Jaak Põldmäe 75

Jaak Põldmäe 7

Breaking the Syllabic-accentual Monotony

Ants Oras’s innovation was not confined to the sphere of language, he also has an important role in the enrichment of Estonian metrics and systems of versification. His sources were mainly the forms of different European poetic cultures, which he introduced in his translations. In the paper, two meters are studied, which Oras tried to create in his translation of Goethe’s Faust, in order to adequately convey the original’s rhythm. These verse meters are German national form, Knittelvers, and adoneus derived from ancient and medieval verse. One common characteristic for these meters is the breaking of syllabic-accentual monotony

Verse as a semiotic system

Poetry is an important challenge for semiotics, and a special area of study for the Tartu-Moscow semiotic school, since the first volume of Sign Systems Studies was Juri Lotman’s monograph Lectures on Structural Poetics (1964). From then on the concept of poetry as one of the secondary modelling systems has evolved, since in relation to poetry, the primary modelling system is natural language. In this paper, the concept of semiotic system has been re-examined and the treatment of primary and secondary semiotic systems has been significantly revised. A semiotic system can be characterized not only by its internal structure and other systems to which it is related, but also by the field upon what it is realized. The latter aspect has gained almost no attention in any treatment of semiotics; the execution of a sign is understood in the spirit of Saussure and Hjelmslev as a material realization of an abstract element (for instance, a chess piece knight can be realized with wood or plastic, but it can also remain purely virtual). At first, distinction is made between language and sign system. Every sign system consists of language and field. There are three different kinds of fields: 1) just a background – footprints on sand are a sign on the background of sand; 2) a material structured field (a football ground or a chess board in the game called Chapayev) and 3) an abstract structured field, which in its turn consists of other fields (for instance, the chess board which consists of 64 fields). Differently from a football ground, a chess board can be a purely virtual one on which virtual pieces are moved (for instance, in case of blindfold or correspondence chess). The field in its turn can be language and one language can use another language as its field. In this case we speak of primary and secondary sign systems. For instance, the prosodic system of language is a field for a verse metre, while the semantic system of language is a field for a narrative

Lost and found in translation: the case of alliteration

The paper examines the transmission of alliteration in Estonian and Russian translated verse. The main focus is on the translation of alliterative epic, on the one hand, and more recent literary alliteration, on the other hand. Various alliterative techniques in different genres are observed, as well as various strategies in conveying alliteration: rejection of alliteration, transmission of alliteration, compensatory translation, for example, with functional equivalent and eventually, saturation with alliteration, to signal alliteration in a tradition without corresponding framework

The Accentual Structure of Estonian Syllabic-Accentual Iambic Tetrameter

This paper is part of a project aimed to analyse the rhythm of Estonian binary verse metres. It is the first complex analysis of Estonian syllabic-accentual iamb. The analysis is comprised of poetry by 20 prominent authors from the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, and, all in all, more than 9000 verse lines. In order to find out which regularities are specific to poetry in general or to a particular poet, these data were compared with pseudoiambic segments extracted from prose. Differently from the earlier studies, stress is treated as a phenomenon of gradation, with altogether five different degrees of stress distinguished. The performed study showed that the rhythmical structure of iambic poems allows the clear distinction between two groups of poets, whom we conditionally call Traditionalists and Modernists

The semiotics of verse rhythm and comparative rhythmics: Vladimir Nabokov’s and Jurgis Baltrušaitis’s binary tetrameters from a typological perspective

The article discusses the problems of poetic rhythm in two aspects. The first concerns the possibility of awareness and conscious modelling of various aspects of poetic rhythm; the second is related to the manifestation of similar or even identical tendencies in the rhythmic structures of various authors who belong to different eras and literary trends and even writing in different languages. Works from bilingual authors such as Vladimir Nabokov and Jurgis Baltrušaitis are of the particular interest. The first half of the article focuses on how the concept of rhythm proposed in the book by Andrei Bely (1910) influenced the poetic practice. Before Bely, it had been implicit that the choice of stanzaic and metric forms was usually conscious for authors, while Bely demonstrated that poets and their audience can be aware of verse rhythm as well. After the publication of his results, Bely and other poets of a predominantly Symbolist approach began to pay attention to the rhythmic structure of the verse and made attempts to model it. Considered are the following problems: a) how do poetic meters relate to rhythmic forms; b) to what extent can the rhythmic momentum be recognized by the author, and to what extent can the author influence it; and c) how can the author compose verses in accordance with a pre-selected rhythmic model. In the second half of the article, the rhythm of iambic and trochaic tetrameters in Russian poetic heritage of Jurgis Baltrušaitis is analysed in comparison with the rhythm of his Lithuanian verses. As it turns out, despite the obvious differences in the prosody of the Lithuanian and Russian languages, the rhythmic structure of his poems obeys the same regularities. In the final part of the article, possible explanations of rhythmic patterns are proposed and an outline of the typology of the rhythm of the binary tetrameters is given

The derivatives of hexameter in Estonian poetry and their link with the traditional hexameter

The sources of the theory of the Estonian hexameter can be traced back to 17th century Germany, where the long syllables of ancient hexameter were replaced with stressed ones, and short syllables with unstressed ones. Although such understanding is clearly inadequate, to a great extent it still holds ground in contemporary approaches. Hexameter, like any other verse metre, can be treated from two angles. First, as an abstract scheme which is realized in different texts, while the degree of realization can vary. Second, hexameter can be viewed as a prototype and actual texts create a certain space further from or closer to the prototype. In both cases questions arise, first, about the limits of hexameter, and second, whether a given text has features of a random hexameter or reflects the author's conscious intent