Read Some Auden With Me

“Read Some Auden With Me” is a poem written in free verse that combines postmodernist responses to reading poetry and the surrealist engagement of experiencing poetry through an ironically intimate interaction of the poet and their personal audience.

A Reflection on The Inter-Semiotic Transformation of Select Vacanas of Akka Mahadevi into a Music-Dance Production

This project was set out to curate dance videos of select vacanas, meaning, religious free verses in Kannada, of Akka Mahadevi, a twelfth century poet from Karnataka, India. Vacanas are religious lyrics in free verse which mean ‘a saying’ or ‘a thing said’. By translating Akka’s vacanas to music and dance the project aimed to transport the essence of her poetry to the viewer. The symbols, images and metaphors used by the poet from discursive fields such as Bhakthi movement (a spiritual reform movement in India), Vedas, Upanishads, Yoga and feminism were re-interpreted through traditional music and dance styles recognized as classical arts by the national government, by a process of, what I theorize, as inter-semiotic transformation. Inter-semiotic transformation is the reinterpretation of symbols from one semiotic system, say, literature into others like music, dance, film or theatre. This paper analyses strategies of bringing poetry into the realm of aesthetic experience of viewers through the performing arts.

Men’s Spiritual Vacuity and Inefficacy in Eliot’s Poem The Hollow Men

The Hollow Men by Eliot is a widely read poem which is structured of five sections. These sections deal with a group of hollow men unable to communicate with one another, a hollow man who is afraid to look at others directly, the barren land where they cannot fulfill their desire, their unwillingness to look at others and to be looked at by them,and finally a nursery rhyme which they can’t recite completely respectively. They are unable to think, create, respond and act because of the shadow that falls in between them.This article primarily explores men’s spiritual vacuity and inefficacy in this poem. It is an episodic free verse poem which reflects the poet’s pessimistic vision towards the human life and the present world. The poet presents the men as effigies which lack human efficiency and the world as a dead cactus land lacking the spring of blooms and joys. It reflects the conditions and contexts of modern men through divergent allusions. Men feel helpless and lonely despite being in a group, find no senses and meanings in spite of their assertions, realize their inefficiency and inability despite their sound health and certificates, feel unfortunate and miserable in spite of their material advancement and wealth, and find death in their lives despite being alive.

La ‘traduction supposée’ ou: de la place des pseudotraductions poétiques en France

A pseudo-translation is a fiction, an original text that the author chose to present as a genuine translation for either psychological (e.g. to be acknow-ledged as a writer), ideological (to convey potentially polemic contents with-out being directly involved oneself) or literary reasons (to import new literary patterns supposedly belonging to another tradition). Romantic French poets such as Mérimée, Nodier , Rabbe, and Nerval saw fictitious translations as a way of experimenting with new poetic devices and of freeing themselves from what they regarded as the narrow conventions inherited from French Classicism. My intention in this paper is to contextualize the practice of pseudo-translations in France and in Europe, and to analyze to which extent pseudo-translations of poetical texts contributed to major changes in 19th-century French poetics, be it through the promotion of a new conception of poetry, the introduction of so-called ‘free verse’, or the creation of a new genre: the prose poem.

A Critical Discourse Analysis of Socio-Psychological Factors in Taufiq Rafat’s “Wedding in the Flood”

People use language for different social practices in different contexts and perspectives, and discourse analysts examine these social practices for a better understanding of the discourse. The language used by a poet is different from the language used by common people; the poetic diction helps to understand a poet’s literary style, his ideology, and the use of descriptive language. This article focuses on exposing the socio-psychological factors through examining the use of language in a free verse poem ‘Wedding in the Flood’ by Taufiq Rafat who tried to present different aspects of Pakistani culture in the poem. The socio-psychological factors combine the social (family, society, wealth, religion) and the psychological factors (feelings, thoughts, actions, beliefs) that play an important role in shaping the personality of an individual, and the characters in the poem are the best examples of it. This analysis is based on Fairclough’s conceptions in CDA that claims of an inter-link between ideologies and texts, and this link cannot be separated because there are many ways to interpret texts, and the Socio-Psychological Theory (20121) also combines many social and psychological factors of human life. Many researchers did the stylistic analysis of the poem, but nothing has been done to highlight its socio-psychological factors through CDA.

