Poetic Talent Research Articles

On the English Translation of Li Qingzhao’s Ci-poems--A Contrastive Study on the Translations of the Ci-Poem “To the Tune of Tipsy in Flower Shade”

Li Qingzhao (1084-ca. 1155?) is widely lauded as the most celebrated and talented woman poet in the history of classical Chinese literature. This study, with the theoretical guidance of Dr. Wang Feng’s “Harmony-Guided Three-Level Poetry Translation Criteria”, focuses on a comparative analysis of the collected renditions of the ci-poem “to the tune of Tipsy in Flower Shade” at the macro, middle and micro levels, to further promote the translation and communication of classical Chinese literature. This study aims to exert far-reaching influences on the process of Chinese literature going global, which has unprecedented contemporary significance.

Fundamentos humanísticos-sociales Bajo el influjo estilístico-semántico en Tres poemas escogidos de Ángel González Muñiz

Para realizar un estudio analítico linguistico, debemos seguir un sistema connotativo con otro sistema de significación ,porque los sentidos de los léxicos se averiguan un mensaje mental en forma de creación literaria ,en nuestro caso, como el objetivo de la investigación entremano del poeta español contemporaneo Ángel González Muñiz. Ya que nosotros insistimos en las direcciones de los conjuntos de las palabras y sus conceptos, a través de un entendimiento que enlaza entre el léxico y la semántica que producen una formación ideológica en el que se apoya el literato mismo.
 Nuestro estudio afirma la asociación de la visión humanística por medio de unos linguisticos de vocablos, tiempos y otras influencias que giran en el orbe social generalizado en las creacciones poéticas de las generaciones de los cincuenta y sesenta del siglo pasado que se vió obedecido a unos criterios tanto politicos como culturales, cuyas adejetivaciones fueron muy severas.
 El poeta Ángel González, según esa investigación, sería una parte de un conjunto de la intelectualidad de entonces, reflejaba las preocupaciones de una sociedad que padecía los efectos de consecuencias de años treinta. Así que el poeta pretendía usar formulos linguisticos ,de lexiconía y semantica, muy tajentes para reflejar su posición ideological y literaria ,por lo cual este trabajo se enfoca para extraer fundamente linguísticos poniéndolos en servicio del factor humanístico, y aveces el factor social. Insistimos que los esquemas realizados y extrados aquí, y en delante ,es para dedicar con los comentarios literarios de los conceptos ideológicos que ven afectado por los usos de los vocablos ,que al final se conducen a una comprensión mental filosófica-literaria ,que será la visión humanística ,basando en que la fílologia ,con sus partes, influye en el mundo de interpretación literaria.

The spiritual heritage of Yusuf Balasagun in the Context of the modernization of political science

This article artistic heritage Y. Balasaguni interpreted in the context of modern political science. The subject of analysis is the basic idea of «Kutadgu Bilik» the author of the poem ( «KuttyBilik»). Interesting is the author of the writing of this work. Introducing work convinces the reader that the author of the poem Y. Balasagun - outstanding poet and thinker of the largest of all Turks early Middle Ages. In its work, Y. Balasagun great poetic talent and skill describe and solve complex social problems associated with the policy, political power and the state. He is one of the first thinkers who sang an ideal ruler and the state, given the images of different categories of people, and the rulers of the various social strata, representatives of secular and religious power of contemporary society.Key words: state, poem, «Kutadgu bilik» («Kutty bilik»), ideal ruler, thinker, Turks, poet, medieval society, history, politics, tradition.

