This article presents interpretations of Erwin Kruk’s late poems included into his last two volumesof poetry: Znikanie [Vanishing] and Nieobecność [Absense]. In the course of analysis, the main themesof the senile poetry are considered: memory, evanescence and death. The puer senex theme in relationto the lyrical ego also receives the author’s attention as well as the regional context of Kruk’s poetry,i.e. its connections with the history of Masuria. However, the author notices the universality of thesepoems, as they convey a message which goes far beyond the limitations of regionalism.
In a recent study of Shakespeare translation in Japan, the translator and editor Ōba Kenji (14) expresses his preference for the early against the later translations of Tsubouchi Shōyō (1859-1935), a small group of basically experimental translations for stage performance published between the years 1906 and 1913; after 1913, Shōyō set about translating the rest of the plays, which he completed in 1927. Given Shōyō’s position as the pioneer of Shakespeare translation, not to mention a dominant figure in the history of modern Japanese literature, Ōba’s professional view offers insights into Shōyō’s development that invite detailed analysis and comparison with his rhetorical theories. This article attempts to identify what Shōyō may have meant by translating Shakespeare into elegant or “beautiful” Japanese with reference to excerpts from two of his translations from the 1900s.
Alexandr Kuprin was gifted with an unusual sense of sight and hearing; and what was stressed by his contemporary writers, an acute sense of smell. It comes as no surprise that the process of conceiving the world in asensory way is an integral part of his literary output. All senses tangled together in various configurations and playing different roles (i.e. smells and sounds evoke images from the past) were presented in his short stories. Still, the sense of smell is the most predominant. Kuprin touches the issue of the interdependence of sensory experiences and emotional states (joy, sadness, longing, fear, anger) and melds them with ponderings about evanescence, ontologic-al loneliness of the man, summing up life or searching for its meaning.
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