Song Of Sorrow Research Articles

In the Flow

In the Flow Kimberly Juanita Brown (bio) Part revolutionary treatise, part sorrow song, and part celebration, Shana L. Redmond's American Studies Association presidential address brought the audience through the four stages of black study within American studies: inquiry, immersion, politics, and prose. Music and motion are organized around collective regard. With "The Dark Prelude" as the title of her address, Redmond reconfigured sites of communion and black presence as the calibration of the soul journeying through the life of the mind, the life of the heart. Beginning by placing herself in the chorus, hoping that as the blend of voices and octaves come together, something new can be gleaned, Redmond escorted all of us through the avenue of engagement that breathed new life into old. This is not your linear narrative, not your rallying call of a presidential address. This is the trace of blackness and presence that upends temporality. If you let it. The process is the product is the method. Redmond brought her activism, scholarly interests, subject of study, creativity, and verve to the one place that could hold it: the first in-person ASA meeting since 2019. Just observing the crowd as they gathered for the address, one could navigate the current terrain of academe through those who have entered it only recently. The same people whose research and writings have animated a whole universe previously taken for granted. Introduced by President-elect Sharon Holland, Redmond took the stage accompanied by her friend and collaborator Kwame Phillips, who provided the musical accompaniment for the talk. The combination of music and prose worked seamlessly to carry the message of interdisciplinary production that is the cornerstone of American studies writ large. Moan, Wail Redmond opened her talk with a nod to the potent directionality of emotion ("I cry a lot for what I'm learning and those things I'm being forced to acknowledge that I already knew"). To begin in this place, in the interiority of feeling and its connection to the lives and labors of study, is to orient the [End Page 225] eye and the ear in the same direction. The sound is unmistakable. As listeners followed Redmond's sonic offering, the pathways of black possibility opened up and out, enclosing much in the space of creation. We followed the trail of movement from Assata Shakur to Sandra Bland, recognizing something familiar in each pause, turn, reflection, and moment of apprehension. Here is one such pause: I'm lingering again in the discontinuities of death named by comrade Sharon Holland. I'm trying to revive the details carried to graves—to write answers to the questions we don't ask. I'm trying to become an amplifier for a chorus whose bright songs have been compressed to undertones beneath the weight of symbolism and spectacle. The presidential address as "amplifier" is one way to traverse the ebb and flow of black studies as it exists in the arena that is American studies. So the address encouraged us to join the chorus in the distance in an effort to make the fullness of sound as effective as one singular voice. We were encouraged, by example, to do what we do best. As she merged popular music playing on the radio at the time with racist confrontations with police (a whole history unto itself), Redmond intertwined the sounds of musical production with the cacophony of driving-while-black, and understanding the precarity of the endeavor. From Leon Bridges and Gladys Knight and the Pips, Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway, Tony Orlando and Dawn, the sounds of survival were articulated as guideposts letting us know where we were going. And the journey, of course, is ever fraught. Part of the particular delineation of purpose Redmond presented in the talk was her way of compelling the audience with fluid musical offerings that were juxtaposed against racialized upheavals perpetrated by the state. Though the music had a softening effect, it also managed to produce pinpricks of apprehension for those of us who know all too well how so many of those traffic stops end. Arrest, injury, escape, or death, there are no happy stories once the sirens begin. Add race...

The Old Dream of Legendary Shanghai

The film “Song of Eternal Sorrow” derives from an adaptation of the classic novel with the identical title by Wang Anyi. Director Guan Jinpeng developed an individual history that parallels the course of Chinese history, with the route and destination of the characters exiled from Shanghai to Hong Kong and then dispersed from Hong Kong to the other parts of the world, the implicit narrative of Hong Kong in the shift of the main perspective, as well as the characteristics of the female narrative, all of which constitute a dynamic and multi-perspective perspective of Shanghai. With regard to environmental styling, the film places great emphasis on integrating the urban culture of Shanghai by means of scene design and prop design, such as the settings of the alleyway, the film set, as well as the Shanghai Apartments. With regard to character styling, the cheongsam, which serves as the aesthetic label for Shanghai females, is the core and highlight of the clothing design of the film. The variations in texture, color, pattern and style of the cheongsam tends to underline the variations in personality and the transformation of fate and mentality of the characters.

