Henri Dutilleux, haunted by Baudelaire

One of the leading French composers of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Henri Dutilleux (1916-2013) set only one text by Baudelaire, though he said that the poet was the artist in any medium who had the strongest impact on him; indeed, he said that ‘Baudelaire continues to haunt me.’ This article explores how this ‘haunting’ affected Dutilleux’s oeuvre, from his cello concerto Tout un monde lointain… [‘A Far Distant World’] (1967-1970) whose five movements are each preceded by a Baudelaire epigraph, through to his final completed work, the song cycle Le Temps l’horloge [‘Time the Clock’] (2006-2009) which concludes with a setting of Baudelaire’s prose poem Enivrez-vous [‘Be Intoxicated’]. Le Temps l’horloge also features settings of poems by Jean Tardieu and Robert Desnos, and Baudelaire’s poetry and art criticism were centrally important to both these writers. The multiple interrelationships between Baudelaire, Tardieu, Desnos, and Dutilleux are traced in this article, and analysis of ‘Enivrez-vous’ shows it to be the summation of Dutilleux’s output.

Prose Poetry

This chapter treats the prose poem as the decadent genre par excellence by focusing on Charles Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris (Paris Spleen, 1869). The prose poem is well suited to the expression of decadent culture because of its formal subversion of conventional poetry, especially as adapted by Baudelaire to articulate “the bump and lurch” of urban experience. J. K. Huysmans certified the decadent credentials of the genre when he described it in À rebours (Against Nature, 1884) as “the osmazome of literature, the essential oil of art,” a literary distillation that makes it “an aesthetic treat to none but the most discerning.” The article analyzes “Any Where Out of the World” and other prose poems in relation to certain poems in Le Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil, 1857), observing no loss of metaphorical power in the more “prosaic” medium despite Baudelaire’s secular and subversive treatment of many of the same poetic material given more elevated, spiritual treatment in the earlier collection.

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.

Form and History in Modern Arabic Poetics

Modern Arabic poetic forms developed in conversation with the rich Arabic poetic tradition, on one hand, and the Western literary traditions, primarily English and French, on the other. In light of the drastic social and political changes that swept the Arab world in the first half of the 20th century, Western influences often appear in the scholarship on the period to be more prevalent and operative in the rise of the modernist movement. Nevertheless, one of the fundamental forces that drove the movement from its early phases is its urgent preoccupation with the Arabic poetic heritage and its investment in forging a new relationship with the literary past. The history of poetic forms in the first half of the 20th century reveals much about the dynamics between margin and center, old and new, commitment and escapism, autochthonous and outside imperatives. Arabic poetry in the 20th century reflects the political and social upheavals in Arab life. The poetic forms which emerged between the late 1940s and early 1960s presented themselves as aesthetically and ideologically revolutionary. The modernist poets were committed to a project of change in the poem and beyond. Developments from the qas̩īdah of the late 19th century to the prose poem of the 1960s and the notion of writing (kitābah) after that suggest an increased loosening or abandoning of formal restrictions. However, the contending poetic proposals, from the most formal to the most experimental, all continue to coexist in the Arabic poetic landscape in the 21st century. The tensions and negotiations between them are what often lead to the most creative poetic breakthroughs.

FORMS IN MOTION: THE POETIC PROSE OF ROBERT MACFARLANE AND KATHLEEN JAMIE

This essay examines the use of poetic prose in recent non-fiction by Robert Macfarlane and Kathleen Jamie. Drawing on selected chapters from Macfarlane’s The Old Ways (2012), Jamie’s Sightlines (2012), and a prose poem from Jamie’s The Bonniest Companie (2015), it demonstrates the hybridity of contemporary nature writing by paying attention to the works’ transgressions of the bounds of verse and prose. After introducing the nineteenth-century debate on differences between lyric and prosaic language and outlining Romantic efforts to poeticize prose descriptions of nature and environment, the article discusses Macfarlane’s and Jamie’s role in this conversation. I argue that formal transgressions – evident in metrical and rhyming effects, typographical experiments, imagery, and allusion – are especially strong in passages that describe movement: in accounts of walking or in observations of the shifting motions of light and weather. Prose forms that approximate and integrate lyricism here enhance a sense of transience as well as exhibit the continuity of human and non-human worlds. Self-consciously tracing the footsteps of other poets who have traversed genre boundaries, Macfarlane’s and Jamie’s work establishes nature writing as a form that is persistently on the move.

Concept analysis on literature lessons: the text emotiogenicity of the prose poem "To the Memory of U. P. Vrevsky" by I. S. Turgenev

The paper considers the St. Petersburg concept of emotional intelligence development as a promising approach to implementing linguoconceptology in education. The aim of the study was to test a concept analysis model built on the technology of mastering the key concepts of Russian culture and the theory of multiple intelligencies proposed by Howard Gardner. The three scientific approaches – emotional intelligence theory (D. Goleman), linguoconceptocentric theory (N. L. Mishatina) and classical hermeneutics (F. Schleiermacher) constitute the methodological framework of the research. From the standpoint of hermeneutics, investigating how learners understand and interpret the emotional concept ‘the images of the lyrical hero and the heroine’ in the prose poem "To the Memory of U. P. Vrevsky" by I. S. Turgenev highlights their progression from the formation of one emotional competence to another and finally to building and developing emotional intelligence. In the course of the hermeneutical study the lyrical hero’s image is considered from the viewpoint of the emotional linguistic persona; the text of the poem is discussed as an emotiogenic text. Within the framework of laboratories-studies a system of tasks was developed to form and develop learners’ emotional intelligence. The metaphors created by the teacher and the students as well as the text of a concept-centric essay comprise the results of doing the abovementioned tasks during laboratories-studies. Our data provide evidence that conceptual analysis enables learners to decode the emotional content of the author’s values and implications. The development model of emotional intelligence based on hermeneutical conceptual analysis provides an opportunity to internalize and reinterpret iconic cultural texts, bridge the cultural generation gap and put Generation Z into the context of world history.

Transient Feelings

In response to the shifts of communication following the COVID-19 lockdown restrictions, this research investigates the disorienting experience of navigating loneliness and intimacy in the digital space. Creative writing is a relatively unexplored but recently emerging field of academic inquiry (Skains 2018, 84). Poetry in particular involves research into the language and textures of the world—it is a critical way of thinking that incorporates not just the signified meaning of words, but also the phonaesthetics, placement, space, and textual structure. This practice-based creative work is presented in the form of a 9-part autoethnographic prose poem that echoes the fragmented and asynchronous nature of digital communication (Bonner 2016, 11). Through stream-of-consciousness vignettes that could be read in any order, I emulate the experience of scrolling through a feed. I explore ideas of limitlessness in the face of apocalyptic endings, where our desire for more is troubled by having too much. This experimental and experiential paper is ultimately an interrogation of the tension between affective relations and isolation, where mediated bodies are troubled by longing, loneliness, and looking.

Arabic Poetry in the Twenty-First Century: Translation and Multilingualism

This paper examines the work of a sample of contemporary Arab prose poets whose poetic investments exceed the linguistic parameters of previous generations. Unlike the pioneers of the prose poem in Arabic in the early 1960s, the poets of this generation are not interested in interrogating Arabic poetic language or reimagining Arabic literary history. Instead, these poets embrace the Arabic literary tradition as an open multi-generic practice exercised in the space between multiple literary and linguistic traditions. This essay shows how their deliberate detachment from the Arabic poetic tradition, as well as from the inheritance of the early modernists, reveals a relationship with the Arabic language that differs from that of their predecessors. Their poetry is thus born translated: it is multilingual and exophonic in its motivations.