Rejection, Repurposing and Renewal of the Self: Bodies as Texts in the Erotic Poetries of Carlos Drummond de Andrade and Ronaldo Wilson

This article presents a unique uncommon intertextual staging of two erotic poets whose writings intersect and divide at times, thematically and cross-temporally, to challenge our understanding of the erotic’s liminality. I examine the erotic poetry of Carlos Drummond de Andrade in O amor natural and Ronaldo Wilson’s Poems of the Black Object and Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man, to understand how the body is used to explore identity (re)construction. I show how the incorporation of the body as a source of expression in poetry can be read as transgressive, especially in these pieces.

Teaching Indo-Islamic poetry: Sexuality in the global classroom

The article argues that a critical encounter with pre-modern literatures from the national past is long overdue under the impact of a globalized discourse of sexuality. Its effects are already felt at the level of both pedagogy and literary reading, one reconstituting the other, in the ‘global classroom’, a self-conscious pedagogical space imagined by the new educational policy to bring about a globally accredited cultural homogeneity. The case study comes from teaching erotic poetry at an Indian university, from the joint literary complex of Hindi and Urdu in South Asia, a theme uncomfortably located in national culture not just because of its sexuality but its association with non-national linguistic elements which the article terms ‘Indo-Islamic’. The overlapping of the sexual modern with the Indo-Islamic resurfaces a tension in the nationalized body of literary writing in Hindi/Urdu, the major ‘national’ languages of South Asia. This encounter of erotic poetry in old Hindi and Urdu with globalized sexuality, the article shows, offers a chance to reflect on how literary studies are being reshaped by the assumptions of a monolingual, monocultural global sexuality in our nationalist times.

Escrito en el lienzo: Ovidio y el Billete de Amor en La Enferma de Amor de Jan Steen, pintor holandés del Siglo de Oro = Written on the Canvas: Ovid and the Billet-Doux in The Lovesick Maiden by Jan Steen, Golden Age Dutch Painter

Se analiza la impronta de la poesía erótica de Ovidio sobre un tema favorito del pintor barroco de Leiden Jan Steen (1626-1679), La enferma de amor o La visita del médico, con especial atención a la presencia en el cuadro de un billete de amor con una máxima escrita de origen ovidiano sobre el tradicional concepto del amor como una enfermedad incurable:… amor non est medicabilis herbis (epist. 5.149).Abstract Analysis of the influence of Ovid’s erotic poetry on a favourite theme to the Leiden Baroque painter Jan Steen (1626-1679), The lovesick maiden or The doctor’s visit, especially focalised on the presence of a billet-doux with an Ovidian written refrain on the traditional concept of love as an incurable illness: … amor non est medicabilis herbis (epist. 5.149).

Eastern Poetry by Western Poets: Powys Mathers’ ‘Translations’ of Sanskrit Erotic Lyrics

This essay focuses on a pivotal (if understudied) moment in the history of the translation and reception of Sanskrit erotic poetry in the West – a moment which sees the percolation of this classical poetry from the scholarly sphere to that of non-specialist literature. I argue that a crucial agent in the dissemination and inclusion of Sanskrit erotic poems in the canon of Western lyric poetry was the English poet Edward Powys Mathers (1892–1939), a self-professed second-hand translator of ‘Eastern’ literature, as well as the author of original verses, which he smuggled as translations. Using Black Marigolds (a 1919 English version of the Caurapañcāśikā) as a case study, I show how Powys Mathers’ renderings – which combined the practices of second-hand and pseudo-translation – are intertextually dense poems. On the one hand, Black Marigolds shows in watermark the intermediary French translation; on the other, it functions as a hall of mirrors which reflects, magnifies and distorts the emotional and aesthetic dimensions of both the classical/Eastern and modern/Western literary world. What does the transformation of the Caurapañcāśikā into a successful piece of modern(ist) lyric poetry tell us about the relationship that Western readers wished (and often still wish) to have with ‘Eastern’ poetry? Furthermore, which conceptual tools can we mobilize to ‘make sense’ of these non-scholarly translations of classical Sanskrit poems and ‘take seriously’ their many layers of textual and contextual meaning?