Cy Twombly: A Rustle of Catullus1

Cy Twombly: A Rustle of Catullus1 Anne Carson (bio) in what follows I would like to try thinking into Cy Twombly through the poems of Catullus. Twombly admired, quoted, misquoted, and painted Catullus. Their two spirits seem to me somehow in tune. Both of them were inventors of a new style. Both were boys at heart, or pretending to be boys. Both were very fond of naming people and things. So, my talk is organized in eight paragraphs, one for each letter of Catullus’s name. Beginning with C. 1 C is for Cy and for Catullus, and for convention, which they both repudiated. Like Catullus, Twombly was an artist so impressed by the past that he wanted to make it over again. Who needs abstract expressionism when you can look at a head of Apollo from the fifth century bce? But no one can make the past over again, you have to make it new. Catullus in first-century-bce Rome belonged to a radical literary circle calling itself simply poetae novi, “the new poets,” who venerated the versification of the archaic Greeks. As the foremost new poet of his day, Catullus basically invented lyric poetry for the Romans. He studied and imitated the Greeks, transformed Greek meters for Latin phonetics and translated texts of Sappho and Callimachus into fresh Roman masterpieces. His main energy was rebellious. The sober surface of Roman poetry bored him. He broke that apart. Conventional pieties made him impatient. He defaced them. His verbal style juxtaposes crudeness on the level of graffiti with songs of love or sorrow as delicate as Sappho’s. He changed the diction of lyric verse, opening it to the everyday Latin of the Roman street, admitting words like lotum (“piss”) and defututa (“fucked to [End Page 1] bits”). He had a special arsenal of obscenity for his enemies and, like Twombly, he sprinkled his work with penises—there are many words for these. Overall, it was a question of how to change the velocity of words or paint, how to speed up the surface. Catullus died at thirty. 2 A is for Achilles, Adonis, Aeneas, Agamemnon, Aphrodite, Apollo, Anabasis. Twombly liked naming names and he liked making the letter A. His A’s are often done in red, very pointy, aggressive, possibly phallic or at least radiating intense emotion. Names are said to give the namer power over a bit of reality—as with Adam in the book of Genesis or Robinson Crusoe on his island or, for that matter, Catullus who uses names all over the place in his poems: either to call out, denounce, and ridicule an enemy (in the poems of invective) or to luxuriate in the details of desire (in the love poems). But I don’t think Twombly is interested in power like this. Instead, perhaps, he is finding his way toward what Walter Benjamin called “the pure language,” the original connection between names and things. Walter Benjamin imagines a state of paradise where no one has to struggle with the communicative significance of words. Things just are what they say and say what they are. For Twombly a list of names of the heroes of Troy evokes the whole phenomenon of that myth directly, as well as the mood of “sentimental despair” that emanates from it, which seems to have been one of Twombly’s favorite moods. A is also for the misspelled A in the 1978 painting series inspired by Homer’s epic poem on the fall of Troy, Fifty Days at Iliam. Twombly spoke alertly, if not indignantly, about this misspelling in an interview with David Sylvester: I spelt it ILIAM which is not correct, it’s ILIUM. But I wanted that, I wanted A for Achilles, I wanted the A there and no one ever wrote and told me I misspelt it. . . . No one cares. (Cy Twombly: Making Past Present, 222–3) I am here to attest that someone cares. However, I appreciate Twombly’s instinct to have the anger of Achilles interrupt or insult the name of Troy, as did Achilles himself want to penetrate and sack the [End Page 2] city. Ancient poets often represented city-sacking...

Musical/Textual Double Consciousness in W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk

Besides introducing groundbreaking critical concepts such as double consciousness, colour line and the veil, W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903) was among the first books to attribute universal dignity to black music. It did so by devoting a whole chapter to the ‘sorrow songs’, seen as “the articulate message of the slave to the world”, as well as by opening each chapter with epigraphs composed of bars of ‘black’ spirituals juxtaposed with lines of poetry by notable ‘white’ authors – Symons, Lowell, Byron, among others – in a musical/textual version of double consciousness. Reconsidering the composite formal structure of The Souls of Black Folk and the role of the spirituals as ceaseless reminders of freedom, the paper explores the ways in which Du Bois’s speculations on black music foreshadow contemporary sonic/textual strategies.

