The article provides interpretation of the changes the prototext of Ivan Laučík’s (1944 – 2004) poems “Biely film” ([White film] from the collection Havránok, 1998) and “Tam, kde nie som” ([There, Where I’m Not] from the collection Na prahu počuteľnosti [At the threshold of hearing], 1988) underwent since it was included in the letter to Peter Repka from the 10th September 1970. The contribution concentrates on three main issues. The first one concerns the intertextual reference the prototext makes to the poem by the French journalist and author Jean-Paul de Dadelsen (1913 – 1957) “Jonas” and the possible meanings it brings to the prototext. The absence of this reference in the poem “White film” serves the convergent function. The article then provides a comparative interpretation of the changes between the prototext and the poem “White film”. These appear to have made the poem clearer and strengthened its metaphysical aspect through intensifying the presence of “illumination/light” motives and elements in the poem. Finally, the contribution analyses the modifications the last four lines of the prototext underwent before they were included in the poem “There, Where I’m Not”. The article argues that the poet attempted at simplifying the segment as to the poetic devices it employs and at making it clearer. In result, the singular lived experience was transformed into a general maxim.
The award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 to the Bengali writer, philosopher and teacher Rabindranath Tagore (1861 – 1941) for the collection Gitanjali created considerable interest in his work in Europe and America. One of the first writers who set his poems to music was the Czech composer J. B. Foerster; others included Leoš Janáček and Alexander Zemlinsky, of the Slovak composers Alexander Albrecht and the others. In 1923 Ján Móry (1892 – 1978) composed Tagore Album, op. 12, a cycle of 14 songs for vocals and piano, which was issued in printed form by the Ries & Erler publishing house in Berlin. This cycle enriched the work inspired by Tagore’s poetry in Czecho-Slovak and European musical culture.
The paper presents a reading (lektúra) of the poem by Milan Rúfus (1928 – 2009) “Tak [So]” from the end of his key collection of poetry Zvony (Bells, 1968). The text chosen as its summary and generalization provides insights into the poet’s world and his poetics. The reading records the lexical semantics, syntactic and verse structure of the poem, and potential correspondences with the poetry of the Czech poet František Halas (1901 – 1949). The result of this interplay is the transposition of the evoked facts and synecdoches of the disappearing pastoral-peasant world into a cipher of human existence in life and death. The anaphorically emphatized “hunger” becomes an existentially poetic key to the fatal deficiency of human functioning in the world.
The paper addresses the problem of the boundaries of the poem, both at the textual level – considering the poem as a definitive formation and the author's repeated return to a single poem – and in terms of its transgression toward both literary and non-literary texts. It focuses on broad borderlands or inter-medial and inter-semiotic fields, where poetic language and imagery extend beyond their own limits toward other art forms such as music and visual art. In these encounters, poetry enters into resonances, interpenetrations, harmonies, and contradictions with its own imagery. This process gives rise to new forms of intertextuality, inter-mediality, and inter-iconicity within the arts. Poetic writing may also engage in diverse osmoses and interferences with non-literary discourses – such as philosophical writing – and not exclusively in interpretation, but also via mutually enriching oscillations. Examples of this dynamic can be found in the texts of such authors as Friedrich Nietzsche or Martin Heidegger. The study takes as its methodological starting point the rhizomatic ontology of the artwork, understood as a condition for its scriptibility (Gilles Deleuze, Roland Barthes).
The paper intends to point out to the translating activity of Anton Straka, cultural attaché of the Czechoslovak Republic in Hungary during the interwar period, particularly in relation to František Halas´s piece of work called Staré ženy/Old Women. The piece of work had been translated several times but in the given period of time it was Straka´s translation titled Anyókák that stood out. The work or its translation was published by the Publishing House of Eugen Prager in Bratislava in cooperation with magazine Szép Szó. Anton Straka did the translation with the help of a well-known poet Attila József as well as Boris Palotai. Thanks to the cooperation with Attila József the poem Anyókák/Old Women was first published in magazine Szép Szó. The whole of the translation process has been preserved in the records which are found in the Petőfi literary museum in Budapest.
