text. While this is a welcome turn, this article argues that acts of poetic biblical retelling and recycling are more disruptive, troubling the ways in which critical scholarship operates. Utilising Timothy Beal’s thinking around the ‘cultural history of scripture’ and analysing Roland Boer’s sceptical attitude toward reception-historical practices, the first section teases out the nuances of how certain modes of biblical interpretation are deemed primary (and thus more legitimate) and others secondary (and thus anachronistic). As such, the second section introduces poetic retellings of biblical material that foreground how poetry is a literary space where knowledge is articulated in particularly performative idioms. Reading poems from Kei Miller and Michael Symmons Roberts that appropriate biblical material, this analysis demonstrates that the poetic retelling of biblical material is an act of writing that refuses secondary status and cannot be simplistically yoked to traditional modes of exegesis. In this way, poetry problematizes the originary-secondary binary in reception-historical interpretation and, at the same time, recasts historical-critical exegesis as another form of ‘supplemental’ writing. This opens up the discipline to rethink some of its most protected interpretative paradigms and engage more fully with other forms of biblical ‘supplement’ across the disciplines.

Burh and Beam, Burning Bright: A Study in the Poetic Imagination of the Old English Exodus

The Old English Exodus, a vigorous poetic retelling of the most exciting parts of the eponymous book, stands out from its immediate context, Junius 11, a manuscript of Biblical verse, and, indeed, from the rest of the Anglo-Saxon literature. One of the distinct features of its poetics is its self-conscious handling of two unexpected evocative objects to explore the larger themes of connection and disruption, tradition and innovation. The first, surprising for a poem taking place in and around the desert and the sea, is the burh, “city, fortification, enclosure,” that emerges, on a horizontal axis, in various permutations throughout the epic voyage of the Israelites, and shows continuity within discontinuity. The second crucial artifact, the shape-shifting pillar separates Moses’ troop from their surroundings while connecting them vertically to the biblical past and the Christian and eschatological future. Through my investigation of these two evocative objects I hope not only to illuminate a new aspect of an Old English poetics, but also to make an early-medievalist contribution to recent discussions of fusions between the human and the artifactual in “thing theory.”

Megillat Ester in Ottava Rima: Mordecai Dato's poetry regarding sixteenth‐century Italian Jewish women

The focus of the present paper is a translation of Mordecai Dato's Megillat Ester in ottava rima, a sixteenth‐century poetic retelling of the biblical book of Esther written in Judeo‐Italian. Previously untranslated, this poem provides subtle yet important insight into views of Italian Jewish women, and even into the reality of their daily lives. Dato's poetic version differs drastically from the original biblical text, indicating that these divergences were conscious choices on the part of the author and should therefore be considered evidence of the changing views of Jewish women by their male counterparts in sixteenth‐century Italy. The introduction to the translation is an analysis of Dato's divergences from the biblical story in regards specifically to the characterization of his female characters. The poet mirrors a contemporary literary and artistic tendency to focus on the position of the woman in both society and religion, crafting marked changes that reflect the growing presence of women in sixteenth‐century Italian Jewish society.

Persephone's Triumph

This article is a poetic retelling of insight gained as a Black woman surviving graduate school. The purpose of this autoethnographic narrative is to document a few pivotal graduate school experiences that illustrate all that it means to become disciplined in and by higher education. Although the violence committed in such a privileged space may seem trivial, the hurt is real and needs to be given voice. Written to warn and to inspire those not yet overcoming, the metaphor of Persephone and Demeter (as adapted by Rita Dove) is invoked in this essay to demonstrate how it is more than possible to reign in the midst of pain.

Coleridge's Art of Translation

Previous articleNext article No AccessColeridge's Art of TranslationFrederick BurwickFrederick Burwick Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 38, Number 3Summer 2007The Wordsworth-Coleridge Association Meeting, 2006 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24045133 Views: 2Total views on this site © 2007 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.