A New York Leśmian: The Translation Strategy of Marian Polak-Chlabicz

The aim of this article is to identify and outline the strategy applied by Marian Polak-Chlabicz in translating the poetry of Bolesław Leśmian into English. The examination begins with the preliminary norm as refl ected in text selection, and the initial norm, which proves to be oriented toward recreating the strangeness of the author’s poetics. Examination of particular elements of the poetics includes the translator’s attitude to Leśmian’s neologisms and other creative language deviations, issues of syntax and of poetic form, and ideational contents of the poems. Also discussed are editorial problems and issues connected with paratexts.

The first ghazal of the Divan of Ghalib

The article offers a multi-dimensional analysis of the first ghazal from the Urdu Divan by the Indian classic poet Mirza Ghalib (1797–1869). Ghalib wrote in two languages – Urdu and Persian, but it was the completion of the Urdu Divan that made him a great poet. The article presents the history of the creation and publication of the Divan, as well as discusses its sources. The authors focus on the complexity of the style and the richness of poetic themes, images and writing techniques. They also discuss the Sufi component of the first ghazal of the Divan, thus highlighting the poetics of the ghazal. The “opening” ghazal, which is placed at the beginning of a divan usually takes over the function of the hamd, i.e. the eulogy to the Creator, which is typical for a traditional introduction to a large poetic form. However, in Ghalib’s ghazal, this praise comes in a paradoxical form, which is caused by Ghalib`s high criteria of humanism and dignity. The analysis of the first ghazal helps in many ways to understand the creative credo typical for all of Ghalib's poetry, as well as the difficult path the poet had taken, while continuously improving his art of “hunting” for a poetic word. The ghazal is discussed in the context of Ghalib’s other Urdu and Persian poetry, as well as of Sufism that prevailed in India of Ghalib’s time.

Serialization of Ọbasa’s Poems in The Yorùbá News

Every newspaper has its form, structure, and pattern. The Yorùbá News published between 1924-1945 was not an exception, as it comprised of different contents ranging from the editorial opinion to home news, gossip, adverts, and serialization of different forms of narratives. D.A. Ọbasa, the publisher ́ of The Yorùbá News, also published many works of poetry. Ọbasa started the publication of excerpts of his poems in The Yoruba News under the column “Àwọn Akéwì.” Serializing these poems, therefore, means issuing them regularly and consecutively in diferent editions of the newspaper. In the various scholarly engagements with Ọbasa’s works, little or no attention has been given to the serialization of his poems in Te Yorùbá News. The focus of this easy therefore is to fill this gap by highlighting and documenting the serialized poems of Ọbasa in Te Yorùbá News. Trough intertextuality theory, the easy aims at appraising how Ọbasa transfer his knowledge of the Yorùbá oral literature to his readers through his application of oral poetic form from his serialized poems. Tis work will therefore dwell on Intertextuality and its influence on the works of Ọbasa, which will enable us to discuss his creative ability as a cultural activist.

"Perimeters of Grief": Elegy in and out of Bounds in Fred D'Aguiar's Memorial Poetry

While Fred D’Aguiar’s preoccupation with acknowledging the dead and honoring their memory gives his work an idiosyncratic elegiac quality, it is with the publication of the poetic sequence “Elegies”, from the collection Continental Shelf (2009), that the author overtly pitches himself in the traditional terrain of the elegy as a poetic genre. This sequence, a response to the Virginia Tech shootings (April 16, 2007), the deadliest gun rampage in US history to date, invites critical attention not only because it remains critically unexamined, but also because through its title it presents itself as an elegy when an anti-elegiac turn has been identified in modern poetry. This paper will explore D’Aguiar’s intervention in the debate surrounding elegy’s contemporary function as a genre which oscillates between the poles of melancholia and consolation, thus contributing to shaping the contours of an ancient but conflicted poetic form for the 21st century. I will be arguing that D’Aguiar’s poem suggests that for elegy to serve the troubled present it may benefit from the cultivation of an unembarrassed attachment to the deceased, from avoiding depoliticizing tragedy and from the exposure of its socio-historical underpinnings. In sum, it should be open to engaging with such critical issues as the struggles of collective memory, or the turning of grief into mass-mediated spectacle.

Ungdomens poetiska form

The Poetic Form of Youth: The Rebellious Power of Language and Desire in the Anthologies Kärlek och uppror and Berör och förstör Siv Widerberg and Anna Artén’s poetry anthology Kärlek och uppror: 210 dikter för unga människor (Love and Rebellion: 210 Poems for Young People, 1989) is something of a classic when it comes to Swedish contemporary poetry explicitly addressing young readers. Thirty years after its publication another poetry anthology, Berör och förstör: Dikter för unga (Affect and Destroy: Poems for Youth, 2019), edited by Athena Farrokhzad and Kristofer Folkhammar, was published. Both books tap into a long tradition of lyrical anthologies. Neither of the anthologies contain poetry written primarily for young readers. On the contrary, the anthologies include poems from the Swedish lyrical canon. Although the two anthologies share a similar structure and joint themes such as youth, love, poetry, and rebellion, they are significantly different in regard to poetic form and the conceptualizations of youth. The main theoretical perspective in this study is that the form of the anthologized poems can be understood as ideological expressions of an interplay between the genre's tradition and its specific aesthetic context. By historizing the genre and comparing the different paratexts of the anthologies, the article shows that adult conceptions of youth hides behind the editorial choices. In a quest to (re)create new writing subjects, through the rebellious powers of poetic language and love, the symbolic form of youth poetry both challenges and negates adult notions of youth in the two anthologies.

