Interlitteraria

Lyrical Poetry as a Factor in the Formation of Literary Cultures

Liina Lukas — 2023-08-10

Lyrical Poetry as a Factor in the Formation of Literary Cultures

Heart to Heart: The Power of Lyrical Bonding in Romantic Nationalism

Joep Leerssen — 2023-08-10

In nineteenth-century nation-building, the textual genres investigated by researchers are usually long-distance, mediated ones, such as journalism and the novel. This article attempts to assess the function of a much more intimate literary genre, the lyrical, in that process. Lyricism was a central poetical element in Romanticism; its emotive, affect-centered mode was seen as specifically “immediate”, non-mediatized and deeply personal (and therefore non-political). How could this register aid the formation of self-defining national communities? The article suggests a special role for female poets and a privileged position of the lyrical in the interplay between print-disseminated literature and oral-performative literature, in shaping the nation as an “emotive community”.

“This Land Is Your Land”: A Note on America as a Nation of “Varied Carols”

Heinrich Detering — 2023-08-10

Modern American literature starts with the sound of voices singing: “I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear”. It is Walt Whitman who begins one of his most popular poems with this line, referring to the voices of people from all generations, classes and ethnic backgrounds who are about to form a new type of nation, a nation beyond ethnicity based on the principles of democracy and diversity alone. Against this background of listening to the countless different voices, his equally famous poem ‘America’ reads like a personal and individual answer: “Centre of equal daughters, equal sons, / All, all alike endear’d, grown, ungrown, young or old, / Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich”. Whitman’s poetry lays out the foundation for a specifically American tradition of song poetry that focuses on political equality and social justice as collective human rights and the free development of every person’s individuality at the same time. The present article follow the line from Whitman’s poetry of songs to 20th century American song poetry, by the way of the example of Woody Guthrie’s anthem ‘This Land Is Your Land’ and its transformative receptions in Bob Dylan’s and Bruce Springsteen’s adaptations (in contrast to the way in which European national anthems conceive the nation-as-territory).

‘We’re All Mad Here’: Alienation, Madness, and Crafting Tom Waits

Nadia López-Peláez Akalay — 2023-08-10

Tom Waits, through his poetry, his poetic and public personae, has become the father of the desperate failures of society, those who lay down and fill the background with disillusionment. No-direction-homers flock together and become the majority of Waits’ main characters. As an artist, he gives a voice and a name to those who, otherwise, would remain invisible, endowing them with corporeality. Waits, through the projection of his public persona, illumines the lives of the weak, who strive to survive in a world that has always fed upon those below. There is something honourable about the people who struggle the most, trying to find their path in the darkest of places, and Waits, through his career as an entertainer, has always prioritised his respect for these people, praising their many faults and poor decisions, merging them with the tormented collective and thus becoming one with their sadness and horror.

This paper will focus on how Tom Waits constructs his personae through an identification with the disappointments of society: the underdog, and, more particularly, the alcoholic underdog. I intend to focus mainly on the lyrical content of his albums Rain Dogs and Small Change, together with their respective representations in other art forms, specifically interviews, lives, artistry, etc. This section will also include Tom Waits’ depiction of some characters as grotesques, as they form the limits of societal acceptance. In the last section, I will examine the presence and construction of these grotesques in his album Alice (2002), while comparing the lyrical content to its other cultural manifestations.

The Transition from Song to Poetry in Latvian Literature in the Second Half of the 19th Century

Māra Grudule — 2023-08-10

The Latvian nation is a singing nation. The Singing Revolution and similar song- and singing-related references are traditionally associated with the image of Latvians. The origins of written Latvian are also related to song: the oldest known Christian song in Latvian, dating from 1530, is also one of the oldest examples of Latvian-language text.

In the second half of the 18th century, as a result of transferring from a German to a Latvian cultural space, a new genre of song was created by the German pastor Gotthard Friedrich Stender, the secular, didactic and sentimental ziņģe (a term coined from the German verb singen, ‘to sing’). As the level of education among Latvians was low and most information spread by word of mouth, the German pastors and the first generation of Latvian poets made use of ziņges as an informative tool. Around the middle of the 19th century, the Latvian national revival began. Without denying the importance of Latvian folk songs in the creation of national culture, the main focus of this article is on the secular ziņģes that were adopted from the German literary tradition, which up until the second half of the 19th century were a favourite tool for entertainment (singing) and spreading information orally. As the level of literacy among Latvians rose, the ziņģes receded to the periphery of the literary landscape, paving the way for a new concept for denoting a rhythmic text that was for the first time not melody-bound: dzeja, or ‘poetry’. The emergence of the new concept in 1869, which was related to the Latvian national revival and the formation of a national literary culture, at the same time also marked a turning point from orality to literacy in Latvian society.

