Futuro pasado. la evolución del concepto Poesía en Octavio Paz

Future Past. The Evolution of the Concept of Poetry in Octavio Paz. Octavio Paz (1914) is a poet writing in Spanish whose aesthetic ideas have built a vision of relevant poetry for at least three traditions: poetry in French, English and, of course, Spanish. This study will analyze, from the metalinguistic perspective proposed by Reinhart Koselleck, how the concept of “poetry” evolved in the thought of the Mexican Nobel Prize winner. Framed by his tradition, by his space of experience, Octavio Paz wrote works that have been instrumental in understanding and valuing poetry in the twentieth century. From “Poesía de soledad y poesía de communion” (1943) to La otra voz, Poesía y fin de siglo (1990), Paz synthesized the aesthetic ideas of his time in El arco y la lira (1956), rethought the lyrical exercise in “Los signos de rotación” (1956), modified his poetic in the prologue to Poesía en movimiento and made his position explicit in Los hijos del limo and his thoughts on Lévi-Strauss and Marcel Duchamp. By focusing on these texts, as well as on a corpus of conferences, interviews, correspondence and even poetry recitals, this study explores the evolution of poetic thought and the horizon of expectations that the work of the last Spanish-speaking poet who received the Nobel Prize opens for us. Keywords: Octavio Paz, style, poetics, post-utopian time, semantics of concepts

‘To Speak of Cattle is to Speak of Man’: Anthroparchal Interactions in John Connell’s The Farmer’s Son

“To Speak of Cattle is to Speak of Man”: Anthroparchal Interactions in John Connell’s The Farmer’s Son. The present paper intends to build a critique of contemporary farming practices, based on Erika Cudworth’s theory of “anthroparchy.” By exemplifying how anthroparchal interactions function in John Connell’s memoir, I will outline the becoming of a posthuman farmer that awakens certain sensibilities towards nonhuman animals, in ways that compel a rethinking of gendered relations, patriarchy, violence, and capitalist interests. The analysis provides a needed insight into recent developments in Irish rural farming, detailing the position of the human subject in relation to nonhuman otherness and describing some of the changes that need to be made regarding the power relations that are at work within patriarchal systems. To this extent, Cudworth’s theoretical framework and Connell’s memoir are proven to be contributing to the necessary restructuring of farming practices and of human-nonhuman interactions. Keywords: anthroparchy, posthumanism, gender relations, zoomorphism, capitalism, farming

Corps de femmes et maisons d’enfants dans Enfants du diable de Liliana Lazăr

Women Bodies and Children’s Homes in Liliana Lazar’s Enfants du diable [The Devil’s Children]. Many contemporary Romanian writers who chose French as a literary language seem to share a common interest in revisiting through fiction Romania’s relatively recent communist past, thus exposing the dysfunctionalities of the ‘multilaterally developed socialist society’ during the last years of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s dictatorship. In her novel, Enfants du diable (2016), Liliana Lazar’s merit is to emphasize the abusive nature of the Romanian totalitarian regime by exploring a topic which is normally less taken into account by post-communist Romanian fiction, namely the private body of women transformed into a public, even political body after the implementation of the Anti-abortion Decree 770/1966. Our aim is to examine the way in which Lazar’s book deals with this topic and its social and personal consequences, as well as its denunciation of a less evident form of the communist carceral system, namely the institutionalization of orphaned children. Keywords: communism, totalitarian regime, women’s body, orphanage, carceral system, Liliana Lazar, Nicolae Ceaușescu

The Role of Myths in Japanese Calligraphy’s Interpretative Process

The Role of Myths in Japanese Calligraphy’s Interpretative Process. This article illustrates the role of myths in the interpretative process of calligraphic works. Being considerably different from Western calligraphy, Japanese calligraphy (shodō) may seem at times visually similar to abstract art. However, calligraphic works – and shodō as art – are rich in meaning and abundant of myths. Focusing on both linguistic and visual elements of calligraphy, the article depicts how myths can be identified in a calligraphic work and how they provide a better understanding of the particularities of shodō. In order to illustrate how myths uncover new layers of meaning, the article incorporates an analysis of a calligraphic work created by Rodica Frențiu, underlining the process of accessing the transcendent meaning. Keywords: shodō, Japanese calligraphy, calligraphy, cultural semiotics, Japanese studies, kanji, myth, Zen, Buddhism.

“Stelele și lalelele”: saggio di micromonografia storico descrittiva di una classe flessiva della lingua romena (II)

“Stelele și lalelele”: Micromonography of an Inflectional Class in the Romanian Language (II). This article is part of a series aimed at reconstructing the history, and discussing the current state of what has been considered, from a Romance perspective, a peculiarity of Romanian language: the existence of an inflectional class of feminine nouns ending in tonic vowel (in short: F√V́ Ø), which form the plural with the addition of the le morpheme. The present paper, the second in the series, discusses some morphological traits of F√V́ Ø on the basis of a lexicographical corpus of contemporary standard Romanian: division in subclasses, internal morphological structure of its members (primitive and derivatives nouns, in particular diminutives, internal formations), and morphological variability. Keywords: nominal morphology, Romance plural, Romanian language, Turkish loanwords, inflectional morphology.