Vaĺžyna Mort: A Poet between Two Continents

<p>Walżyna Mort jest jedną z najbardziej utalentowanych współczesnych poetek białoruskich na emigracji. Celem artykułu jest analiza poetycka utworów, które powstały zarówno przed emigracją, jak i po wyjeździe do Stanów Zjednoczonych Ameryki. Wśród przeanalizowanych książek znalazły się: Fabryka śloz (teksty białoruskie i angielskie, 2008), Collected Body (wiersze angielskie, 2011) oraz najnowsze wydanie wierszy białoruskich Epidemija ružau (2017). Omówiono najlepsze wiersze poetki w języku białoruskim oraz angielskim, m.in.: Biełaruskaja mowa I, Biełaruskaja mowa II, Rafału Wajačaku, Fabryka śloz/Factory of Tears, Scena siaredniawiečnaj wajny (pawodle adnajmiennaj karciny Dega), Mužčyny prychodziać jak ličby ŭ kalendary..., Na plažach Flarydy, Nju Jork, Uspaminy, Photograph, A Portrait of a Mother in Fall. Badaniu poddano także prozatorskie utwory Hopniki i Ciotka Anna. W artykule udowodniono, że twórczość Mort charakteryzuje się bogactwem języka, obrazowością, niezwykłą spostrzegawczością oraz ironią w opisie banalności codziennego życia zarówno na Białorusi, jak i w Ameryce. Poetka szczerze pisze o rodzinie i intymnych stronach ludzkiego życia. Niewątpliwie jest jedną z najbardziej wyrazistych i oryginalnych postaci współczesnej literatury białoruskiej.</p>

ABOUT THE L ABOUT THE LANGUAGE OF THE WORK «GULIST GE OF THE WORK «GULISTONI BIT-TURKIY»

The article investigates some lexical-semantic and linguistic-poetic peculiarities of one of the important written sources of the XIVth century “Gulistony bit-turkiy” by Sayfie Saroyi. It should be noted that the linguistic features of this written source, which plays an important role in the history of the Uzbek literary language, the contribution of the talented poet and translator Sayfi Sarayi in the development of the Uzbek literary language have hardly been studied in Uzbek linguistics. The study of the poet's work in various aspects is important not only for Uzbek linguistics, but also for Turkology.

The First Serbian Female Writer: From the History of Nineteenth-Century Women’s Literature

At the end of the nineteenth century the Romantic image of Eustahija Arsić (1776–1843) was introduced to the Serbian national pantheon as the first Serbian woman writer and philosopher of the modern age. This image was based first and foremost on her book “Useful Thoughts on the Four Seasons” which appeared in Budim in 1816 under that author’s name. In the second half of the twentieth century several scholarly studies and a biography were devoted to Arsić. More recently this image has attracted the attention of scholars of women’s literature in South Slavic countries. These scholars note that her “Thoughts”, while influenced by Western pre-romantic (sentimentalist) literature, illuminate a wide range of fields, including philosophy, ethics, history, natural science, anatomy, physics, and religion, while at the same time they introduce the genre of the “feminist essay” into Serbian literature. The poems that are included in “Thoughts” appear in anthologies of Serbian literature as original poems by Arsić. The present essay shows that the ideas about the originality, European erudition, cosmopolitanism, personal tone, philosophical gifts and poetic talent are highly exaggerated, and that the image of this author is a cultural construct that was created at a certain stage of the formation of Serbian national literature and was reconceived at a later time. The essay establishes that Arsić’s “Useful Thoughts” is a compilation of essays, tracts, and poetry that appeared in Russian journals from the late 1780s to the early 1810s. These works (including some by Nikolai Karamzin) were transferred into her book with minor orthographic and grammatical changes (e.g. masculine noun endings are changed to feminine ones) and without any indication of the source. The work of the compiler of “Thoughts” consisted solely in taking the sentimental texts of Russian male authors and attributing them to a pious female author. The essay does not simply give the direct sources of this “Slavono-Russian” book of “the first Serbian woman writer” and describe the process of adaptation of the “foreign” as a stage of the national and literary self-affirmation of the “younger” Slavic culture, but it also offers material for a more general (philological and literary-critical) study of the “Slavono-Russian” period in the history of Serbian literature in particular and “pan-Slavic” pre-romanticism more generally. The case of Arsić is likewise interesting for a comparative analysis of the formation of national literary “pantheons” and for a gender history of Russian and other Slavic literatures.

