English rhythms in Russian verse : on the experiment of Joseph Brodsky / by Nila Friedberg.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Friedberg, Nila, 1972-

Series:

Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs [TiLSM]

Trends in linguistics studies and monographs ; 232

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Linguistics in literature.

English language--Influence on foreign languages.

English language.

Russian poetry--20th century--History and criticism.

Russian poetry.

Brodsky, Joseph, 1940-1996--Criticism and interpretation.

Brodsky, Joseph.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (224 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Berlin ; New York : De Gruyter Mouton, c2011.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Readers of poetry make aesthetic judgements about verse. It is quite common to hear intuitive statements about poets' rhythms. It is said, for example, that Joseph Brodsky, the Russian poet and 1987 Nobel Prize laureate, "sounds English" when he writes in Russian. Yet, it is far from clear what this statement means from a linguistic point of view. What is English about Brodsky's Russian poetry? And in what way are his "English" rhythms different from the verse of his Russian predecessors? The book provides an analysis of Brodsky's experiment bringing evidence from an unusually wide variety of disciplines and theories rarely combined in a single study, including the generative approach to meter; the Russian quantitative approach, analysis of readers' intuitions about poetic rhythm, analysis of the poet's source readings, as well as acoustic phonetics, statistics, and archival research. The distinct analytic approaches applied in this book to the same phenomenon complement one another each providing insight alternate approaches do not, and showing that only a combination of theories and methods allows us to fully appreciate what Brodsky's "English accent" really was, and what any poetic innovation means.

Contents:

Front matter

Acknowledgements

A note on copyright and transliteration

Table of contents

Introduction

1. Brodsky's predecessors: Rules, violations, semantics

2. Redundant syllables: Elision in Brodsky's verse

3. Brodsky's anti-RD rhythm: semantics and sources

Conclusion

Appendices

Appendix I. Changes from Brodsky's drafts to final versions

Appendix II. 100 randomly-selected words with the shape -Xxx- in the prose of Brodsky, Slutsky, and Donne

Appendix III. Words with the shape -Xxx- in elision positions in the verse of Donne, Brodsky, and Slutsky

Appendix IV. Statistical tests of words with the shape -Xxx- in poetry and prose

Appendix V. Anti-RD rhythm in Brodsky's iambic poems

Appendix VI. Anti-RD rhythm in Tsvetaeva's iambic poems

Appendix VII. Anti-RD rhythm in Brodsky, Tsvetaeva, and Donne

References

Author index

Subject index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9786613429940

9781283429948

1283429942

9783110238099

3110238098

OCLC:

769190325