The Role of Lyrics in Estonian Literature: Three Exemplary Cases

Anneli Niinre — 2023-08-10

Song lyrics are usually positioned in the margins of literature and tend not to be in the first line when writers and their works are discussed. There have been debates about whether to consider lyrics as literature and/ or ‘real poetry’. The article examines three cases in Estonian literature where melodised poetic texts have played a significant role in Estonian culture and are considered to be core texts: “Mu isamaa on minu arm” (My Fatherland is My Love) by Lydia Koidula, songs from the feature film Viimne reliikvia (The Last Relic), lyrics written by Paul-Eerik Rummo, and “Laul Põhjamaast” (“Song of the Northern Land”), lyrics by Enn Vetemaa. These also represent three ways a text can function: “Mu isamaa on minu arm” was first written and published as a poem and later set to music; The Last Relic represents a case where texts were initially written as lyrics and later published in a collection of poems; “Song of the Northern Land”, by Enn Vetemaa, was meant to be and has remained a song and has not been included in poetry collections.

Romantic Poets in Epic Form of Nordic Countries and Estonia’s Classical Dialect Poetry

Lauri Pilter — 2023-08-10

The recently awakened academic interest in the multilingual character of the written culture of the Baltic region in more distant times calls for fresh attention to and reassessment of the poetry of the ethnic minorities that have inhabited the territory of Estonia. One such minority was the Estonian Swedes who dwelt in western Estonia up to 1944. This paper mainly focuses on the lifecourse, as reflected in his poems, of Estonian Swedish native skald Mats Ekman, who wrote in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Since his work and the whole topic of Estonian Swedish culture are largely unknown in Estonia and everywhere else, except for the direct descendants of that minority, the paper offers the necessary background information, while also applying the method of close reading to a few of the author’s poems in the original Swedish dialect and in English. Parallels are drawn with the major classical authors of neighbouring Nordic countries, such as Esaias Tegnér of Sweden and Aleksis Kivi of Finland, authors who can be seen as models not only for Ekman, but also for a number of significant ethnic Estonian poets who wrote in Estonian, such as Juhan Liiv and Ernst Enno.

Juhan Liiv’s Comprehension of Poetry

Tanar Kirs — 2023-08-10

Juhan Liiv (1864–1913) is considered to be the first important innovator of Estonian poetry. So far, it has been underlined in Estonian culture that Liiv lacked any ties with world literature and thus world literature had no role to play in the birth of the innovation of Estonian poetry. In this article, I am showing that Liiv’s comprehension of poetry is closely tied to German poetic culture. These connections arise from Liiv’s essays, which have not been studied so far. I analyse Liiv’s essay Ääremärkused (Marginalia) and formulate the main theses in his comprehension of poetry.

The Semantics of the Absurd: On German ‘Hermetic’ Poetry and Political Commitment after 1945

Marko Pajević — 2023-08-10

German culture experienced an enormous rupture after 1945. Not only was the country in ruins and an outcast of the international community because of the recent regime and its devastating effects, its entire cultural tradition was under suspicion: had German culture always been steering towards this catastrophe? Was everything within it corrupt? While the frenetic economic activity of the ‘Wirtschaftswunder’ side-stepped a mainstream confrontation with the horrors of the recent past, intellectuals and artists radically interrogated the reasons for the disaster. As always, language and the meaning-making procedures in language prepare the mind to open up and to prepare for action. Language is at the root of action and this insight fuelled reflections on language, for instance by philosophers such as Wittgenstein and Heidegger. But it was particularly in lyric poetry that a lucid and politically aware examination of the recent past took place and an expression of such considerations could be found.

This paper demonstrates how poets made a unique and highly significant contribution to the development of a new political awareness in Germanlanguage culture. By integrating silence and the absurd (that is, the unheardof and the unspeakable) into literary language, this so-called hermetic poetry did not entail a withdrawal from society but, on the contrary, devoted itself to a particular form of political commitment. This procedure represents a rupture with what Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno called the ‘culture industry’ (1947), opposing conventional and habituated approaches to art in terms of its production and reception and advocating instead a stringent and critical concept of arresting aesthetic form that was to distinguish the work of art from products of that culture industry. Paul Celan, Ingeborg Bachmann, Ilse Aichinger, Günter Eich and Nelly Sachs are the household names associated with this poetics. While it was never necessarily mainstream, it was arguably the most innovative poetic strand of its time and in the long run a key factor in shaping a modern German culture that could come to terms with its past and overcome authoritarian structures.