A Preliminary Look at the Poems in the Prosperous Tang Dynasty—Jian Bai Juyi’s Song of Eternal Sorrow

A Preliminary Look at the Poems in the Prosperous Tang Dynasty—Jian Bai Juyi’s <i>Song of Eternal Sorrow</i>

Dirge: Black and Indigenous Hemispheric Burial, A Sound Sculpture

Dirge:Black and Indigenous Hemispheric Burial, A Sound Sculpture Tao Leigh Goffe (bio), Aparajita Bhandari (bio), Lydia Macklin Camel (bio), Delilah Griswold (bio), Leanna Humphrey (bio), Nusaibah Khan (bio), André Nascimento (bio), Chijioke Onah (bio), Rewa Phansalkar (bio), Marsha Taichman (bio), Chloe Tsui (bio), and Hanxue Wei (bio) There must be no idle mourning. —Shirley Graham Du Bois1 Collective mourning and mass burial are uneven territories of racial grief and grievances.2 The way societies honor the dead is often as much a celebration of life as an arena for singing communal sorrow songs. The landscape architecture of burial is always fraught and racialized because the afterlife is segregated not only by different death rites and rituals but by the epistemic violence that extends past death. The minor and melancholy key of Black life and mourning is connected to that of Indigenous life and mourning across the Western Hemisphere because of colonialism. The two are not mutually exclusive scales of relation because of the crimes of stolen life and stolen land, as well as the important fact that Afro-Indigenous peoples share the history of both ongoing events.3 The theft of the body and of the land is a terrain inflected by the asymmetric valuation and formation of race as it takes shape differently globally. Connecting the disparate geographies and grounds of burial in Upstate New York, the Caribbean, and New York City and a speculative environment in the far future, I produced the sound sculpture Dirge with twelve graduate and advanced students. A hemispheric hymn for the dead, this collective dirge takes multiple forms; the central component is a twenty-seven-minute experimental film. In five acts, we feature sonic and visual interpretations of the spatial poetics [End Page 463] of Black and Indigenous mourning across the hemisphere as a celebration of the livingness of both communities. Another component of the project is a podcast; and the third part is this essay, which forms a written guide articulating the collaborative process behind coproducing Dirge. Together we explored how unmarked graves of improper burial for people of color in the Americas are structured by the violent and accelerating dynamic of racial capitalism that unevenly distributes the risk of premature death, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore tells us.4 The culmination of a Cornell University architecture seminar entitled "Black and Indigenous Metropolitan Ecologies" sponsored by the Mellon Foundation, this sound sculpture was produced as a creative offering in a time of crisis: the COVID-19 pandemic.5 What sort of monument, we asked, could be built to celebrate life amid the harrowing stakes of mass death faced by Black and Indigenous peoples across space and time in the Western Hemisphere? As a collective of scholars and practitioners, how could we listen for the deafening din of state-sanctioned suffering with the riotous joy of Afro-Indigenous coalitions across space and time? Taking together the entanglement of the dispossession of Native sovereignty (stolen land) and African enslavement (stolen life) as foundational to a potential hemispheric politics of mourning, we decided sound would be a fitting medium for a funereal poetic sculpture. Sound sculptures take many forms, but most are intermedia time-based artforms that produce a soundtrack. The sonic register takes primacy and is often nondiegetic and nonlinear in its mode of composition. Under the frame of "metropolitan ecologies," I invited students to disrupt linear timescales and the binary between the urban-rural experiences. From a Black feminist perspective, I encouraged these students (several of whom are architects) to attend to the dark blueprints of race and space across the Americas. "Dark blueprints" is a phrase that Ben Platt, a member of the Dark Laboratory, my collective on race, ecology, and creative technology, used a couple years ago. I have not been able to forget it. Through literature, historical texts, theory, and film with special attention to the architecture of cities that might not be considered cities anymore, my students and I explored cemeteries as segmented cities of the dead. Hemispherically, from Brooklyn to Teotihuacán, we centered Indigenous architectures and infrastructures rooted in knowledge practices that Europeans depended on when they arrived with the aim of conquest. Black archaeologists such...