Andrzej FranaszekHerbert: Biografia

Andrzej Franaszek Herbert: Biografia 2 vols. Kraków. Wydawnictwo Znak. 2018. 857 & 958 pages. Andrzej Franaszek once again undertook a gigantic task when, after his successful biography of Nobel Prize–winning Polish author Czesław Miłosz (2011, English translation 2016), he decided to write a comprehensive biography of another outstanding Polish poet, Zbigniew Herbert (1924–1998). In the case of the latter, Franaszek had at his disposal a wealth of unpublished material : Herbert’s diaries and notes, letters from friends and translators, correspondence with women close to the poet, as well as many eyewitness accounts of his poetry readings and opinions from different periods . Paradoxically, Zbigniew Herbert, first a silent, later increasingly a vocal opponent of the Communist regime in his country, reached fame sooner outside Poland, provoked controversy after his final return to his homeland, while his memory was kept alive twenty years after his death by the Republic of Poland declaring 2018 a Memorial Year of Zbigniew Herbert. Franaszek divides his material into seven longchaptersacrosstwovolumesandwithin his chronological approach finds room for subchapters focusing on particular themes. This works reasonably well, though it leads to minor repetitions. While following the biographical thread, Herbert appears in at least four distinct roles: as a private person, a talented poet, a budding dramatist, and a cultural essayist with an excellent eye for the fine arts. It is as an essayist that Herbert scored his first international success: Barbarian in the Garden (Babarzyńca w ogrodzie, 1962), a collection translated into several European languages, was proof of the poet’s profound interest in the beginnings of European culture (Lascaux) as well as Greek and Italian art, not omitting the consequences of such antiheretical “internal Crusades” as the war that ended with the extinction of the Cathars. While writing this book, Herbert spent more time in Paris and London than in Poland, finding new friends and supporters in western Europe and the United States: the critic Al Alvarez in London, his translators Karl Dedecius and Klaus Staemmler in Germany, and the most loyal American Polish couple, John and Bogdana Carpenter in America. This comprehensive biography will also satisfy readers curious about Herbert’s private life, providing information on his international romances as well as long-standing emotional attachments. As for the latter, here two women seem to dominate: Halina Misiołek, a married woman whom Herbert met in 1950, and the aristocratic Katarzyna (“Kasia”) Dzieduszycka, his wife from March 1968 to his death thirty years later. The correspondences with and reminiscences of both are essential to understanding the twists and turns of Herbert’s colorful life, spiced from time to time by romances with a French woman, an Austrian actress (both older than the poet), and a young German admirer. Equally important are Herbert’s friendships with (usually older) writers and critics such as Jerzy Zawieyski, Books in Review ANDRZEJ FRANASZEK monsters reveal themselves to be inside the characters. And in each character there are monsters asking us, “What beast do you have clawing inside?” Luisa is a teenage idealist , a thrill-seeker, and a novice researcher of shipwrecks. Her monster is discovered along the way to her many random yet pointed decisions, such as her most surprising one to run away with a boy to a beach known to drown even skilled swimmers in its treacherous undertow. The randomness of Luisa’s decisions are a part of the allure and mixed engagement one may find in the book; even Luisa’s escapades in Zipolite are conjured by an obsession she finds arbitrarily: an old article in the newspaper describing the escape of twelve Ukrainian dwarves from a Russian circus, last reported to be heading to the coast of Oaxaca. Although this exotification of little people may seem problematic to 2019 readers, this is part of what sets the tone of the novel: Luisa is detached from the world in her nascent adulthood and innocent of hard experiences. Luisa believes the world around her is calling her to be a part of a grander mystery, but in reality, her decisions are the acts of someone in the midst of becoming who they are. Aridjis gives us a character who is hard to pin down...

Redeeming Michitsuna's Mother: A Feminist Reading of the Kagerō Diary / 道綱母の名誉救済：蜻蛉日記のフェミニスト的解釈

A quantitative approach to the Kagerō Diary (Kagerō nikki, 974) reveals a proud, competitive, creative, and compassionate woman whose ambition to gain status and prestige was ultimately thwarted by relative infertility because, in her polygamous society, children were the avenue to a woman's success. The author has often been disparaged as jealous, hysterical, neurotic, and masochistic, but these are exaggerations that seem to be the result of gendered stereotypes. She is only outspokenly resentful of her husband's relationships with women who threatened her dignity and status; she often laments her husband's negligence, but she also shares many warm moments with him and is more than a wife. She has strong bonds with her biological family members, is recognized as a talented poet, corresponds with a variety of her peers, and undertakes numerous pilgrimages. She retains her husband's interest for nearly twenty years, and then turns her attention to the needs of her adult children, a biological son and an adopted daughter. It is her son's achievements, not her husband's affection, that elicits her strongest expressions of joy. A data-driven analysis of the Kagerō Diary, combined with recognition of the importance of status and prestige among the aristocracy in Heian Japan, refutes sexist characterizations and allows us to see Michitsuna's mother as an impressive figure.

