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http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3982 (Visiual Language, magazine)
Szkarosi, Endre
Arguing that modernization of expression is indispensible to modernization of perception, the author locates the origins of sound poetry in dada and futurism. While a precise definition is impossible for sound poetry, the problem of visual representation of sound or other sensory modalities, other than the visual, is examined. All this is by way of preamble to a discussion of Hungarian poetry's long history of musicality in which particular poets are cited. The context of avantgarde development, as colored by politics, both hot and cold, is also explored.
With the paradigmatically complex and quite often very specific developments of twentieth century's poetic practice, poetic activity continuously rediscovered the potentiality and efficiency of the oral and vocal dimension of language and expression. Evidently, as it is usual in the history of art and mankind's spiritual self-expression, the exploration of the huge field of vocality included experiments and experiences which not simply preceeded, but even came to full bloom together with the process of articulation of the expression itself. The exciting and interesting ancestral symbiosis of perception, cognition and expression makes this discourse much more complicated, but as we have not sufficient space to develop this in detail, for now we state that the modernization of expression is indispensable to the modernization of perception. Meanwhile, at the same time and evidently, the continuous articulation of the supply of expressive forms articulate the capacity and the special sensibility of perception and cognition as well.
This heroic period of the radical modernization of poetic language is attached, as it is quite well-known, above all to futurist and dadaist experiences (not undervaluing other sources of renewal). There was an extremely important precedent produced by symbolist poetry. It would be difficult to overestimate the significance of the recognition of the deep spiritual identity of poetic and musical experience (conception alized vigorously in Verlaine's famous Art poethique). Intuition leads to the theoretic separation of the language of poetry, on one hand, and the language of prose forms, on the other hand. It means that "literature" as an entity missing any essential link with musicality, will be separated from "poetry" which is identified more and more with music. This conception is materialized, in a way, in the vocal practice of futurist declamation and dadaist lautgedichte, and all the history of twentieth century poetic experimentation shows somehow the functionalization of musical parameters inherent in language, which earlier were neglected and taken as accidental or as less than secondary factors of linguistic expression. Futurism and mainly Marinetti's declamation harshly revitalize intonation, timbre, rhythm, volume and onomatopoeism. Dada's sound poetry eliminates the nearly obligatory semantic automatism in poetic communication, and focuses on the phoneme and letter as basic elements of the language of poetry. Later on, radical poetic experiments, engaged in sound experiences, tried and succeeded to penetrate the phoneme itself (see some congenial inventions of /sou) and/or functionalized the extralinguistic domain of speech activity (such as inspiration and expiration noises, articulation noises, groaning, sighing, whispering, howl, etc.). See for example, the heroic poetic efforts of Artaud. With the continuous development of the technical basis of civilization and, consequently, of artistic activity, the range of sound expression forms and possibilities and the domains to be yet explored have been incredibly widened. All the artists, poets and musicians, and all the participants and theoreticians of present day culture are or, if not, should be well aware of what has happened in this large field outlined by poetic, musical, artistic, performative activities. As a result, it is really difficult to qualify generically (within traditional categories), if a sound art work should be considered music, poetry, performance or a conceptual piece. (Many can find a generic identification in the intermedial range based on the conceptual symbiosis.)
That's why sound poetry has such a large number of identitying aspects - from the relatively purist tendencies of phonetic poetry (the early Heidsieck or Garnier, Ri.hm or Rotella) or minimalistic vocal poetry (Spatola or Lora-Totino) through Chopin's or Cobbing's or Dufrene's or The Four Horsemen's vocal noisism or Rothenberg's or Morrow's chanted poetry and through Blaine's or Minarelli's actional sound poetry up to clearly musical sound poetry (Amirkhanian, Stratos, Arcand, Fontana, Moss) or even to music engaged in linguistic experiences (Cage, Ashley, Bertoni-Serotti etc.), there is an abundant variety of genres and manners of expression in sound poetic activity. For this see, among others, Minarelli's articles and papers on the concept of polipoetic genres.
