V. Sambasivan’s populist Othello for Kerala’s kathaprasangam

Through the verve and beauty of V. Sambasivan’s (1929–97) recitals for Kerala’s kathaprasangam temple art form, performed solo onstage to harmonium accompaniment, Shakespeare’s Othello has become a lasting part of cultural memory. The veteran storyteller’s energetic Malayalam-language Othello lingers in a YouTube recording, an hour-long musical narrative that sticks faithfully to the bones of Shakespeare’s tragedy while fleshing it out with colourful colloquial songs, verse, dialogue and commentary. Sambasivan consciously indigenized Shakespeare, lending local appeal through familiar stock characters and poetic metaphor. Othello’s ‘moonless night’ or ‘amavasi’ is made bright by Desdemona’s ‘full moon’ or ‘purnima’; Cassio’s lover Bianca is renamed Vasavadatta, after poet Kumaran Asan’s lovelorn courtesan-heroine. Crucially, Sambasivan’s populist introduction of Othello through kathaprasangam marks a progressive phase where Marxism, rather than colonialism, facilitated India’s assimilation of Shakespeare. As part of Kerala’s communist anti-caste movement and mass literacy drive, Sambasivan used the devotional art form to adapt secular world classics into Malayalam, presenting these before thousands of people at venues both sacred and secular. In this article, I interview his son Professor Vasanthakumar Sambasivan, who carries on the family kathaprasangam tradition, as he recalls how his father’s adaptation represents both an artistic and sociopolitical intervention, via Shakespeare.

Subject Metaphors of Stars in Lithuanian and Russian Poetic Texts

The current article, that follows the research cycle analyzing natural phenomena metaphors, examines the star metaphors identified in the works of 40 Lithuanian and 54 Russian poets (mostly 20th century). It also studies the subject metaphors which constitute from the ethnolinguistic point of view the most numerous and most interesting group of six semantic subgroups of star metaphors. The subject metaphors of stars can be both substantive and verbal. However, the article focuses on substantive metaphors. They are divided into nine groups: 1) something written, drawn or embroidered (letters, written texts, books, drawings, figures); 2) lighting devices and other lighting means; 3) clothing, fabrics, yarn, knitted or woven items; 4) small metal, shiny, rounded or sharp objects (jewelry, coins, nails, needles, weapons, etc.); 5) buildings and their parts; 6) kitchen utensils; 7) food and drinks; 8) vehicles; 9) fragments of large objects and debris. The study showed the similarity of the poetic systems of the two languages, in which the same metaphorical models are presented, as well as their differences. The largest number of subject metaphors of stars in both poetic traditions was found in the first four groups, the examples from the following three groups were less common, while the examples in which star metaphors related to vehicles were hardly found. The differences between the two poetic systems may be observed due to the differences in cultures and traditional names of stars and constellations in the languages. The article noted that the author’s poetic metaphor in both Lithuanian and Russian could correlate with folklore tradition, that is with riddles, proverbs, legends and traditional beliefs, which are often common to the two languages.

Sidonius Apollinaris and the ‘Senate in Exile’: On a 'Republican' Poetic Metaphor

The Gallo-Roman imperial accession of Avitus, following the Vandal plunder, is presented by Sidonius Apollinaris (Carm. 7) as an effective opportunity for the revival of the Western empire in a utopian and mythical-historical perspective, which uses repertoires of Roman Republican History. An neglected tradition of that same history is thus revived, incidentally, with precedents ranging from the Gallic siege to civil wars and beyond. In this context, some senatorial ateliers where communications functional to the idea of a senate “free from the emperor” were experimented, could have made use of a certain “republican” modality of the use of prodigies in the most unscrupulous way, with recourse to even very complex propaganda paradigms.

Time and Temporality

For the nineteenth century, music was commonly characterized as the “art of time,” and provided a particularly fertile medium for articulating concerns about the nature of time and the temporal experience of human life. This chapter examines some of the debates around music and time from the period, arranged thematically around a series of conceptual issues. These include the reasons proposed for the links between music and time, and the intimate connection between our subjective experience of time and music; the use of music as a poetic metaphor for the temporal course of history; its use by philosophers as an instrument for the explication of temporal conundrums; its alleged potential for overcoming time; its various forms of temporal signification across diverse genres; and the legacy of nineteenth-century thought on these topics today.