Mediated Identifications

Mediated Identifications

On relieving aging vocalizations of famous trot singers by sound massage

Most of the songs of famous trot singers sing folk songs of sorrow, and their popularity has continued for decades. However, aged singing voices feel flat and monotonous compared to the loud singing voices of their prime. In order to improve aging vocalizations, it is sometimes used to calm the mind and body through ingestion of a tonic or neck massage. However, as the singing voice ages, the spectrum bandwidth gradually decreases, and the chords of the voices become simpler, so listeners do not feel the magnificence of the songs well. In this paper, a new method of relieving the aging characteristics of famous singers through sound massage of sound mug cups is proposed. In other words, based on the past vocalizations of famous trot singers, the singing spectrum was restored in its prime by reflecting the singing waveform from the mug cup and massaging the inner epithelium of the vocal cords. Although the bandwidth of a famous trot singer's voice has been reduced by –27% for 30 years when the proposed sound cup massage is applied, the aging spectrum is restored by more than 90% compared to the heyday, and most of the chords in the song come to life.

‘Ol’ Man River’ at the Front: Paul Robeson, Music, and Blackness in Republican Spain

Several scholars have discussed the impact of the Spanish Civil War on the Black singer, actor, and activist Paul Robeson, including his brief 1938 tour of Republican Spain. Yet none has considered the tour in musical terms, nor taken into account Spanish reaction. Drawing on coverage in the Republican press, along with recent work on vocality and identity, I argue that the tour challenged prior notions of blackness in Spain. Spanish journalists addressed Robeson’s singing from the standpoint of the ‘suspect whiteness of Spain’ (to borrow Fra-Molinero’s apt description) while Robeson himself linked blackness and flamenco and reformulated the ‘sorrow song,’ as W. E. B. Du Bois called the spiritual. I also analyse Robeson’s performances of ‘Ol’ Man River’ from the musical Show Boat in terms of Republic ideology. In sum, Robeson challenged Franco’s vision of ‘blood purity’ (limpieza de sangre) while calling for racial justice worldwide.

Views from a Black Artist in the Century of Light

Twelve years ago, while planning the funeral service for my father, an artist and author born in Philadelphia in 1937, I found within the pages of one of his journals a phrase that caught my eye: The Sorrow Songs. Beneath it were the words Steal Away, which he’d underlined three times....

Wrestle On, Jacob: Antebellum Spirituals and the Defiant Faith of the Hebrew Bible

A tension between pious submission and defiant protest pervades responses to suffering and oppression in the Hebrew Bible. Though both positions are frequently encountered in the same books, even embodied in the same character, interpreters tend to dissociate them from one another and then privilege one over the other. The genius of the Israelites’ faith, however, is that they merged both responses to suffering into one profound paradox, understanding themselves as those who wrestle with God (Gen 32:24-28). The spirituals sung by enslaved African Americans are a powerful demonstration of this same dialectic. In this article, I consider how these songs interpret and resonate with the Hebrew Bible and then, in turn, how this intertextual relationship illuminates the interpretation of the biblical text. The spirituals bristle with biblical allusions. They wrestle with God like Jacob and lament with the psalmists. Like Job, Jeremiah, and Jonah, the singers long for death and wish they had never been born. With Abraham, Moses, and Habakkuk, they question God’s justice. Yet, as Du Bois observes, “through all the sorrow of the Sorrow Songs there breathes a hope—a faith in the ultimate justice of things.” The intertextual dialogue between wrestling with God in the Hebrew Bible and in the spirituals, which display, draw on, and even directly engage with that biblical tradition, therefore, challenges readers who have misunderstood the dynamics of defiant faith and divorced piety from protest because they have not faced the oppression that forges faith and defiance together.