The process outlined above with regard to the development of vocal and sonoric functionalization of the language of poetry is encoded by the problem of visual components and carriers. On one hand written language - even as a score of human speech activity - serves as a two-dimensional starting point for vocal reinterpretation in oral poetry or declamation, which is already a three-dimensional creative action. Then in the process of this three-dimensional (re)creation, beyond vocal and musical parameters inevitably appear visual (gestual, ambient, scenic etc.) codes as can be clearly seen in the futurist declamation programme (Declamazione dinamica e sinottica) or in Ball's memoirs on the early formation of dadaist loutgedichte (Die Flucht aus der Zeit, Luzern, 1946). So modern sound poetry was born organically in a total space of creativity characterized by the simultaneous presence of linguistic, vocal-sonoric, gestural and actional elements.
A well-known question which has a paradigmatic evolution in recent art history, is this: how to restore the link backwards from acoustic codes to visuality - how to note a complex vocal-sonoric-actional art work with visual signs. Evidently, it is a question far beyond the problem of notation: visual scores evoking the original artistic act are more than a simple diagram or visual description. Visual notation must be an autonomous reinterpretation of the original artistic act, exactly the way declamation or sound poetry action was or could be a recreation of a written poem or of a visual work. The autonomy of single artistic spheres, connected by the processes of medial reinterpretation and recreation, is dialectically completed by the special creative nature of the intermedial artistic mind. The verification of this reciprocal continuity of medial reinterpretation and recreation can be seen in the practice of futurist paroliberismo and tavole parolibere, as autonomous visual poems often have their acoustic parallels in declamations which are often visually recoded in tavole porolibere as visual scores.
Since the question and its artistic solution is the problem of modern music's notation - which produced a highly interesting domain of intermedial contacts of "pure" modern music and visual art (see for example, some scores of Ligeti, Stockhausen, Xenakis, Boulez or others) - is relatively well-known. At this point we look to more radical steps in intermedial artistic concepts and in their linguistic and structural consequences: to Cage's conceptually redefined musical or performative instructions, to Higgins' conceptual scores interpretable both in a visual-conceptual and a musical-actional way.
After having outlined, even if in a summary way, the basical developments of the vocal-sonoric rearrangement of poetry and its visual consequences, let's see what has been going on in Hungary in the last few decades. As a short prehistory, we recognize that Hungarian poetry had a long tradition of - musicality - even virtuoso musicality. Great Hungarian poets such as Balint Balassi in the sixteenth century or Mihaly Csokonai Vitez at the turn of the eighteenth to nineteenth century, or Janos Arany in the second-half of the nineteenth century worked out an almost perfect sound for the language of Hungarian written poetry. Still, the conceptual recognition of the organic identity of poetry and music, and, together with that, the conceptual separation of poetry from "literature" realized by French symbolist poetry (evoked initially with Verlaine's famous poem) was not conceptualized at that time in Hungarian poetry. Nevertheless post-symbolic musicality was developed to an extensive level by the poets of the review Nyugat (West), which was a forum for the modernization in literature during the early twentieth century, in the poetry and in the rich translation activity of Dezso Kosztolanyi, Arpad Toth, Mihaly Babits. A totally new, proto-avant-garde sensibility and an adequate primary musicality of poetic language was found in the poetic work of one of the greatest Hangarian poets of all times, Endre Ady. This perceptive and linguistic modernization has an interesting parallel in the earIy music of Bela Bartok, essentially during the first two decades of the century.
These, events suggest a reciprocal co-penetration of music and poetry that might have consolidated in a rich generic range as in the case of futurist or dadaist practice, yet didn't. Furthermore, the first strong wave of historical avant-garde was signaled by the outstanding poet, writer, Lajos Kassdk. He is better known in Europe as a painter, great organizer and editor of important reviews such as A TETT (The Action), MA (Today), Munka (Work), Dokumentum etc. These took their first decisive inspiration from German-Austrian expressionism and, on the other hand, from cubism and, a bit Later, from constructivism. These were relatively purist tendencies, as they influenced almost exclusively fine arts, or - as in the case of expressionism - had a quite intense influence on artistic intentions and dynamism, but didn't radically upset the whole structure of poetic language. Kassak and his colleagues (such as Robert Bereny, Sandor Barta, Bela Uitz, Robert Reiter, Erzsi Ujvari, or for a period Laszlo Moholy-Nagy) formed a new artistic vision, launching a new practice in applied arts, typography, cover-- design etc., but essentially didn't integrate the asyntactic and asemantic use of poetic language. So, regarding the acoustic aspect of poetic language, instead of initiating any kind of vocal-sonoric poetry, the only relevant step done by them in this field, was the interesting practice of choir-recital of poems, an activity which had a progressive relevance both in cultural-sociological and in an artistic sense.