Invocations of the Body

Invocations of the Body Bryon Dickon (bio) Museum of the Americas J. Michael Martinez Penguin Books www.penguinrandomhouse.com 112 Pages; Print, $20.00 In his third collection of poems, Museum of the Americas, the speakers of J. Michael Martinez tell a narrative in the language of trans-historical bodies. Each poem in the collection is an exhibit, rich in allegory, and coalesces narrative and history to display the sociopolitical realities of colonialism and the immigrant experience. In addition to combining history and story-telling, Martinez also expertly incorporates literary arts with visual ones, with a photograph, a casa painting, or a postcard opening each section. These various ways of telling come together in Museum of the Americas to communicate the historical and transnational rigors associated with the bodies of immigrants. In the poem "Instructions for Identifying 'Illegal' Immigrants", the speaker invites the reader to "Consider moving through / the preface to home." Although this poem does not open the collection, its invitation begins to shape the narrative of what is to come. In Museum of the Americas, the body is the magnetic center of the poems, representing both historical and national identity. Even as those boundaries are crossed, the body remains in sharp focus throughout the poems. In this poem, the speaker says, "the immigrant will be / dried leaves amongst owl eggs / & cradles / of lacquered oak." The speaker here strikes a bargain between transcending national boundaries and maintaining a sense of self. The speaker accomplishes this through frequent invocations of the body and flesh throughout the poem. In what started as a set of instructions for identifying immigrant bodies, the meaning of the poem morphs into a manual for identifying and understanding the intersections between their bodies and identities. Martinez's collection offers a profound reading of the body through poems and photographs. The second section is accompanied by a postcard by Walter H. Horne entitled Execution in Mexico. The rest of the poems are in dialogue with this and other postcards published by Horne, depicting the violence committed against Latinx bodies during the Mexican Revolution. In this way, Martinez's speakers depict a history of violence by engaging with images of battered bodies across national and historical boundaries. The speaker in "The Mexican War Photo Postcard Company" prefaces the poems that come after by providing a brief history of the Horne post cards without sacrificing the writer's magnificent talent for rich allegory and lyricism. The speaker takes on the function of a docent, describing the images, often in vivid detail. This section does much to show off Martinez's poetic talent for incorporating vibrant imagery, bringing life to the photographs and casa paintings throughout his well-crafted collection. By the end of the section, the reader truly gets a sense that the subjects of these poems (and the postcards they describe) are anchored to "the dialectic between Self / as Subject & Self / as Object." The penultimate section of the book largely features the work's titular poem "Museum of America." In this poem, the speaker recounts the narrative of what is assumed to be General Lopez de Santa Anna's wood and cork leg. The poem combines historical narrative with wartime mythology, making the wood and cork leg become larger than life, representing "where the migrant body . . . gains political / currency only insofar as it is also a nationally unanchored art object." The leg of General Lopez endures a journey through and between trans-historical narratives as it passes from [End Page 23] Mexico across trans-historical borders vis-à-vis an Illinois sergeant, who exhibited the leg "at county fairs and festivals for 'a dime a peek.'" Through various means, the prosthetic leg appears among the exhibits of P.T. Barnum's American Museum. General Lopez's leg finally meets its final resting place at the Illinois State Military Museum. The way in which the leg is treated as an exhibition speaks volumes about the voyeuristic way in which transnational bodies are viewed. This poem showcases Martinez's skillful alchemy of poetry and creative nonfiction by demonstrating how the removed prosthetic of a Mexican body grows to almost mythological proportions. On the other hand, the exhibition of the...

In Memoriam: Roberto Fernández Retamar (1930–2019)