Death and Work: Utilizing Diverse Methods to Integrate Mortality into Management Research

Many occupations involve mortality cues, or external stimuli that remind employees of death. Yet we know relatively little about: (1) how employees experience mortality cues in workplaces and (2) the effect of mortality cues on employees and organizations. On one hand, mortality cues can trigger employee stress, trauma, and uncertainty. On the other hand, employees can bond and find humor and purpose in these experiences. Our symposium reports qualitative and quantitative research that extends the understanding of mortality in the management literature, and, in so doing, strongly contributes to the Academy of Management’s conference theme “20/20: Broadening our Sight”. The symposium includes four papers showcasing the influence of mortality cues on employees’ emotions, work orientations, well-being, and performance. We address dichotomies in this symposium – that mortality cue exposure has both positive (e.g., work engagement, meaning) and negative (e.g., emotional exhaustion) employee outcomes – and clarify mechanisms and boundary conditions contributing to these dichotomies. Taken together, our papers and discussion, led by Dr. Peter Bamberger, endeavors to provide insight into the consequences of mortality cues for employees and organizations, deliver actionable recommendations for managers, and generate future academic research. Called to Cure: Patient Deaths, Death Fear, and Calling of Substance Abuse Treatment Counselors Presenter: Zhenyu Yuan; U. of Illinois at Chicago Presenter: Lisa E. Baranik; U. at Albany, State U. of New York Presenter: Lillian Eby; U. of Georgia Presenter: Robert R Sinclair; Clemson U. Another Day, Another Death? The Impact of Mortality Cues on Employees Exposed to Death at Work Presenter: Pascale Fricke; U. of British Columbia Presenter: Danielle Van Jaarsveld; U. of British Columbia Presenter: David Douglas Walker; U. of British Columbia Mortality Cue Threats, Death Anxiety, and Employee Well-Being: A Moderated-Mediation Model Presenter: Alexandra Jacobsen; Central Michigan U. Presenter: Terry A Beehr; Central Michigan U. Song of Sorrow: A Longitudinal Study of Work-Related Grief and Organizational Change Presenter: Elizabeth E. Stillwell; U. of Minnesota Presenter: Angelica Leigh; U. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Presenter: Olivia Amanda O'Neill; George Mason U.

The Form of Jesus Christ: A Balthasarian Conversation

“What is bothering me incessantly is the question… [of] who Christ really is….” Dietrich Bonhoeffer was not the first to ask this question, nor will he be the last: Jesus Christ is an inexhaustible mystery. He is not, however, the sort of mystery that one simply puzzles over, like a calculus problem that proves a bit too difficult. Rather, he is mystery in the same sense as Raphael’s stunning colors, or Henryk Gorecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs: mystery as overwhelm, as the source of unceasing awe.This is the great insight of Hans Urs von Balthasar, one of the twentieth century’s most unique theologians. The Jesuit master saw aesthetic theory as a great vein to be mined for the praise of Jesus Christ’s mystery. This paper will run alongside Balthasar’s systematic theology as found in Seeing the Form. Rather than serving as an exegesis of Balthasar, or an attempt to situate his thought within the great cosmos of Christian thought, this paper aims to join its teacher Balthasar in elucidating something of the mystery of Jesus Christ. It aspires to sing out praise in response to Bonhoeffer’s question. Naturally, it will encounter thinkers other than just Balthasar along the way—Saint Augustine in particular, one of Balthasar’s predecessors in seeing form as inseparable from understanding Jesus Christ, will make recurring appearances.But the real touchstone this paper wishes never to leave is Jesus Christ himself. Certainly, it will seek to examine him from different angles, to behold several of the infinite dimensions in which he subsists. Here is Jesus Christ, the revealer and concealer of transcendent divinity! There he is again—the great attuner of the universe, and of human freedom! Can he even be glimpsed in the midst of the believers, lovingly impressing his form on those who love him?Consider this, then, a work of love.

