Comparative Literature

Hallemeier, Katherine

2019 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-7339105

This article argues that reading for the vernacular of Standard American English in Nigerian Anglophone literature creates the opportunity to think about how the Englishes of British and American empire have not always been negotiated as singular or sequential, either in postcolonial or global Anglophone world literature. Writing by Buchi Emecheta, Chinua Achebe, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie suggests how the appropriation of the language of British colonization has been undercut and abetted by the Anglophone cultural and educational institutions of US empire.

Davis, Christopher

2019 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-7339116

This article examines three multilingual lyrics from the Middle Ages in which linguistic difference is employed as a strategy for defining the relationship between language and poetic form. Two poems by twelfth-century troubadours, “Eras quan vey,” a descort in five languages by Raimbaut de Vaqueiras, and “Lo ferm voler,” a sestina by Arnaut Daniel, are read as experimental compositions that promote the function of lyric forms to provide stability to the vernacular in a fluid oral context by communicating meaning in nondiscursive ways. The influence of these works—and also thirteenth-century Occitan grammars by Raimon Vidal and Uc Faidit—may be detected in a later multilingual poem by Dante Alighieri, “Aï faus ris,” which alternates among French, Latin, and Italian according to an intricate formal structure. While previous studies have argued that this fascinating poem strives to synthesize different languages to produce a perfect poetic idiom, this article contends that “Aï faus ris” in fact performs the limitations of human language and the inevitability of linguistic difference, advocating instead for the conceptual harmony of lyric form as an aesthetic vehicle.

Larson, K. Maya

2019 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-7339127

Designed to deceive some readers, such as the censor, while inviting others to read “between the lines,” Aesopian texts task their translator with added interpretive complexity. Does a given translation reflect both text and subtext, target audience and hurdle audience? Is the target audience of the translated text even mappable onto an original text’s schema of hurdle and target audiences? The writings of Varlam Shalamov further complicate the translation of Aesopian texts. Whereas Leona Toker and others identify Aesopian moments in Shalamov’s prose, Svetlana Boym argues that in his writings the deceptive device of mimicry resists totalitarianism precisely when it goes beyond any Aesopian or other useful purpose. Shalamov’s 1963 essay “The National Borders of Poetry and Free Verse” (“Natsial’nye granitsy poezii i svobodnyi stikh”) invites engagement as an exemplary Aesopian text—one whose “deceptive means,” however, call for a more capacious understanding of Aesopian language. Nineteenth-century satirist Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin first used the term “Aesopian” to indicate the “trembling” littérateur’s unique style of writing, whose “deceptive means” showed “a remarkable resourcefulness in their invention.” The Aesopian mimicry of Shalamov’s essay on free verse exceeds both predator’s and trembling prey’s powers of appreciation, calling for equally artful mimicry on the part of the translator.

Mor, Liron

2019 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-7339138

This article explores the operation of humor in Palestinian author Emile Habiby’s novel The Pessoptimist (1974) and compares it to Voltaire’s humor in Candide, which it explicitly cites. The differences between the two authors’ modes of humor are read as an index of their different relations to the law, and specifically, to international law as the guarantor of human rights. Voltaire’s humorous critique is limited to the current content of the law, reflecting his confidence in universalist ideals and rights attainable by legal reform. Habiby’s humor, however, protests the law as such, exposing universalist ideals as not merely unhelpful for the Palestinians’ struggle but also as complicit in the oppression and fragmentation of Palestinian society. Habiby therefore redirects the emphasis toward interpersonal manners and intimacies that are external to the realm of the law yet underwrite it. Against Voltaire’s cosmopolitanism and Enlightenment-era ideals, Habiby’s humor thus offers a differential and conflictual community that prioritizes a practice of decolonization over ideal solutions and their dichotomous logic.

Maslov, Boris;Nikitina, Tatiana

2019 Comparative Literature

doi: 10.1215/00104124-7339149

Building on statistical approaches to poetic meter, this article puts forward a new quantitative method for exploring syllabo-accentual verse that takes into account several formal properties, including rhythm, rhyming, and stanzaic architecture. Against the background of a broad typology of European verse, it argues that a basic compensatory mechanism balancing different levels of organization of verse is complicated by the interaction between different national traditions. As a particularly complex case the article investigates the introduction of syllabo-accentual verse in Russia in the 1730s–40s, which represented an encounter between Polish, German, and French practices of versification. In addition to the general compensatory principle and local effects of borrowing, the article discusses a previously unexplored kind of formal complexity that evolves with the maturation of a tradition of verse making: certain nontrivial correlations between rhythm and rhyme that have been observed in Pushkin are not found in the work of Lomonosov, a poet who stands at the origin of Russian syllabo-accentual verse. The article’s conclusion addresses the relevance of the quantitative approach to the larger theoretical claims of Historical Poetics.