Empirical Aesthetics of Poetry

Poetry enjoys greater liberties (“poetic license”) than all other uses of language to depart from a variety of grammatical and discourse-semantic constraints that typically shape verbal messages. At the same time, poetry frequently conforms to additional formal constraints on the selection and combination of linguistic elements, e.g., meter, rhyme, and other types of parallelism. Surveying empirical research into the cognitive, stylistic, and aesthetic effects of parallelistic features and poetic license, we argue that both types of deviation affect processing fluency in distinct ways and on distinct levels of processing. Poetic license renders verse cognitively more challenging, i.e., harder to comprehend and more ambiguous, but also more “poetic.” Parallelistic diction, by contrast, increases predictability and perceptual processing fluency; it underlies the rhythmical and melodic properties that link poetry and music. Sound parallelism has further been shown to enhance the memorability of verse, and to render humoristic verse more humorous and emotionally moving poems more moving, beautiful, melodic, and vivid, but also richer in meaning. We further survey investigations of the sound-iconic properties of verse, semantic figures (most notably, poetic metaphor), and mood representation, as well as of readers’ dispositions favoring poetry reading. We conclude by identifying directions for future research.

Life as a Metaphor and Metaphor as a Foundation for Poetic Translation

The first part of the article examines the phenomenon of metaphor in its ontological sense – as an integral part of the poetic worldview. Using the example of the famous extended metaphor in describing the ball in Nikolai Gogol’s novel “Dead Souls”, we discuss the extension of meanings that occurs at the level of aesthetics as a direct effect of the metaphor. In the second part of the article, the metaphor is considered as a supporting element of the poetic construction, which in a certain sense plays the role of an invariant in the process of poetic translation. Using my own translation activities as an example, I am trying to trace the transplantation of a poetic metaphor from English into Russian. Moreover, the metaphor, that terminologically means movement, a certain flow (and extension) of meaning, is analysed as a scientific model. In constructing this model, the author’s goal is not identification, but approximation, not blind similarity, not far-fetched comparison of the two phenomena (even if formally suitable), but the discovery of deep kinship. Moreover, as stated in the article, this kinship does not have to be conveyed by the totality of qualities – instead, it aesthetically follows from the main features. Using translations from 20th-century English poetry (Robert Frost and Wilfred Owen), specific poetic decisions made by me as a translator are discussed. At the same time, general issues that inevitably arise in translation are also addressed, in particular, on the choice of a poetic form depending on the cultural context and on both poetic traditions. In this case, our goal is to trace what happens with a metaphor in the process of translation, what transformations it undergoes.

Metaphor, Parody and Madness

Folie, the final part of Marie Chauvet’s trilogy Amour, Colère et Folie (1969), depicts Duvalierist political terror in a small town in Haiti and the futile attempts to resist it by René, the narrator, and his three friends. They are all poets, and René appears to be mad. Ronnie Scharfmann suggests that in this situation of extreme violence the boundaries between madness and sanity become impossible to demarcate, and that René and his friends, in their desperate stance against the Duvalier regime, are heroes. (‘Theorizing Terror: the Discourse of Violence in Marie Chauvet’s Amour Colère Folie’, 1996). Michael Dash, however, sees the text very differently, as parodying the figure of the poet as national hero and portraying René satirically as pathetic and delusional (in The Other America, 1998). But the issue of whether René is mad or not can only be fully explored by examining the language of his narrative in more detail than either Scharfmann or Dash provide. Is his florid, extravagant style meant to be a parody? Is his prolific use of metaphor really in fact metaphorical, or a literal account of his hallucinations? e.g., when he claims to be ‘riding the sun’, is this a self-consciously poetic metaphor or a hallucination? And if the latter, is it parodic? In this chapter I argue that Folie suggests that parody and metaphor are both in some sense incompatible with ‘mad’ discourse, and that therefore the gradual disappearance of these formal features from the text as it progresses provides a way – the only way, in fact – for the reader to chart René’s descent into madness.