After the Versailles-Tria non peace treaties and, in a longer perspective between the two wars for a long list of historical reasons that cannot be detailed at the moment, this flrst strong avant-garde for wave practically stopped: because of an immense variety of consequences including the fatal mutilation of the country, the forced emigration of most of the avant-garde artists (even Kassak went on with his
activity for years in Vienna, where he had a memorable meeting with Marinetti) and the strong oppression of the then-new right-wing regime (most of the avant garde artists were engaged in more or less radical leftism).
After the second world war, Hungary experienced a new oppression, in the form of Stalinist dictatorship, when neither moderate nor conservative spiritual positions were tolerated. Despite the overtly oppressive nature of the Stalinist dictatorship in the 1950s, and then the incresingly disguised oppression of the long Kadar-era, due also to a complicated texture of various (sociological, political, cultural, etc.) effects and the new winds of the 1960s in Europe (which did not penetrate the frontier), nervertheless, a highly intensive new wave of neo-avant-garde thought developed in the late 1960s and in the early 1970s. The most progressive outcomes were in the field of experimental theater (see the extensive example of Kassak Studio, later, in emigration, Squat in New York) and in progressive pop music (see the multiple examples of Kex and Janos Baksa-Soos), but in fine arts and poetic practice important results were achieved. Still, the mostimportant influence of this new wave was the preforming of the artistic mind of the young generations, because of which from the late 1970s through the 1980s an over-all effective "parallel," independant, over-undergroundculture and art practice developed outside the official, monolithic institutions of the regime.
Perhaps for the first time in the history of Hungarian avant-garde movements, the dominating artistic trend was exactly this over-all view of art, the total co-penetrations of poetic, musical and artistic ideas. That's why music became so decisive for poetry as well as for art. The concert-theater situation and the rlative freedom offered by the means and effects of the same situation, produced a new space for artistic-- poetic-musical experimentation. A number of relevant groups formed -- and worked or have been working intensely -- artists, poets, musicians and all kinds of performers such as Bizottsag (Committee), Konnektor, BP Service, Lois Ballast, Art Deco, Jugo Tudosok (Yugoslavian Scientists) and so on.
It seemed evident that musical and visual space could have a strong influence on the use of poetic language, first on the level of vocality and then on the level of sonority and conceptuality. Nevertheless, real Hungarian sound poetry was put in motion outside Hungary.
In modem Hungarian poetry, between the two wars and after the second one, until the 196os, the only poet who occasionally went beyond the semantic border of language - from poetic musicality moved on towards abstract phonic possibilities inherent in language - was one of the greatest poets of this century, Sandor Webres. Hungarian sound poets of the first generation made sound tributes to him: Tibor Papp in his Pagan Rhythms and Katalin Ladik in her Group of phonemes or Panyigai, for example.
Katalin Ladik, poet, performer, actress, born in 1942 in Novi Sad, was a Yugoslavian citizen till the end of the 1980s. She published several books (both in Hungarian and in Serbian-Croatian) and had innumerable performances in Europe. But her most outstanding artistic expression is vocal art and sound poetry. Her international fame is due to her exceptional vocal capacity and voice training, and of course, to her deeply original poetic inventions in vocal expression. In her sound poetry activity an atavistic richness of body language sublimated in voice meets a folkloristically deeply colored linguistic background and an up-to-date modern sensibility. It is not surprising that her sound poetry works attracted the attention of Henri Chopin in 1979, in his monograph on international sound poetry (Poesie Sonore Internationale, Jean-Michel Place editor).
Tibor Papp was a 1956 refugee, living subsequently in Paris. In the first period of his sound poetry activity he concentrated mainly on verbal rhythms and the alternative or simultaneous adoption of French and Hungarian languages. He developed a large-scale cooperation with emigrant Hungarian avant-gardists (in Paris, with Pal Nagy and Alpar Bujdoso, edited for decades the most important review of Hungarian neo-avant-garde: Magyar Muhely [Atelier Hongois]), and similarly with French avantgarde artists, collaborating in Polyphonix group, with artists such as Jean-Jacques Lebel, Charles Dreyfuss etc. Since the i98os he has been engaged in computer poetry and created some original poetic programming software such as Distichon Alfa which can generate an almost endless number of distichons. At the same time he became a theoretician of computed-generated poetic language. Inside Hungary, in the 1970s more Hungarian poets - usually working in other forms of poetic selfexpression as well - started a real sound poetry practice, in which the inspiration and the influence of avant-garde movement of previous periods were quite decisive. One of them was yet more or less a foreigner: Istvan Kantor, for decades more known by his artist name Monty Cantsin. In the mid 197os, he left the country and lived primarily in Canada. He is a performance artist, musician, composer, with a profound sound poetic inspiration. In his songs, multimedia performances or other works vocal and verbal expression remains decisive.