Estonian, Russian and Samizdat Identity: Arno Tsart and Elena Shvarts

Miriam Rossi — 2023-08-10

The article explores a case of literary mystification by Elena Shvarts that occurred in samizdat during the eighties, featuring a fictitious Estonian poet. Aware of the relevance that translation played in the literary samizdat of Leningrad during the eighties, the investigation focuses on the similarities between the poetess’ hoax and the concept of pseudo-translation, analysing the reasons for and outcomes of her endeavour in terms of identity research. Engaging with Shvarts’ verses, Sergei Stratanovsky’s account of the episode and the position that Estonia played in the samizdat imagined world, the article explores the role of Shvarts/Tsart’s mystification in relation to the poetess and her readership.

“In a Miracle Wellspring” of Goethe’s Poetry: Comments on the Role of Translated Poetry in a Small Literature

Liina Lukas — 2023-08-10

In 1944, on the cusp of one occupying power replacing another in Estonia, the beloved Estonian poet Heiti Talvik translated Goethe’s poetry and was filled with admiration: “What a youthful abundance of life in every detail! Yes, to delve into Goethe’s work is to rinse your eyes in a miracle wellspring capable of renewing your fading vision.” By then, the Estonian language and Estonian poetry had already been drawing from this miracle wellspring for more than a century. In this presentation, I will be discussing the significance of Goethe’s poetry in Estonian literature and comparing it to that of small and large literatures of neighbouring countries. Based on research, I conducted with my co-authors Vahur Aabrams and Susanna Rennik for our recently published book Goethe’s Poetry in Estonian (University of Tartu Press, 2021), I will show the dynamics of the reception and translation of Goethe’s poetry in Estonia and in the wider Baltic cultural space, and I will explore the local socio-cultural and more general aesthetic and ideological factors that influenced this reception.

An Attempt to Account for Distributed Cognition in Translating the Poetry of Juhan Viiding

Miriam McIlfatrick-Ksenofontov — 2023-08-10

This article continues the author’s research into the creative process of writing and translating poetry. It is preparatory work for translating the poetry of one of Estonia’s most widely read and appreciated poets, Juhan Viiding (1948–1995), who wrote under the pseudonym Jüri Üdi until 1978. It proposes that an understanding of Viiding’s work is enhanced when viewed in the wider human perspective of distributed cognition, as elaborated by neuroanthropologist Merlin Donald. In contrast to traditional approaches that look to socio-historical background to contextualise literature and translation research, the distributed cognition model places greater emphasis on the creative processes in culture that take place outside individual minds and focuses less on the capacities and talents of the author as the unique source of creativity. This approach is helpful for the translator of Viiding’s poetry who aspires to produce translated poems that do in another language what the original poems do in their language, for it entails thinking through language to access the working of the individual and the collective minds in the text. The significant role that social connections and public reception play in Viiding’s creative work is illustrated by an essay by Elo Viiding, a poet and Juhan Viiding’s daughter, in which she describes nine types of reader of Juhan Viiding’s poetry, each of which creates their own distinct ‘Juhan Viiding’. Drawing on poet and literary critic Hasso Krull’s study of Viiding’s poetry, Elo Viiding analyses Juhan Viiding’s method of negation as essential to his creative work and engagement with his audience. In this article the author lays theoretical groundwork for the translation of Juhan Viiding’s poetry into English.

Traducir poesía es descubrir los volcanes sepultados debajo de los pies. A propósito de Valitud tõlkeluulet 1970–2020 (Selección de la poesía traducida, 1970–2020), por Jüri Talvet

Merilin Kotta — 2023-08-10

Jüri Talvet, Valitud tõlkeluulet. I. Hiliskeskajast modernismini. TÜ Kirjastus, 2021, 298 pp.

Jüri Talvet, Valitud tõlkeluulet. II. 20. sajandi keskpaigast 21. sajandi alguseni. TÜ Kirjastus, 2021, 489 pp.

About the Authors

Interlitteraria — 2023-08-10