Continuidad y discontinuidad en la transmisión de las palabras patrimoniales competidas por arabismos: oliva y aceituna, olio y aceite, olivo y aceituno

Continuity and Discontinuity in the Transmission of Spanish Inherited Words Competed by Arabisms: oliva and aceituna, olio and aceite, olivo and aceituno. The loss and replacement of Arabisms by Latin loanwords was a frequent phenomenon between the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries; the opposite movement, the replacement of an inherited word by an Arabism is far less frequent. Oliva, an inherited word, is competed by the Arabism aceituna; currently the common name for the fruit in the Hispanic world is aceituna, and oliva has a restricted use to the phrase aceite de oliva or to refer to a colour. Similarly, the inherited word olio will be replaced by aceite, and with a specialized meaning will be eliminated by the euphuism óleo, its etymological doublet. On the other hand, olivo prevails over aceituno and represents a special case of continuity in this lexical family. The research will be carried out in two directions: first, I will analyse the old academic dictionaries and other specialized dictionaries and glossaries from the fifteenth-twentieth centuries. Second, I will conduct a corpus analysis, based on the diachronic corpora available for the Spanish language. This study will try to answer the questions how? and why? of these neological movements of vocabulary. Keywords: inherited words, Arabisms, oliva, aceituna, lexical substitution

A Relational Approach to Lexical Borrowings in the Discourse of Romanian Bilingual Immigrants in Spain

A Relational Approach to Lexical Borrowings in the Discourse of Romanian Bilingual Immigrants in Spain. This paper is a neurocognitive analysis of idiosyncratic lexical borrowings recorded in the discourse of bilingual Romanian immigrants living in Spain. The neurocognitive approach, also known as Relational Network Theory (RNT), conceives language as an interconnected relational network composed of nodes and lines, part of and connected to the general cognitive system. Linguistic processing is a result of spreading activation through the network and of interaction of the system with other biological systems. The model elegantly describes real and inferred linguistic behaviors, both well-formed and erroneous. We use this approach to explore the underlying mechanisms that trigger the emergence of linguistic interference in the discourse of bilingual speakers. We focus on several lexical borrowings selected from corpora of Romanian spoken in Spain, and we model them, using the NeuroLab tool, in relational network terms. The network modeling of these hybrid forms pinpoints new ways of understanding the differences between adapted and non-adapted, and between necessary and luxury borrowings. We conclude that the RNT model is well suited for explaining bilingual processing and, arguably, one of the few models that can account for the hybrid forms emerging in the discourse of bilingual speakers. Keywords: Relational Network Theory, lexical borrowing, Romanian, Spanish, Rumañol, neurocognitive linguistics.

Investigação histórica do sufixo -eir- na nomeação de vegetais em língua portuguesa

A Historical Investigation of the Suffix -eir- for the Naming of Plants in the Portuguese Language. The Latin suffix -ari-, used as a creator of adjectives, developed several meanings during the period of spoken late Latin, as well as in the formation of the Romance languages. One of those meanings, present in the Portuguese suffix -eiro/ -eira, is associated with tree names, based on the name of the corresponding fruit. Quite productive in current modern Portuguese, that suffix was always linked to the denomination of plants in general, some of them not necessarily related to edible fruits or even to fruits. Similarities are found between the Portuguese derivations and other Romance languages. In this text, those similarities were investigated from a historical-comparative point of view. The high convergence in the western Romance languages can be motivated both by a common Latin heritage as by further loanwords, however during the European expansion in the sixteenth century, new plant names were known from the New World and their naming was based on words derived by the same suffix. Keywords: suffixation, Romance linguistics, botanical popular naming, historical morphology, morphological productivity.

Perspectivas ecocríticas y tensiones narrativas en El padre de Blancanieves de Belén Gopegui

Ecocritical Perspectives and Narrative Tensions in Belén Gopegui’s Snow White’s Father. The relationship between literature and ecology has come to the fore in the last few decades and has encompassed several dimensions approached within the evolving framework of ecocriticism. In this context, our purpose is twofold: to explore the possibilities of an ecocritical reading of Belén Gopegui’s novel Snow White’s Father and to highlight the way in which the characters’ uncomfortable questions, the fully-articulated answers and those still latent make up an intricate network of narrative tensions. At the core of the novel lies an all-pervading need of self-questioning and collective reassessment of values, interactions and ethical limits. Its characters are marked by doubt and hesitations regarding the reasons that make them strive for a change or defend the status quo they are fond of. Gopegui is able to perform a delicately-balanced walk on a tightrope between stern anti-capitalist principles and complex human motivations. Keywords: system, ideology, capitalism, ecocriticism, collective subject

The Thread metaphor in the linguistic imaginary of folklore

The Thread Metaphor in the Linguistic Imaginary of Folklore. In our study, we analyse the conceptualization of the idea of creation in the linguistic imaginary of traditional Romanian communities, with the help of certain metaphors from the sphere of household industry, namely the thread, the linen, the towel, the handkerchief, the kerchief, the girdle and others. By exploring a number of theories from the field of cognitive linguistics and ethnolinguistics, we research not only the manners of representing genesis, but also those of other forms of “creation”, such as creating human connections, both between the living and between the living and the dead. To this end, we follow certain linguistic data that encode the concept of creation, identified in folkloric texts, such as dirges, incantations, carols, fairytales, or cosmogonic legends. For their correct interpretation, we invoke their relation with popular beliefs, with ritual practices or elements of material patrimony, without which we would not be able to understand the deepest meanings. Finally, the results of the analysis highlight the significance of the seed-thread, as a core-metaphor responsible for the production of several types of creation, at different levels of existence. The thread metaphor supports the imaginary scheme of warping and weaving, which has modelled the representations about the birth of the vast canvas of the world. By analysing the multiple items, the connections and correlations created with the thread’s help, we can better understand that the folkloric world is itself a vast canvas whose threads often remain visible only to the initiated. Keywords: creation, cosmogony, thread, linen, towel, handkerchief, kerchief, girdle, footbridge, bridge, connection.