In MemoriamRoberto Fernández Retamar (1930–2019) Elzbieta Sklodowska Roberto Fernández Retamar (1930–2019) was a prolific poet, renowned essayist, and a controversial public figure whose creative and intellectual life was inextricably intertwined with the history of the Cuban Revolution. He was committed to the revolutionary cause to the point of embracing an austere lifestyle and an ongoing militant stance, but, in his writings and public statements, he was also thought-provoking to the point of provocation. At the core of Fernández Retamar’s contribution to the Latin American decolonization project was a nostalgia for and perhaps even an undying belief in a utopian ideal, something very few of us would dare to profess in the wake of the horrors and terrors of the long twentieth century. At no point did disillusionment seem to creep into his public persona, even when the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s plunged revolutionary Cuba into the deepest socio-economic crisis of its history, known as the Special Period in the Times of Peace, and later, during the hardly restrained protocapitalism of the “transition” that followed. A true believer rather than a turncoat, always marching in step with the Cuban Revolution—which, in its 60 years and counting, has had its own share of grave and seldom rectified missteps—Fernández Retamar could not evade the fiery darts of criticism hurled at him from every possible direction. Alongside the heartfelt lamentations that he had squandered his impressive erudition and significant poetic talent in the service of ideology, and a vast array of thoughtfully polemical papers, theses, lectures, and blogs, a few of Fernández Retamar’s detractors did not hesitate to descend into openly ad hominem strikes. Regrettably, and perhaps ironically, some of the most unforgiving attacks surfaced in the guise of obituaries after his passing in the summer of 2019 at the age of 89. In Calibán (1971), the signature essay for which he is both widely celebrated and mercilessly vilified, Fernández Retamar unshackled the fury of antiimperialist rhetoric and conjured the figure of Calibán to single-handedly defy (post)colonial epistemologies. Born in the heart of the Caribbean in response to a political crisis with far-reaching ramifications (the Padilla Case), this tempestuous manifesto resonated with a long legacy of Latin Americanist thought from writers as revered as José Martí, [End Page 817] José Enrique Rodó, Alfonso Reyes, and José Carlos Mariátegui. The grip of political urgency versus the utopian lure of an overarching continental poetics, the near-hubristic self-confidence of the frantic prose versus the wisdom of self-questioning, the torrent of eclectic ideas interspersed with nuggets of lyrical insight, all describe and obscure Calibán as much as they capture and mask the contradictions of the man, Fernández Retamar. Wrought with tensions between opposing forces, which the author refused to resolve in later translations, re-editions, and revisions, Calibán entered the bloodstream of Latin Americanism and has never ceased to ignite debates across the full range of discursive and ideological registers. Fernández Retamar’s enduring legacy as a literary critic and theorist extends beyond Calibán, of course, and encompasses authoritative studies on major Latin American writers (José Martí, Rubén Darío, Ernesto Cardenal) along with sweeping panoramas of Cuban poetry and Spanish American literary theory (La poesía contemporánea en Cuba 1927–1953; Para una teoría de la literatura hispanoamericana, to name just a few). Tireless in fulfilling his myriad roles, assignments, titles, and capacities, Fernández Retamar should be recognized as the co-founder of the journal Unión (1962), as well as the founder—and director until 1986—of Centro de Estudios Martianos and its journal, Anuario. But first and foremost, he will be remembered for his long leadership at the helm of Casa de las Américas (1986–2019), Cuba’s flagship cultural institution of hemispheric reach, whose eponymous journal he began editing in 1965. Under his guidance, Casa de las Américas was not only instrumental in encouraging Latin American(ist) artistic and intellectual endeavors through an impressive array of publications and prizes, but also helped promote Havana...

Мотивы лирики Габдуллы Тукая (к проекту словаря-указателя мотивов)