“My Unwritten Novel”: The Long Poems of Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh between Genre and Form

The long poems of the Hindi poet Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh (1917–64) present a series of fantastic narratives, in which a nameless speaker journeys through a fantastic landscape. These works, often analyzed solely in terms of a supposed mythic, romantic structure, should be considered as a response to formal problems of the novel and the lyric in midcentury Hindi literature. Despite acknowledging these long poems as his most important contribution, literary critics display a marked discomfort with what they see as their excesses. Muktibodh’s writings, however, reflect his substantive consideration of the problems of narrative poetry. In Muktibodh’s most famous work, “Aṁdhere meṁ” (“In the Dark”), the long poem’s distinct formal structure is deployed to produce the disjointed paratactic narratives that typify Muktibodh’s work. Furthermore, this poetic structure is crucially influenced by free verse poetics in Marathi, making clear that any consideration of modern Hindi literature must take into account the complex interrelationships of literary cultures in South Asia. Thus, Muktibodh’s long poem prompts a reconsideration of the role of genre and form in our understanding of South Asian literary cultures and their engagements with the world.

TEXT-WORLDS IN MICHAEL SWAN’S POETRY: A READER’S PERSPECTIVE

The article highlights the role of world-building elements in the process of readers’ interpretation of poetic texts. According to Text World Theory (P. Werth, J. Gavins), elements that set temporal and spatial boundaries, specify objects and entities; elements that describe their qualities; and those that desceibe events, actions or states enable readers to construct their own text-worlds – mental representations of the discourse. This principle underpins our analysis of free verse poetry of Michael Swan, a contemporary British linguist and poet. His texts abound in references to objects, entities, spatial and temporal relationships in the world around us; often, they dominate in the verbal context of a poem. Such references are a characteristic feature of both narrative and metaphor-based poetry. World-building elements are perceived as especially foregrounded in the poems where no conclusion or attitude are explititly stated. There are the following types of world-builders in Michael Swan’s poems: units that denote God as the supreme being, persons, animals and birds, geographic objects, material objects, objects and phenomena in the world of nature, scientific objects and notions, phenomena of human spiritual life, temporal and spatial parameters. We also consider their attributes. Taken together, they illustrate Michael Swan’s general themes – the nature of reality and being, the conception of God, human beings in social and historical contexts, human psychology, human relationships with nature, art. Besides, Swan’s mimetic reflection of reality has a significant emotionl potential. A mini-experiment within the framework of this research shows that it is necessary to further develop students’ skills in inferential interpretation of poetry.

M. Valek, G. Aygi and “Woman on the Right”, or The first Slovak translation of G. Aygi’s poetry in the context of the 1960s and modern reception

The book of poetry by G. Aygi was translated and published into Slovak language as “Žena sprava” (“The Woman on the Right”) in 1967. The same year the book was translated into Czech language. It is the Czech translation that occupies the first place in the research and bibliography of G. Aygi’s publications. The paper examines the features of the Slovak translation through the views of the translator and poet M. Valek. The translations appeared when Slovak poets were in search of finding a modern artistic language and modifying the original in accordance with the artistic concept of the poet-translator. M. Valek’s interest in the poetry of G. Aygi was associated with the same range of problems. The translations have an imprint of M. Valek’s own stylistics and demonstrate his priority for existentiality and metaphor, which he emphasizes, leading to neglecting the peculiarities of the original form. The contemporary Slovak translations of G. Aygi’s poetry are more focused on the transfer of formal innovation, the preservation of the author’s punctuation and graphics. However, the novelty of G. Aygi’s verses, which is still far from being fully explored, was comprehensively analyzed only in the 2000s and contemporary translators rely on new theory as well as a rich history of translations.The novelty of the paper is that it compares the translations of different years, the views of G. Aygi and M. Valek on free verse, and also provides an assessment of the translations by G. Aygi himself.

The Uncertainty of Confidence

This is a free-verse poem about the estimation of population parameters in statistical models. The spacing of words is intended to reflect uncertainty.