The Song of Songs: Its Basic Teaching and Place in the OT Canon

The Song of Songs is a love poem (or a collection of poems), full of sensuous symbols. The central theme of the book is love; it celebrates human love in all its physical dimensions. Its language is love, a language which seems daring and sometimes even shocking, considering its seeming erotic feature. The author provides a teaching on the place of love and marriage in God’s plan of creation. It focuses on fidelity and mutuality in love between the sexes. The author offers a perspective of love not found elsewhere in the biblical writings. The climax of his teaching on love is contained in Sg 8:6-7. Here the poet emphasizes the power and energy of love. He compares the consuming power of love to “a raging flame” (rišpê ’ēš) which no water can quench. He specifies the value of love: love is so priceless that no material wealth can match it.

The Heraldic Shield and the Woman’s Body in the Blasons Anatomiques du corps féminin (1543)

In the French Renaissance, the term ‘anatomical blason’ (blason anatomique) designated a highly descriptive love poem praising a single part of a woman’s body, while in heraldry, the noun ‘blason’ defined the ensemble of ornamental components constituting the shield. Just as the French verb blasonner meant to describe and to interpret the shield’s material and symbolic parts, so could this verb be used in amatory poetry to signify the act of lauding the details of the beloved’s anatomical parts. This study examines the structural analogies between heraldic shield and the anatomical blason, addressing how the technical terms defining the shield’s components such as partitions, points, charges, tinctures, and the achievement could be given analogous expressions in the anatomical love poetry.

Asymptotic Dream

A love poem about breaching mathematical limits, inspired by the tragic beauty of calculus.

CRITICIZING THE TRANSLATION OF GIBRAN’S “THE BROKEN WINGS”: EXTRA AND INTRA-TEXTUAL ANALYSIS

This research was based on the fact that in the discipline of Translation Studies, Translation Criticism (TC) is highly underrated. Not many research that discuss about the issue due to the fact that doing TC is not as simple as flickering your fingers. It requires mastery of the theories of translation and mastery of linguistic and socio-cultural aspects from both languages. It was therefore, this study aimed to: (1) identify and elaborate the aspects of doing TC from extra- textual and intra-textual aspects; (2) give evaluation on the basis of the quality of the translation. To achieve the aims of the study, Gibran famous novel The Broken Wings (TBW) and its Indonesian translation Sayap-sayap Patah (SSP) are used as the data. Data collecting procedures are identifying the extra-textual and intra-textual aspects from TBW and SSP, highlighting them, and placing them on the table of data collection. The writer then analysed the data by employing the theory proposed by Nords and Newmark on TC and the Larson for the quality of translation. The findings showed that the analysis of extra-textual focusing on the ST and TT has shown that the intention of Gibran to write TBW is to depict the life during his era during which the era deals with various problems that plagued early-twentieth-century Lebanon and foremost to tell a tale of tragic love, set at the turn of the 20th century in Beirut. It is perhaps most aptly described as a “love-poem-in-prose,” unified by the force of its universal theme of love, though critics have regarded it from the traditional perspective of the novella. Based on the analysis of the intra- textual aspects, it is shown that TBW contains many figures of speech, to name a few are the similes which dominate, the metaphor and the personification. TBW also contains so many cultural words that refer to ecology to describe the beautiful landscape of the Lebanon, the material culture to describe the flowers, fruits, and also the organization of Lebanese with the “houris”. The translator was able to perceive and retain the meaning of each making the translation fulfilled the criteria of good translation, clear, accurate and natural.