The article is focused on the aspects of the lyrical motive theory connected with the project of the motives’ index of Gabdulla Tuqay’s lyric poetry. The conceptual provisions for the index are formulated on the basis of systematized works on the lyrical motive problem. The lyrical motif is considered as a theme-rematic unity based on the functional identity of the motif and the theme. When analyzing lyrical motifs, it is important to establish the contexts that determine their semantics: biographical, cultural-historical, literary (components of literary tradition (traditional images, motives, themes) and modern artistic and non-artistic texts). These theoretical and methodological provisions are demonstrated by the example of the motivational analysis of Gabdulla Tuqay’s poems, united by the theme of hope and hopelessness. It is established that poems in which the lyrical personage experiences a value crisis prevail among the works of this thematic group: “Omid” (“Hope”, 1910), “Ozelgan Omid” (“Broken Hope”, 1908), “Omidsezlek” (“Hopelessness”, 1910). Semantic representations of the motive of hope and hopelessness in these poems by G. Tuqay are revealed. The factors influencing the semantics of this motif of his poetry are determined, the intertextual connections of the analyzed poems, biographical, cultural and historical contexts determining the semantics of the studied motif are analyzed. The article raises the question of the influence of the Eastern poetic tradition and the principles of meaning formation typical for the Arab-Muslim culture on the semantics of G. Tuqay’s lyrical motifs. In accordance with the special nature of the connection between word and meaning in Arab-Muslim Philology (“indication of meaning”), the analysis of G. Tuqay’s poem “Ber Man” (1910) demonstrates the possibility of transition from the explicit content of the poem to the hidden meaning. The analysis let us determine the role of reminiscences for the meaning of the poem interpreted as a work about a transcendental event (G. Tuqay’s poem “Poet and Khatif”, Quranic reminiscence-quote from 107th ayat of the 21st Surah of the Quran). In “Ber Man” there is an actualization of the internal form of the word, in accordance with the etymological meaning of the word “man” (from Arabic “ma’na” – meaning), which gives reason to consider the change in the mental condition of the lyrical personage as a process of acquiring the once lost meaning. At the same time, considering that G. Tuqay’s poetic talent developed at the intersection of Tatar, Russian, and European literatures, it should be mentioned that it is inadmissible to absolutize the Eastern origin as the only one which determines the motives’ semantics in the lyrics of the Tatar poet.

Making Men Ridiculous: Juvenal and the Anxieties of the Individual by Christopher Nappa

Reviewed by: Making Men Ridiculous: Juvenal and the Anxieties of the Individual by Christopher Nappa Evelyn Adkins Christopher Nappa Making Men Ridiculous: Juvenal and the Anxieties of the Individual Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018 Pp. xii + 224. $75.00. Christopher Nappa offers a new reading of Juvenal's Satires that moves beyond persona theory to examine how the author and his works simultaneously critique and participate in what he fears is the decline of traditional, elite Roman masculinity. Nappa analyzes not only how the idea of "Juvenal" constructs and is constructed by the Satires, but also how he undermines himself and his project through his own rhetoric. In the introduction (1–22), Nappa describes his use of and departure from persona theory, then lays out the book's central concepts of identity, anxiety, and autonomy. The elements of identity that Nappa says he will focus on are class, ethnicity, gender, and wealth, though he treats ethnicity only sporadically. Likewise, the discussion of gender could be more consistent, especially in the first few chapters, and better theorized, with reference to more recent publications such as Kirk Ormand's Controlling Desires (2009) and the essays in Mark Masterson et al.'s Sex in Antiquity (2014). Turning to autonomy, Nappa rightly points out that full autonomy was possessed by almost no man in the Imperial period. The Satires express Juvenal's anxiety that the criteria of masculinity have changed in such a way that he and those like him are being dragged down the social ladder and made ridiculous. Nappa explores the implications of this for Juvenal's literary project in Chapter One, "The Failed Satirist and the Failed Man" (23–60). Through an extended close reading of Satire 1, he shows how Juvenal undermines himself and his works by: participating in the literary culture he critiques, yearning for the wealth and status of those he attacks for gaining these through unorthodox means such as gender and class inversion, and saying that he will use anger to compensate for a lack of poetic talent. He fails as a man and satirist because, unlike his literary model Lucilius, he lives under an imperial system that makes open critique dangerous. In Juvenal's inabilities to escape from literary tradition and speak freely, we see his "first and greatest example of manhood unmanned" (60). The next two chapters focus on ways in which manhood may be unmanned. "The Body and the Failure of Autonomy" (61–92) draws on the theory of "mind-blindness" developed by Blakey Vermuele for eighteenth-century English satire to analyze how Juvenal uses bodily imagery to dehumanize his targets. Nappa demonstrates how individuals in the Satires are reduced to body parts, beaten, obliterated, emasculated through old age, and transformed into unstable symbols such as decaying or reused statues or a schoolboy's declamatory exercise. These images of bodies deprived of autonomy express Juvenal's fears about loss of status and masculinity. Where Chapter Two examines external factors that may make a man involuntarily ridiculous, Chapter Three, "The Dangers of Debasement: Manhood and Class" (93–126), explores what happens when men willingly debase themselves. Nappa argues that figures such as Lateranus, Creticus, and Gracchus [End Page 148] in Satires 2 and 8 display anxieties about class betrayal through markers such as inappropriate religious behavior and gender transgression. Juvenal fears not only that individuals will act badly, but also that their bad behavior will spread to others. Freedom from social restraint is shown to be attractive, even to Juvenal, who undermines his project by displaying and thereby potentially spreading the very behavior he critiques. The final two chapters turn to Juvenal's greatest anxiety: that there may be no real, Roman men in the first place. "A Woman's World" (127–65) focuses on Satire 6 and Juvenal's fears that women from adulteresses to empresses are excluding Roman men from a world that should be theirs. Nappa argues that the poem is less about women, however, than it is about "failed masculinity" and even "a failure of Romanness" (130). Juvenal targets adultery in particular out of a concern that elite Roman blood may be diluted through the birth of illegitimate children...