Identifying Intentional Ambiguity

Identifying Intentional Ambiguity It is widely acknowledged that certain genres in ancient Near Eastern literature including the Hebrew Bible are characterized by intense ambiguity. In particular, divination, Wisdom literature and erotic poetry thrive on a special type of ambiguity—“double-edged words”—in which a single graphic or phonetic sequence is employed to convey a message and its precise opposite, at one and the same time. However, it is often difficult to demonstrate that a specific case of “double-edged wording” is in fact intentional rather than a product of an eager reader’s over-interpretation. The proposed paper offers three criteria for identifying intentionality in the formulation of ambiguous texts, based on examples from Biblical and other ancient Near Eastern divinatory, Wisdom and poetic texts: (1) Ungrammaticality: Sometimes an author is forced to use an ungrammatical form in order to preserve two opposite meanings. This happens when smoothing the grammar would have been achieved only at the price of losing the ambiguity; (2) Multiple representation: At times the same exact ambiguity is evidenced in identical contexts, but in different words and by means of different sentence-structures (occasionally even in different languages, e.g., Hebrew and Aramaic); when it can be demonstrated that coincidence is highly unlikely, the argument for intentional crafting is strong; (3) Straussian “Art of Writing”: When the author addresses an issue that was demonstrably contentious (from the author’s perspective), potentially-subversive formulations are particularly suspect. The intersection of two or three of these criteria in a single text strongly suggests intentionality

A czy to ja kalika, czy nie mom konika? (Nie)sprawność w świetle erotyku ludowego

A czy to ja kalika, czy nie mam konika? (lit. ‘Am I a Cripple, or Don’t I Have a Horse?’). Disability in the Light of Folk Erotic Poetry Folk erotic poetry, as ‘a song of lovers not yet tied by the knot’, is a genre of text that relates the notion of love and the image of intimate body parts, the roles assigned to woman and to man, as well as social and moral norms in the traditional community. At the base of this genre lie such values as: happiness in love, physical contact, lovers’ openness to the love game, youth and beauty, success and favour, the light-heartedness of the lovers, fun and laughter, freedom, faithfulness and stability; marriage is a relative value, important for the girl, and wealth. Another value that is important in the light of folk erotic poetry, is an able body, sexual performance; the anti-value is a body that is diabled, sick, deprived of its functionality. Deficiency in the art of love, the man’s incompetence or inability to perform a sexual act is for the poetic lover a kind of disability that devalues and disqualifies him as a man and the partner of love act in the eyes of a woman awaiting sexual fulfillment. From the point of view of the heroine, it is justified to describe such a lover (love-cripple) as a disabled or even defunct person. The reason for this unambiguous and stigmatizing categorization is not only the inability to provide the girl (also a young wife by an old man) with erotic pleasure (kochanie ‘touching, moving’), but also to perform the love act which the folk culture understands as a participation in the creative action of the entire cosmos.

Miniaturization of Earlier Poetry in Greek Epigrams

Chapter 6 offers a diachronic study of Hellenistic epigram with a focus on the issues of thematic and generic variety and on the reception and ‘miniaturization’ of earlier poetic genres—particularly of small-scale poetry such as elegy, bucolic poetry and various kinds of erotic poetry, but also of didactic poetry—in Hellenistic epigram. The chapter finds that, although these developments are more obvious in later epigrammatists, their seeds can be found in Callimachus and other poets of his generation. The earlier generations still carried out their thematic and generic experiments largely within the framework of funeral, dedicatory, or ecphrastic and the new subgenre of erotic epigram, while later epigrammatists grew bolder and explored the possibilities of ‘miniaturization’ much further.

Poetry and Matter in the English Renaissance

Chapter 1, “Poetry and Matter in the English Renaissance” traces the crucial relationship between poetics and philosophical materialism in the early modern period, explaining why erotic verse so readily lent itself to confronting questions about the nature of being and of knowledge. This chapter shows that for Renaissance poets—informed by Lucretius’ great analogy between atoms and alphabetic letters—there is poetic form in elemental matter. The writing of poetry was therefore often understood as a physical practice, while poetry itself was understood as ontologically complex and efficacious. As terms such as “figuration” reveal, poetic making has both metaphorical and literal elements, which come especially to the fore in the ubiquitous blazons depicting the face of the beloved. Within the syntax of materialist poetics, foretelling the decay of the love object is therefore tantamount to a kind of deconstruction or unmaking—making poetry actually “do” the work of time. Multiple traditions, from Aristotelian hylomorphism to idealizing Petrarchism, had prepared the way for the female body to function as a proxy for embodied matter which poets could “figure,” “make,” or “undo.” This chapter presents the object of erotic poetry becoming just that: a fictional construct subjected to the recombinatory shaping of the godlike poet. As later chapters will develop, the paradoxical loneliness of the carpe diem invitation emerges from this troubling strategy, for it is an invitational form addressed to an entity it has forever exiled as metaphysically other. This chapter thus provides both a theoretical framework and historical background for the project’s larger claims.