СИМФОНИЯ ПЕЧАЛЬНЫХ ПЕСЕН Х. ГУРЕЦКОГО КАК ФЕНОМЕН КУЛЬТУРНОЙ ПАМЯТИ

The article reviews the stylistic features of an outstanding piece of musical heritage from the second half of the XXth century, which in the context of contemporary events and memorable dates gains a particular resonance. The affiliation of "The Symphony of Sorrowful Songs" with modern cultural references gives it a special timelessness and characteristics of a phenomenon, that broadcasts the idea of the end of the world related to the horrors of war. The object of this article in an attempt to discover the peculiarities of symphonic genre interpretation, which is considered within the historical range of symphonies dedicated to this topic; to find out those features of texture, harmony, modal organization and compositional form of the work, which determine its stylistics. The author also tried to define the quotation techniques, which allow to perceive musical composition as a kind of revelation, presented as a set of texts. Application of the comparative analysis method made it possible to identify common style patterns and properties, which became an attribute of the unique style of Gorecki, who breathed new life into historically established genres, giving them specific features of sonorous texture, where timbre plays the main role. The meditativeness of composition, the form statistics, and the priority of modality, colored with subtle sonorous effects, became style factors as a result.

Songs of Sorrow: Bardic Women in Girodet, Ossian, and Staël

Songs of Sorrow:Bardic Women in Girodet, Ossian, and Staël Tili Boon Cuillé (bio) As we look at Anne-Louis Girodet's Apothéose des héros français morts pour la patrie pendant la guerre de la liberté displayed in the Salon of 1802, commissioned by Napoleon for Malmaison, and inspired by the epics attributed to his favorite poet Ossian, our eye is drawn toward the Scots bard and the French general at the canvas's center (Figure 1). The dove of peace betwixt Odin's eagle and the French cockerel above and the vessels raised in a toast below intensify our focus. We are also vividly aware of the contrast between the Romantic style of Fingal's troops on the left and the Neoclassical style of Napoleon's on the right.1 If we wrest our eyes from the vertical line that divides the painting, however, they are drawn to the winged victory flying down from above and the myriads of maidens surging up from below. In his gloss of the painting on the occasion of its return to Malmaison after a century's sojourn in Germany, Jean Bourguignon considers these maidens evocative of the Valkyries, on the one hand, and mythological painting, on the other.2 We may, accordingly, be inclined to view them as nereids or muses. Yet they also caught the eye of Girodet's pupil Hyacinthe Louis Aubry-Lecomte, for they are featured in a disproportionate number of the lithographs in his Collection de têtes d'étude of 1822, where he identifies them by name. What becomes apparent in these studies is that the maidens bear instruments (Figures 2–3). Who are these women and what was their role? Women appear in interpolated love stories throughout Ossian's poetry. Some die for men, others die at men's hands, still others take their own lives or simply fade away. Whether female warriors or hapless victims, they are uniformly of melancholy disposition. Yet beyond their fierce loyalty, moral fortitude, and tragic fates, these women are also [End Page 159] bards.3 Cómala—whose face is concealed by the eagle's wing in Girodet's painting but whose Celtic rebec is clearly visible—was betrothed to Fingal when he fell in battle. While all that is left of Fingal is a vision, what remains of Cómala is a voice.4 Malvina, betrothed to Ossian's son Oscar, likewise did not survive him. Leith Davis describes her as "the addressee of many of Ossian's poems and, more importantly, a bard in her own right."5 Girodet depicts Malvina alongside Ossian's wife Evirallin, both playing citheras.6 Evirallin was also a bard in her own right, for Ossian and Carril recall the days when they blended voices and she "touched the harp of music."7 While Ossian, Carril, and Ullin sing the tales that comprise Fingal, the epic nevertheless resonates with women's "songs of grief." Fingal's narrative structure embeds Brassolis's song of Grudar within Carril's song of Brassolis within Ossian's song of Carril. The metadiegetic bard is a woman.8 Girodet's painting, depicting women armed with instruments rather than weapons, recalls their status not as warriors or mourners but rather as musicians. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson, Apothéose des héros français morts pour la patrie pendant la guerre de la liberté [The Apotheosis of French Heroes Who Died for Their Country During the War of Liberty], 1802. Chateau de Malmaison et Bois-Preau. (Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY) [End Page 160] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Hyacinthe Louis Victor Jean-Baptiste Aubry-Lecomte, Comala, Plate 8 from Collection de têtes d'étude, 1821–1822. Chateau de Malmaison et Bois-Preau. (Photo: RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 3. Hyacinthe Louis Victor Jean-Baptiste Aubry-Lecomte, Evirallina, Malvina, Plate 15 from Collection de têtes d'étude, 1821–1822. Chateau de Malmaison et Bois-Preau. (Photo: RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY) [End Page 161] Germaine de Staël heralded...