This paper surveys some new aspects of approaching literary works of art in terms of a sequence of trends in linguistics and literary criticism that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century. Those trends did not simply follow one another, but they also reflected on one another in many ways and even synthesised the others in certain respects. They included the structuralist, semiotic, textological, pragmatic, and cognitive approaches. In particular, the paper discusses those aspects in Attila Jozsef's poem 'You know there is no remission.' In Part One, some of the structural/textological/rhetorical characteristics of the poem are mentioned (structure, syntactic structure, versification, verbality, vocabulary, word-ethics, some figures, etc.). In Part Two, evidence is provided of the self-addressing character of the poem in terms of a recent, cognitive approach to literary criticism, and the text focus (the centre of textual organisation) and text topic of the poem are determined. The poem's attitude to time is explored, pointing out that rheme-enhancing particles do make it time-confronting. Finally, in terms of the semiotic and cognitive approaches (claiming that language creation is iconic and language use is energy), the iconicity of certain words occurring in the poem is pointed out. The author's aim with the analysis is to bring linguistic and literary approaches closer to one another.
The paper focuses on the issue of the semiotics of the fragment, its meaning-making function in the figurative and semantic structure, or semiosis of a particular lyric text, with special attention to the close and key connection between imagery and memory. The poem “Spamäti” (By heart, 1957) by Ján Ondruš (1932 – 2000), one of the most distinctive Slovak poets of the second half of the twentieth century, interpreted by Fedor Matejov in his 2018 essay “the lonely boy leaning against the wall” (Ján Ondruš’s poem “Spamäti [By heart]”), serves as an illustrative example. The paper has a meta-interpretive character – it is an interpretation of an interpretation, a reading of a reading. In this sense, it addresses not only the poetics and semiosis of the text but primarily seeks to analytically grasp and characterize the interpretive procedures, strategies, methodological specificities, and the overall logic and significance of Fedor Matejov’s approach. Matejov is considered one of the most original and erudite contemporary Slovak literary scholars focused on the interpretation of Slovak poetry after 1945 and this paper wishes to elucidate the distinctive features of his interpretive practice.
This study focuses on the reflective and meditative poem by Andrej Sládkovič (1820–1872), Roky a veky [Years and ages] (1866), which, in terms of its theme and form, occupies a specific position within the context of the author’s oeuvre and Slovak Romantic poetry. It examines the various textual variants of the poem and its diverse strophic structures, with particular emphasis on the final stanza, which takes the form of a calligram and constitutes a significant meaning-forming element of the text. The paper traces the poem’s evolution from the surviving manuscript version through its subsequent publication in several printed editions, whilst examining the editors’ interventions in the text’s formal, graphic and linguistic aspects. The aim is to identify and systematically compare variants of the poem across individual editions and to highlight the shifts leading to changes in textual structure, the graphic organisation of the stanza, and meaning. Through practical examples, the study demonstrates how the poetic text changes during the publishing process and how different editorial approaches influence the way the selected poem is read and interpreted.
The poem Lubinský z Lubiné a Rozína Milovská (Lubinský from Lubiná and Rozina Milovská) proves the syncretic nature of Bohuslav Tablic´s poetry. In the literary-historical overviews to date the accent has been placed on its didactic, even moralistic character, which is suggested by the subtitle as well as the basic plotline: the just punishment of a wrong deed, a violation of the moral law. The detailed analysis of the text questions the straight forward genre identification of it as a marketplace song having moralistic tendencies. The didactic principle is minimized - it is only used on the thematic level. Tablic carefully chose to use such means that help divert attention from the „warning story“ itself to the inner tragedy of the main character of Rozína – he tactically employed e.g. the motif of fear and mysteriousness, strong emotionality and suspense in the narration. Noticing the features moves the genre identification of this poem of Tablic´s closer to the ballad.
The article concentrates on the intertextuality of Celan, Rilke and Ryszard Krynicki (a Polish poet of the “New Wave” generation and translator of Celan´s poetry). Eugeniusz Tkaczyszyn-Dycki entitled one of his poetry books Poezja jako miejsce na ziemi (Poetry as a place on Earth). For the authors who she mentions in the article poetry is indeed a place to dwell. The reflections concentrate on biographical signals (chronotopic) encrypted in a poem (geo-poetry), also read out from a connected with (new) biographism – geo-poetic prospect (hermeneutics of the place and situation). To Paul de Man´s question, included in the article Autobiography as Defacemet whether an autobiography can be written in the form of a poem, it is fitting to answer that, indeed, it can. In the article the author associates geo-poetics with biographical orientation.
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