scholarly journals Zhou Zuoren' Translation of Japanese and Ancient Greek Poetry and Forming of the Literary Thought of Chinese Vernacular Prose

Author(s):  
Li Sun
Author(s):  
J. L. Watson

AbstractTwo major themes dominate the poetry of the Alexandrian poet, C. P. Cavafy: homosexual desire and Greekness, broadly defined. This paper explores the interconnectivity of these motifs, showing how Cavafy’s poetic queerness is expressed through his relationship with the ancient Greek world, especially Hellenistic Alexandria. I focus on Cavafy’s incorporation of ancient sculpture into his poetry and the ways that sculpture, for Cavafy, is a vehicle for expressing forbidden desires in an acceptable way. In this, I draw on the works of Liana Giannakopoulou on statuary in modern Greek poetry and Dimitris Papanikolaou on Cavafy’s homosexuality and its presentation in the poetry. Sculpture features in around a third of Cavafy’s poems and pervades it in various ways: the inclusion of physical statues as focuses of ecphrastic description, the use of sculptural language and metaphor, and the likening of Cavafy’s beloveds to Greek marbles of the past, to name but three. This article argues that Cavafy utilizes the statuary of the ancient Greek world as raw material, from which he sculpts his modern Greek queerness, variously desiring the statuesque bodies of contemporary Alexandrian youths and constructing eroticized depictions of ancient Greek marbles. The very ontology of queerness is, for Cavafy, ‘created’ using explicitly sculptural metaphors (e.g. the repeated uses of the verb κάνω [‘to make’] in descriptions of ‘those made like me’) and he employs Hellenistic statues as a productive link between his desires and so-called ‘Greek desire’, placing himself within a continuum of queer, Greek men.


Author(s):  
Alberto Eugenio Stefanini ◽  
Anika Nicolosi ◽  
Monica Monachini

Ancient Greek poetry is an essential part of the western cultural heritage; thus, it is important that people have access to its texts and whatever relates to their understanding in a reliable and easy way. Whenever user evaluation is concerned, mock-ups are used by designers to acquire feedback from users. A mock-up is defined as a model of the final product, and may be used for demonstration, evaluation and other purposes. The authors prototyped a mock-up for focusing on the requirements of a scholarly digital edition of Archilochus. This was put under evaluation to assess its usability: it was submitted to extensive use and testing by a sample of prospective users, to better focus on the requirements from a product's perspective. Experimentation involved a group of university students, attending a Greek Philology course at Parma University. More than half of the respondents considered the mock-up a useful study support. The evaluation also pointed out that the mock-up had to be revised, so as to guarantee better cognitive simplicity of the user interface.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-127
Author(s):  
Tom Phillips

Abstract This article addresses P.B. Shelley’s ‘Hymn to Mercury’ and allusions to classical literature in ‘Ode to Liberty’. Congruities emerge between Shelley’s poetic practice, his conception of poetry’s social role, and his understanding of the relationship between antiquity and the present. When translating and reshaping ancient Greek poetry, he brings to the surface morally significant features of that poetry which only emerge in the dialogues that his writing creates. In doing so, he enacts literary history as a process that both reflects and enables expansions of the moral imagination.


2019 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 597-615
Author(s):  
Spencer A. Klavan

Simply by formulating a question about the nature of ancient Greek poetry or music, any modern English speaker is already risking anachronism. In recent years especially, scholars have reminded one another that the words ‘music’ and ‘poetry’ denote concepts with no easy counterpart in Greek. μουσική in its broadest sense evokes not only innumerable kinds of structured movement and sound but also the political, psychological and cosmic order of which song, verse and dance are supposed to be perceptible manifestations. Likewise, ποίησις and the ποιητικὴ τέχνη can encompass all kinds of ‘making’, from the assembly of a table to the construction of a rhetorical argument. Of course, there were specifically artistic usages of these terms—according to Plato, ‘musical and metrical production’ was the default meaning of ποίησις in everyday speech. But even in discussions which restrict themselves to the sphere of human art, we find nothing like the neat compartmentalization of harmonized rhythmic melody on the one hand, and stylized verbal composition on the other, which is often casually implied or expressly formulated in modern comparisons of ‘music’ with ‘poetry’. For many ancient theorists the City Dionysia, a dithyrambic festival and a recitation of Homer all featured different versions of one and the same form of composition, a μουσική or ποιητική to which λόγοι, γράμματα and συλλαβαί were just as essential as ἁρμονία, φθόγγοι, ῥυθμός and χρόνοι.


