The influence of poetic and musical rhythm on the perception and comprehension of an educational text by an Ancient Greek student

The article presents the results of the historical and psychological reconstruction of educational reading in an Ancient Greek school. The purpose of this reconstruction was to identify the psychological mechanisms of influence of the musical and poetic rhythm on the student's personality, to determine the pedagogic potential of the poetic text as a means of raising, to reveal the psychological mechanisms of the activity of the text as a subject of educational reading. The educational effects of the rhythm of the mythological and poetic text in the context of the formation of the socio-cultural identity of an Ancient Greek student are revealed. The psychological mechanisms of the participation of poetic and musical rhythm in the organisation of the practice of reading in an Ancient Greek school are described. It is noted that the poetic rhythm of the text suggests a special way of participating in the teacher's educational reading. Based on the reconstruction, it is concluded that the rhythmically intense educational mythological and poetic text has the ability to evoke an emotional response in the student, influence his unconscious attitudes, and impose emotional and semantic dominants of perception and understanding of what is written. The most important task of modern education is found in the formation of student's sense of rhythm in the process of educational reading. It is noted that this sense of rhythm in a modern school can be formed by referring to educational texts and texts used in youth culture.

Translating the Hebrew Psalms to be Sung: The 2010 Revised Grail Psalms, a Case Study

This article explores the theme of “translating poetically organized discourse to be sung.” The 2010 English translation of the Hebrew Psalms, entitled The Revised Grail Psalms: A Liturgical Psalter (RGP), is presented as a case study. The Hebrew Psalms, for the most part, were composed to be sung, yet more often than not, they are translated to be read. Such translations are primarily characterized by the absence of poetic rhythm, despite the plain evidence and significance of poetic rhythm in the Hebrew. The RGP, on the other hand, privileges the rhythmic dimension of the Psalms. As a result, the RGP is said to be remarkably “adaptable to the exigencies of different musical settings,” and more importantly, eminently singable. Nonetheless, the challenges of translating and formalizing a text according to a given rhythmic principle are in practice formidable, for when translators set out to feature a lyric’s rhythmic dimension, its semantic, rhetorical, and syntactic art is often found lacking. This article examines some of the principal reasons the translators of the RGP chose to re-emphasize the Hebrew Psalms’ rhythmic art and, more importantly, how those translators negotiated some of the more problematic translation challenges that ensued from that choice.

Movement and Balance. A comment on Derek Attridge’s Moving Words

This paper discusses some central problems that occur within cognitive versification studies. Derek Attridge’s Moving Words (2013) comments on Richard Cureton’s concept of temporalities. Attridge understands poetic rhythm as movement. He draws the conclusion that movement and repetition are, in principle, contradictory because, in a way, repetition looks backwards and stops the movement. This turns out to be a complicated statement, as repetition seems to be the only poetic device that is common in poetry all over the world. However, it may be possible to understand the relationship between movement and repetition with the help of Reuven Tsur’s concept of back-structuring. This shows how verse rhythm is spatialised as well as has the ability to move in time. This is possible because of gestalt borders that close the sequences. Additionally, Cureton’s fourth thematic temporality is useful to solve the conflict. Temporality is a complex reality, and poetic rhythm also has the ability to stand still.

Circulatory checks and balances

The proposal ramified in the previous chapter, namely that the forms of poems can act upon the conditions that they contain, is further explored and exemplified with particular reference to the speed of rhythmic and metrical movement. This is in turn shown to be inversely related to the dictional burden of a poem’s words. The chapter begins by returning to the example of Ezra Pound, and a recent reading of the late Thrones Cantos, a reading which canvases but finally rejects rejects analogies between the numbers of accountancy and those of its poetic metrics. Works by J. H. Prynne, Adrian Stokes, and Geoffrey Hill are then employed to promulgate a conception of poetic rhythm figuring the poet’s technique with regard to language as analogous to a central banker’s means for stabilizing the value of a currency.

Changes of Pace

Felix Mendelssohn’s lieder were subjected to severe criticism during the late nineteenth century, with his supposedly ‘sloppy declamation’ often criticized against an aesthetic ideal drawn from Hugo Wolf. Mendelssohn’s own song aesthetic was, however, quite different. This chapter investigates Mendelssohn’s text setting, examining the stress patterns of the poetry from which he constructs his vocal melodies. Covering both early and later songs, the chapter incorporates analyses of Mendelssohn’s song autographs, which reveal that declamation was the focus of a considerable amount of care by the composer. Distortions of the poetic rhythm (such as accelerations or decelerations) that occur in his mature songs can often be explained as deliberate expressive effects responding to the deeper meaning of the poem.