An American Mystic in the East: Tracing the Origins of Robert Bly’s Interest in Persian Literary Tradition

The American poet Robert Bly is among the most important literary figures in the second half of the 20th century. He worked in various capacities as a poet, translator, teacher and workshop organizer among other things, so much so that he is sometimes compared to Ezra Pound on account of the variety of his interests and the extent of his influence. Like Pound, Bly developed an interest in Asian poetic traditions, including that of Iran, and in doing so, he translated the poetry of Rumi (better known as Mowlana in Iran) and Hafez into English. The present study seeks to trace the paths through which Bly came to develop an interest in Persian mystical poetry and to demonstrate two concerns that guided and informed his interest in this tradition; that is, the socio-political vocation of the poet and the formal advantages of the poetic form known as Ghazal. Such concerns, it will be argued, are firmly rooted within the American literary tradition and therefore this study reveals the continuities that underlie Bly’s interest in Persian poetry, suggesting that he sometimes approached Persian poetry on his own terms, without paying proper attention to the context, a shortcoming that, as will be shown, is the result not of ignorance but what may be called methodological laxity.

Some Thoughts About Genre in Old Javanese Literature

Robson in 1983 and 1988 in his reconsideration of the poetics of kakawin epics and Javanese philology drew readers’ attention to the importance of genre for the history of ancient Javanese literature. Aoyama in his study of the kakawin Sutasoma in 1992, making judicious use of Hans Jauss’s concept of “horizon of expectation”, offered the first systematic discussion of the genre of Old Javanese literary works. The present essay offers a commentary on the terms which mpu Monaguna and mpu Prapañca, authors of the thirteenth century epic kakawin Sumanasāntaka and the fourteenth century Deśawarṇana, themselves, employ to refer to the generic characteristics of their poems. Mpu Monaguna referred to his epic poem as a narrative work (kathā), written in a prakṛt, Old Javanese, and rendered in the poetic form of a kakawin and finally as a ritual act intended to enable the poet to achieve apotheosis with his tutelary deity and his poem to be the means of transforming the world, in particular to ensure the wellbeing of the readers, listeners, copyists and those who possessed copies of his poetic work. Mpu Prapañca described his Deśawarṇana differently. Also written in Old Javanese and in the poetic form of a kakawin—he refers to his work variously as a narrative work (kathā), a chronicle (śakakāla or śakābda), a praise poem (kastawan) and also as a ritual act designed to enable the author in an ecstatic state of rapture (alangö), and filled with the power and omniscience of his tutelary deity, to ensure the continued prosperity of the realm of Majapahit and to secure the rule of his king Rājasanagara. The essay considers each of these literary categories.

‘Kinetic’ Reform

The embedding of reformist politics in the medium of poetic form is a central feature of the reformist literary mode. Chapter 4 counterpoints the vision of class strife that haunts Wells’s scientific romances from the 1890s with the gradualist reformist impulse that came to the fore in tax debates in the early 1900s. The development of more nuanced forms of graduated taxation in the Edwardian period turned the tax system into a means of social integration, leading to the emergence of a new institutional idiom that can help us understand the generic hybridity of Wells’s works of this period. These books, notably Wells’s Edwardian ‘trilogy’ (Anticipations, 1901; Mankind in the Making, 1903; A Modern Utopia, 1905), responded to a new understanding of national wealth in terms of kinetic, redistributable ‘incomes’ rather than in terms of fixed private ‘wealth’.

A case for poetry as history and a methodology with poems by James G. March

Purpose This study aims to reveal a lesser known side of Late James G. March, as a poet, by offering a curated selection of his poems. The other purpose of this study is to make a case for using poetry as a methodology. Poetry requires engagement by the reader, thus creating space for the personal. With multiple personal explanations co-existing, poetry allows clarity of action at the individual level while simultaneously leaving room for debate and discussion at the collective level. Thus, poetry offers pluralistic histories with room for complexity, ambiguity, paradox and contradictions. Design/methodology/approach The selection of poems is highly subjective, so an auto-ethnographic approach was appropriate. The collection is curated for the readers of this journal, on topics relevant for the members of the Academy of Management. The argument for poetry as a methodology is based on engaging with the poems for self-reflection and reflexivity. Findings March had a life-long commitment to self-expression through poems. Poetic engagement by one poetry lover with a selection of his poems about our shared profession, yields small self-discoveries that are good for the collective, by revealing unknown histories, with possibilities other than the dominant single story. Poetry as a methodology brings in the personal, that yields moving theories, that are practical in guiding individual action in personally meaningful ways, even in ambiguous, contradictory and complex situations. Originality/value Ideas expressed in poetic form provide a way to liberate possibilities latent in the language itself. Future work from this contribution can be that March’s poems stimulate the imaginations of other poets and poetry lovers, who may have kept it as a private pursuit, just as he did, to come out and share their personal reflexive journeys.