2016 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 5-14
Author(s):  
Michał Bzinkowski ◽  
Rita Winiarska

The imagery of fragmentary sculptures, statues and stones appears often in Modern Greek Poetry in connection with the question of Modern Greeks’ relation to ancient Greek past and legacy. Many famous poets such as the first Nobel Prize winner in literature, George Seferis (1900-1971), as well as Yannis Ritsos (1909-1990) frequently use sculptural imagery in order to allude to, among other things, though in different approaches, the classical past and its existence in modern conscience as a part of cultural identity. In the present paper we focus on some selected poems by a well-known Cretan poet Giorgis Manousakis (1933-2008) from his collection “Broken Sculptures and Bitter Plants” (Σπασμένα αγάλματα και πικροβότανα, 2005), trying to shed some light on his very peculiar usage of sculpture imagery in comparison with the earlier Greek poets. We attempt to categorize Manousakis’ metaphors and allusions regarding the symbolism of sculptures in correlation with existential motives of his poetry and the poet’s attitude to the classical legacy.


Author(s):  
John T. Hamilton

From national security and social security to homeland and cyber-security, “security” has become one of the most overused words in culture and politics today. Yet it also remains one of the most undefined. What exactly are we talking about when we talk about security? This book examines the discursive versatility and semantic vagueness of security both in current and historical usage. Adopting a philological approach, the book explores the fundamental ambiguity of this word, which denotes the removal of “concern” or “care” and therefore implies a condition that is either carefree or careless. Spanning texts from ancient Greek poetry to Roman Stoicism, from Augustine and Luther to Machiavelli and Hobbes, from Kant and Nietzsche to Heidegger and Carl Schmitt, the book analyzes formulations of security that involve both safety and negligence, confidence and complacency, certitude and ignorance. Does security instill more fear than it assuages? Is a security purchased with freedom or human rights morally viable? How do security projects inform our expectations, desires, and anxieties? And how does the will to security relate to human finitude? Although the book makes clear that security has always been a major preoccupation of humanity, it also suggests that contemporary panics about security and the related desire to achieve perfect safety carry their own very significant risks.


2018 ◽  
pp. 47-78
Author(s):  
Samuel N. Dorf

This chapter excavates the remaining traces of pseudo-ancient Greek musical and dance performance that took place in Natalie Clifford Barney’s Parisian home in the first decades of the twentieth century. Barney’s discovery of Greek antiquity came about at the same time that she became aware of her own sexual identity. She perceived a freedom in the culture of ancient Lesbos and Athens that she felt was lacking in early twentieth-century American and French culture, and she used her passion for studying ancient Greek poetry under the tutelage of the best Greek scholars in Paris to channel both her creative and erotic interests in a very public way. This chapter focuses on the alterity of queer performance and reception within Barney’s Parisian circle by exploring how queer performance and identity were mapped in her cultural salon. The evidence of these performances remains in fragments, scattered across public and private collections, preserved in photographs, memoirs, letters, and anecdotes told third-hand. The chapter draws on theories of performance and queerness to make sense of the archival materials relating to re-enactment of ancient Greek dance and music hosted at the heiress’s home. This illustrates the role of ancient Greek–inspired music and dance in defining queer subjectivity in early twentieth-century Parisian salons. In piecing together fragments, this chapter offers new ways for musicologists to think about performance and the archive.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document