Creative writing and the creation of the poet: A romantic perspective

The term creative is based on the inventive
 powers the mind possesses. These powers are the source of imagination which is
 a main feature required for poetry composition. One of the major literary
 movements that placed an early emphasis on the powers of imagination is
 Romanticism. William Wordsworth regards imagination as one of the essential
 qualities the poet should have and employ in the process of creating poetry.
 Versification is among the higher forms of creative writing as it requires
 particular sense of rhyme and meter. However creative writing from a romantic
 perspective is centered on the figure of the poet as a creator who owns
 distinguished imaginative powers and techniques beside the skills of verse
 composition. Nature in the romantic tradition is deemed a major source from
 which the poet fills his reservoir of imagination needed to write poetry.
 Against this background, the study of creative writing from a romantic
 viewpoint should be based on the examination of the concept of the creation
 of the poet. This paper therefore aims to investigate the romantic
 conception of creative writing as an activity leading to an inventive
 production owned by a creator who has already passed a process through which he
 himself is created as a talented poet.

Women Writers’ Consciousness of Talent and Fame During the Qian-Jia Reigns and Cultural Transition

<p>經過明末清初的才德之辨，閨秀文學發展到乾嘉時期，進入了一個新的階段。此期的閨秀有著更強的才名意識，她們充分運用文壇領袖所掌握的文化權力，通過拜師等舉措拓展交往空間，從而與著名文人唱和、題贈，躋身文壇，顯揚聲名。駱綺蘭通過結交袁枚、王文治和王昶等，以畫作、詩集遍求題贈，並編選《聽秋軒贈言》和《聽秋軒閨中同人集》，得以聲名鵲起；歸懋儀在乾嘉文人與閨秀之間構築了一個非常龐大的交游網絡，她執著於詩史留名的願望，成功藉助男性文人的資助，令詩稿付梓，並憑藉才名遊走於江浙間擔任閨塾師，承擔起養家的重任；汪端則欲通過選詩修史來達到不朽，其《元明逸史》的撰寫和詩集中大量的詠史詩，可見其修史的努力，編選《明三十家詩選》更見其不凡的識見。吳藻創作雜劇《喬影》，並繪《飲酒讀騷圖》，體現出懷才不遇的苦悶和強烈的性別意識。總體而言，乾嘉閨秀已經不滿足于內闈狹小的空間，做出了跨越閨門的種種努力，是晚清民國閨秀文化近代轉型的先聲。</p> <p> </p><p>Following the debates on female talent during the late Ming and early Qing eras, women’s literary production entered a new stage. Women poets who were active during the Qian-Jia reigns had a stronger sense of establishing their literary fame through making use of the cultural power held by the leading poets of their time. They became the female disciples of these leading figures, and expanded their networks by communicating and exchanging poetic works with larger communities of eminent literati. Luo Qilan, in particular, succeeded in achieving fame through her important connections, including Yuan Mei, Wang Wenzhi, and Wang Chang. She broadly solicited inscriptions for her paintings and collections of poetry, and published The Collection of Inscriptions for the Autumn Pavilion and The Anthology of Poetic Works by Friends of the Autumn Pavilion. Gui Maoyi, another well-connected woman poet, built a literary community that included both male and female poets. She obtained help from the male literati to publish her poetry collection, thereby realizing her ambition of establishing an undying literary reputation. At the same time, she turned her poetic talent into a means of providing for her family, travelling all over Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces to teach in elite families. Other well-known examples included Wang Duan and Wu Zao. Wang revealed her ambition of authoring history in a broad array of works, including An Informal History of the Yuan and the Ming, Selected Works by Thirty Ming Poets, and numerous poetic works on historical events. Wu was best known for her variety play, A Shadow in Disguise, as well as for her painting, “Drinking Wine and Reading the Sorrow of Departure.” In these works Wu lamented her unfulfilled ambitions and the limitations of gender roles. In general, women poets of this time made all kinds of efforts to venture beyond the inner quarters and can be viewed as the pioneer of the modern transformation of women’s writing culture during the late Qing and early Republican era.</p> <p> </p>