Syntax of the «Poet of Thought» (To the 220th Anniversary of the Birth of Evgeny Baratynsky)

E. A. Baratynsky’ influence on the 20th-century Russian philosophical lyrics is undeniable. The syntax used by the «poet of thought» demonstrates a tendency towards complication and archaization over time, which generally contradicts the aspirations for the democratization of the poetic syntax that emerged in the Karamzin era. The complexity of the syntactic structure in the poet’s search for a «metaphysical» language is achieved not by increasing the number of complex structures, which make up half of the sentences used by Baratynsky, but rather by saturating sentences with various kinds of clauses (participial, adverbial participial, adjective, noun, adverbial, infinitive) that complicate the model by conjunctive syntagms (prepositional-nominal, comparative, conjunctive), parentheses, vocatives, segments of the «nominative of the theme» type. In an effort to preserve the continuity of poetic traditions for a thoughtful, attentive reader, Baratynsky resorts to archaizing the syllable at the lexical and grammatical levels and, in particular, to using absolute clauses. Complex constructions often accompany iambic trimeter, trisyllabic metres, variable-foot verses consisting of longer and shorter lines characterised by changing the order of stress. Sentences with cumbersome isolated clauses are typical for iambic and dactylic hexameter, metres with a connotation of «high» genres. A more complex syntactic structure is observed in polymetric and variable food poems. The added complexity of syntax in long-sized verses is achieved not by increasing the number of parts of complex structures, but rather by adding clauses and homogeneous parts of the sentence. Large stanza forms are frequently divided into several simple sentences of two or three lines in length. The tradition of poetic rhythm requires a coincidence of the boundaries of quatrain and sentences – their symmetry; therefore, in quatrains, similar to couplets, the occurrence of complex and compound structures is much higher. Free stanza or the lack of stanza division additionally complicates the syntax.

The semiotics of verse rhythm and comparative rhythmics: Vladimir Nabokov’s and Jurgis Baltrušaitis’s binary tetrameters from a typological perspective

The article discusses the problems of poetic rhythm in two aspects. The first concerns the possibility of awareness and conscious modelling of various aspects of poetic rhythm; the second is related to the manifestation of similar or even identical tendencies in the rhythmic structures of various authors who belong to different eras and literary trends and even writing in different languages. Works from bilingual authors such as Vladimir Nabokov and Jurgis Baltrušaitis are of the particular interest. The first half of the article focuses on how the concept of rhythm proposed in the book by Andrei Bely (1910) influenced the poetic practice. Before Bely, it had been implicit that the choice of stanzaic and metric forms was usually conscious for authors, while Bely demonstrated that poets and their audience can be aware of verse rhythm as well. After the publication of his results, Bely and other poets of a predominantly Symbolist approach began to pay attention to the rhythmic structure of the verse and made attempts to model it. Considered are the following problems: a) how do poetic meters relate to rhythmic forms; b) to what extent can the rhythmic momentum be recognized by the author, and to what extent can the author influence it; and c) how can the author compose verses in accordance with a pre-selected rhythmic model. In the second half of the article, the rhythm of iambic and trochaic tetrameters in Russian poetic heritage of Jurgis Baltrušaitis is analysed in comparison with the rhythm of his Lithuanian verses. As it turns out, despite the obvious differences in the prosody of the Lithuanian and Russian languages, the rhythmic structure of his poems obeys the same regularities. In the final part of the article, possible explanations of rhythmic patterns are proposed and an outline of the typology of the rhythm of the binary tetrameters is given.

Rhythm in translation, with two accounts of Leconte de Lisle’s ‘Midi’

This article explores the translation of poetic rhythm: not the rhythm of the source text, but the rhythm of the translational act itself. This re-conception of translation’s rhythmic task is enabled by a translation designed for the polyglot, rather than for the monoglot, reader. In this new understanding of translational process, rhythm not only embodies the perceptual and cognitive experience of the translating subject, it also makes more intimate the relationship between language and voice, the linguistic and the paralinguistic. Furthermore, it has as much to do with the space of translation, its distribution on the page, as with its changing temporal modes. The translator, then, does not translate the rhythm of a text so much as a text’s capacity for rhythm, and that capacity includes both espousing the perspective of a translating ‘I’ and releasing what is not linguistically manifest in the source text. These propositions are tested in two translations of Leconte de Lisle’s ‘Midi’.

La diéresis silenciada de Julio Herrera y Reissig

Julio Herrera y Reissig (1875-1910) defiende el uso de la “diéresis silenciada” en unas notas que escribió para explicar soluciones adoptadas en la traducción de dos poemas franceses. El concepto de “diéresis silenciada” es el punto de partida para una amplia exposición de la nueva música del verso, constituida por una serie de recursos capaces de promover, en su conjunto, una nueva música para la poesía en lengua española. Este artículo plantea que las notas de Herrera y Reissig sobre el tema cumplen una función táctica que sobrepasa la discusión técnica y normativa y pueden ser interpretadas como una preceptiva y una descripción poética y musical del modernismo hispanoamericano. Las notas evidencian que el ritmo poético no está plenamente inscrito en el texto y que tampoco es independiente de él, sino que se produce históricamente en construcciones complejas, en las que intervienen los diversos miembros de una comunidad siempre dinámica que incluye, entre otros, a poetas, lectores,editores o estudiosos.In his explanatory notes regarding the solutions he adopted for the translation of two French poems, the Uruguayan poet Julio Herrera y Reissig (1875- 1910) defends the use of the “silenced diaeresis”, taking it as the starting point of a large proposition in favor of a new music of verses. Through the concurrent employment of a series of specifi c resources, it would enable the promotion of a new music for poetry in Spanish. This essay argues that Herrera y Reissig’s notes on this subject have a tactical function that goes far beyond technical and normative discussions, and may be interpreted as a prescription for and a description of the music of the so-called Modernist Hispanic-American poetry. His notes lead to the perception that the poetic rhythm is not wholly inscribed in the text, but not altogether independent of the text: it is produced historically, in complex constructs, with the intervention of various members of a constantly dynamic community including poets, readers, editors, scholars.