Song(s) of Struggle: A Decolonial Reading of Psalm 137 in Light of South Africa's Struggle Songs

This article engages in a decolonial reading of Ps 137 in light of South African songs of struggle. In this reading, Ps 137 is regarded as an epic song which combines struggle songs which originated within the golah community in response to the colonial relations between the oppressor and the oppressed. The songs of struggle then gained new life during the post-exilic period as a result of the new colonial relation between the Yehud community and the Persian Empire. Therefore, Ps 137 should be viewed as not a mere song, but an anthology of songs of struggle: a protest song (vv. 1-4), a sorrow song (vv. 5-6), and a war song (vv. 7-9). https://doi.org/10.17159/2312-3621/2019/v32n2a12

A Song of Sorrow and Praise

&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; This paper explores briefly the musical qualities of Jeremiah’s prophecy. It begins with an analysis of the confession presented in Jeremiah 20:7-13, focusing especially on its similarity to biblical psalms of lament. Following this is an argument for Jeremiah’s use of singing to intensify his impassioned words, and a look at the wider place of music in biblical priesthood and prophecy. Through this study, I hope to give support to theologian Oskar Söhngen’s claim: “Only the elevated language of tones is fitted for speaking with God.”&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D;

Kofi Awoonor (1935–2013)

Somebody is dead. Agosu himself Alas! A snake has bitten me My right arm is broken, And the tree on which I lean is fallen. — Kofi Awoonor (“Songs of Sorrow”)

African Standby Force: A Song of Sorrow

African Standby Force: A Song of Sorrow

«Фонарь догадки во тьме времен»: о пьесе Игнатия Ивановского «Сонеты Шекспира»

&lt;p&gt;Писательские фантазии переводчиков сонетов Шекспира, рожденные в процессе переводческого поиска, стали своеобразным литературным резонансом шекспировской сонетианы в России. Пьеса Игнатия Ивановского «Сонеты Шекспира» — яркий пример подобной креативной игры художественными смыслами шекспировских стихов, показавшей удивительную способность автора преобразовать его переводческое прочтение сонетов в собственную пьесу. В статье представлена попытка аналитического сопоставления переводческой позиции и переводных находок Ивановского с образами и сюжетами «Сонетов Шекспира». Статья выполнена в свете проекта, разрабатываемого Институтом мировой литературы им. А. М. Горького РАН.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Представление о Шекспире и его сонетах Ивановский изложил в статье «Совсем другой Шекспир». Автор уверен, что в шекспировском сборнике отсутствует циклообразующее единство и далеко не все написано Шекспиром. Первые 17 стихотворений, считает переводчик, появились в связи со смертью сына Шекспира, поэтому в их основе не гимн красоте, а тяжкое горе отца. Эти стихи — позднее добавление к задуманному ранее собранию сонетов, посвященных женщине. Названные принципы представлены в статье не умозрительными идеями — рожденные в творческом пространстве богатого писательского воображения Ивановского, они явились результатом проникновенного ощущения Шекспира и его стихов трепетно живыми.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Гипотетические «догадки» Ивановского стали творческими импульсами к созданию его пьесы и определили ее структуру: три интермедии, связанные обрамляющей основой. Идейно-композиционное средоточие пьесы — Шекспир и его сонеты. Интермедии последовательно приближают нас к шекспировским стихам, а персонажами третьей становятся их ожившие герои, которые действуют, подчиняясь волшебной магии шекспировской поэзии. Поэтическую магистраль произведения создают сонеты, непосредственно включенные в обрамляющую часть пьесы. Восприятие Шекспира барочным поэтом позволило Ивановскому воссоздавать семантическую наполненность шекспировских метафор и стимулировало использование их художественного потенциала в пьесе.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Проведенный анализ выявил несомненное отражение переводческих находок Ивановского в созидаемых им образах и сюжетных «догадках» пьесы о Шекспире. В свете теории метафоры, разрабатываемой в современной когнитивной филологии, такой анализ позволяет дополнять и конкретизировать представления о возможности применения когнитивных подходов в переводоведческих исследованиях.&lt;/p&gt;