A Comparative Study of Taking Pride in One’s Own Poetry: Hafez and Shakespeare

Pride is discredited in all cultures, but pride in poetic talent is praiseworthy in all areas. In poetry, the geniuses of all eras have enjoyed their poetry and have paid attention to and have taken great pride in their own poetry. Hafiz boasts of his poetry and is so sure of his poetry that he knows that so long as people reside on earth, the world will read and receive his poetry. The same parallel is found in Shakespeare's poetry so much so that Shakespeare is sure that his poem will be read so long as people can breathe and see. This belief in the immortality of poetry and its effects in the two poets are followed in this article. The dimensions of this issue and the reasons for the discourse of poetry and sonnet are explained in detail. The conclusion is that the two poets are proud of beautiful form and musicality of their poetry which will spread through the world. This is endorsed through the untranslatability of the poems of the two poets ’poetry. The methodology of this paper is based on the descriptive-analytical approach of the American comparative Literature School. The focus of this study is to compare pride in the poetry of Hafez and Shakespeare.

Delphi – Shamanism under control?

The assessment of the talent of the Delphic Pythia was ambiguous among Greeks. On the one hand, they emphasized the role of Apollo in the process, saying that becoming a Pythia requires no special ability or education. On the other hand, they admitted that the Pythia infl uences the poetic quality of the oracle. Despite the modern popular view, the Delphic oracles did not require a secondary phrasing by male priests. Pythias presented the oracles in their final form, but in verse or in prose, depending on the poetic talent of the seer. In my paper, I present arguments that the Greeks deliberately underestimated the Pythia’s own eff orts in order to hinder the formation of a spiritual (shamanistic) power which could have been able to overcome secular political power. The enigmatic character of the oracles served the same goal: to maintain the political independence of the Greek states. However, there are traces showing that divination originally had a close connection to poetic inspiration and that both had a slight shamanistic character. I highlight two motives: the existence of poetic as well as divinatory initiation and the role of honey, a food allegedly inducing trance.

Anna Jackson’s I, Clodia: Catullus, women’s voices, and feminist implications

Anna Jackson’s I, Clodia substantially develops Catullus’s literary reception. The collection complicates understandings of both Catullus’s poetic paramour Lesbia and the historical Roman woman Clodia Metelli. Jackson makes Clodia a poet; she thus becomes not just a receiver of the classical tradition but a participant in it. Clodia responds to Catullus’s poems with her own commentary on poetry, her own set of poetic devices, and a complex inter- and intratextuality. Moreover, Jackson makes Clodia a sensitive and literate reader of Catullus. While her Clodia takes a biographical approach to his poems, reading them as responses to their romance, she is also as attuned to his inter- and intratextual poetics as any modern Latin scholar. The poetic sequence has socio-cultural as well as aesthetic significance; by reimagining the much-maligned historical woman Clodia as an intelligent reader and a talented poet, I, Clodia serves as a feminist text. I, Clodia can be seen as part of the recent tradition of women writers reclaiming and rewriting women from the ancient world, complicating the notion that women writers now operate in a ‘post-feminist’ landscape.

The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 1: 1940–1956

The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 1: 1940–1956

New Letters by an Old Master

ABSTRACT The editors of this collection of Robert Frost's letters—the second of a planned five volumes—express in their preface the hope that the letters, many of which have not been published previously, will provide the “raw material” for a new biography to rectify Lawrance Thompson's somewhat-unflattering portrait of Frost in his authorized biography. The letters in this volume, however, are not consistently flattering. What emerges from Frost's correspondence with family and friends is the image of a restless, uniquely talented, and often-troubled poet who was proud of what he called his “good American prejudices.” Although these prejudices were not always “good,” the letters and the editors' many footnotes help us understand Frost's life and his extraordinary literary accomplishments.

The Journey of Adrienne Rich

The Journey of Adrienne Rich