Studia Metrica et Poetica

Rhyme in dróttkvætt, from Old Germanic Inheritance to Contemporary Poetic Ecology III: The Old Norse Poetic Ecology

Frog — 2024-08-26

This paper is the third in a three-part series that develops a model for the background of rhyme in Old Norse dróttkvætt poetry as a formalization of the same form of rhyme found across Old Germanic poetries. The first paper in this series outlined the argument and its background. The second paper explored rhyme in Old Germanic poetries outside of Old Norse. The present paper introduces rhyme in Old Norse eddic poetries in relation to what was found in other Old Germanic traditions. It then turns to dróttkvætt, discussed in relation to the broader poetic ecology in which it emerged and developed, and considers how dróttkvætt impacted that ecology and uses of rhyme in eddic poetry. Although the ultimate origin of dróttkvætt remains obscure, the discussion of rhyme in dróttkvætt requires a discussion of the history of the meter, here situated in relation to other developments in the poetic ecology that point to greater attention to cadence and rhyme under conditions conducive to formalizing a stanzaic structure. However, this exploration of the history of the poetic form highlights that rhyme may have been a secondary development of the basic meter, formalizing what began as an optional added feature that may have had only a marginal metrical role.

Automatic Poetic Metre Detection for Czech Verse

Kristýna Klesnilová — 2024-08-26

Metrical analysis of verse is an essential and challenging task in the research on versification consisting of analysing a poem and deciding which metre it is written in. Thanks to existing corpora, we can take advantage of data-driven approaches, which can be better suited to the specific versification problems at hand than rulebased systems.

This work analyses the Czech accentual-syllabic verse and automatic metre assignment using the vast and annotated Corpus of Czech Verse. We define the problem as a sequence tagging task and approach it using a machine learning model and many different input data configurations. In comparison to this approach, we reimplement the existing data-driven system KVĚTA.

Our results demonstrate that the bidirectional LSTM-CRF sequence tagging model, enhanced with syllable embeddings, significantly outperforms the existing KVĚTA system, with predictions achieving 99.61% syllable accuracy, 98.86% line accuracy, and 90.40% poem accuracy. The model also achieved competitive results with token embeddings. One of the most interesting findings is that the best results are obtained by inputting sequences representing whole poems instead of individual poem lines.

Poetic License, Textual Fidelity and the Liturgical Impulse in Aleksandr Sumarokov’s Early Spiritual Verse

Ronald Vroon — 2024-08-26

The present essay considers the paraphrases of Psalms and other biblical and liturgical texts that Sumarokov composed between 1744 and 1769. He initially treated his paraphrases primarily as literary exercises: while taking care not to distort the Church Slavic and ipso facto Greek (Septuagint) source texts, he had no qualms about both expanding and abridging the original texts within the confines of traditional metrical and stanzaic structures. Subsequently in the 1760s, he began to experiment with variable iambic and trochaic lines in spiritual verse, though such forms are typically associated with less lofty genres such as fables and epigrams. His experiments in turn allowed him to achieve greater fidelity to the Church Slavic texts targeted for paraphrasis, and to bring his texts stylistically closer to the liturgical norms associated with the Church Slavic originals. At the same time, he strove to improve the fidelity of his own paraphrases of the Psalms by consulting German translations of the Hebrew (Masoretic) originals. Thus, Sumarokov paradoxically brings to his new translations of the 1660s the philological Protestant sensibility of German translations of the Psalter, and an Orthodox sensibility that favors the traditional Church Slavic register associated with the Psalter as a liturgical text. These new translations in free and frequently unrhymed iambs set the stage for the final, more radical experiments undertaken in 1773–1774.

The Concepts of “Verse”, “Meter” and “Rhythm” in Russian Verse Theory

Igor Pilshchikov — 2024-08-26

This article examines definitions of verse and descriptions of the relationships between meter and rhythm as proposed by scholars of Russian poetry. Building on their observations, the author devises a constructive definition of “meter” as a system of permissions and prohibitions governing the distribution of word stresses and word boundaries in a verse line. Additionally, the article proposes constructive definitions for the versification systems employed in Russian poetry.

Functions of Exact and Homonymous Internal Rhymes in Georgian Medieval Panegyric Poetry

Tamar Lomidze — 2024-08-26

The text of the medieval Georgian panegyric poem “Tamariani” has come to us in the form of manuscripts of the 18th and 19th centuries. “Tamariani” mainly uses a poetic form, which is known in Georgian versification as “Chakhrukhauli”. “Chakhrukhauli” is a quatrain with twenty-syllable lines, the pre-caesural parts of which consist of two rhymed (often homonymous) syntagms. The lines also have an end rhyme. In Georgian literary criticism, until now, only evaluative points of view have been expressed regarding this work, and the functional nature of the formal techniques has been ignored. This article is an attempt to substantiate the hypothesis that the use of specific formal techniques – in particular, frequently repeated precaesural (including homonymous) rhymes in “Tamariani” – was due to the influence of Neoplatonic philosophy on the author. This hypothesis is also supported by the fact that Georgian researchers also noted the influence of Neoplatonic philosophy on “The Knight in the Panther’s Skin”, the author of which was Chakhrukhadze’s contemporary, the greatest Georgian poet Shota Rustaveli, although, unlike “Tamariani”, the influence of Neoplatonic philosophy was reflected on Rustaveli work’s content and philosophical concept, while in Chakhrukhadze’s poem the influence of Neoplatonism becomes clear upon a careful “reading” of the form of the work.

World Poetry Today: Production, Translation, Reception

Liina Lukas — 2024-08-26

World Poetry Today: Production, Translation, Reception