Akos Szilagyi's sound poetry is inspired by the gap between the semantic and the phonetic level of language. He creates a permutative oral poetry in which the consistent alteration of the sound form of the same words or phrases leads to the continuous modification of semantic meaning. Using this method, the parallel development of the semantic and phonic modulations, inserted always in a very characteristic rhythmic composition, creates a deeply grotesque effect, which is, atthe same time, full of existential anxieties.
My own sound poetry activity which started at the end of the 1970s. In the initial period, musical inspiration was very strong in both in verbal/vocal and compositional sense. I worked out a sort of abstract sound poetry in which musical cues are decisive.The voice often ends up becoming sound with the sonority or musical complexity of the piece always important. I've been working continuously with bands (Szkarosi & Konnektor, Spiritus Noister, or even the English group Towering Inferno), consequently my poetry usually has a strong intermedial and/or performance character in which visuals and action - even if recently in a minimal way - become components of the whole (sound) poetic composition.
Following these poets which started their activity in the 1970s, Andras Petocz began to work with sound poetry in the ig8os, as one of the (then) young poets inspired by the more and more assiduous presence of Magyar Muhely in Hungary. Petocz's poetry essentially is based on the tradition of French phonetic poetry: the strong role of repetition is combined with a poetic language constructed of phonemes, syllables and relatively few words. He has been collaborating with the outstanding Hungarian composer, Laszlo Sary.
In the 1980s, too, artists and poets of other genres begin to work in the framework of sound poetry as well. Gabor Toth was known as a visual poet when he discovered for himself the language of vocality and sonority, creating a special mode of verbality and gesturality in his poetry. Recently he involved noisism in his practise as well and makes a sort of noise-di-poetry. As for noisism, one of the most original creations of the Hungarian avant-garde in the last decades is related to the activity of a selfmade artist. Since the early i98os, Viktor Lois has been constructing mobile sculpture-instruments from old household machines, waste and refuse. These constructions are, on one hand, authentic sculptures, on the other hand, they are moveable and in some way soundable as wind, plucked or percussive instruments. Their sound is electrically amplified. In order to explore the exciting possibilities of composition with these self-built instruments he has formed various groups (the best known is Lois Ballast) with which he participated in several festivals and tours in Europe. In recent years he has composed real songs using this instrumental basis with vocal contributions.
Evidently, the concept and even more the practice of sound poetry is extensive, and artists arrive in this field from various directions, from different studies and different experiences. Among sound poets, some arrive from textual poetry, some from fine arts and so on. It is obvious that a number of musicians have continuous contact with sound poetic activity, working in both fields (which often are not really separable). Such is the case of well known composer Laszlo Hortobagyi, whose music has a very strong individual character, synthesizing in its language high-tech contemporary expressive forms, deeply transposed ethnic instrumental and vocal traditions and new inventions based on much musical experience. It is the consistent presence of archaic and hypermodern forms of vocality in his compositions that make his work relevant from the standpoint of sound poetry.
Reviewing the development of Hungarian experimental culture as a whole from the mid 19705, the strong and decisive presence of musical expressive forms is more than characteristic. A number of new formations, forums, ways of expression and many artists form their thoughts and practice on the basis of musical experiences, using musical forms or inserting them somehow into their artworks. The analysis of this phenomenon could be the subject of a separate paper. But it is worth mentioning that in the 1990s this organic complexity of poetic experience seems to disappear in specialization: meanwhile artistic experiences (musical, actional, multimedia or intermedia activities) are involving more and more a verbal conceptuality, the so-called poetic activity turns back to linear forms. Interdisciplinary-minded artists who work with text, language or with any form of verbal expression, or poets who work in musical, visual or intermedial context, more and more consider themselves simply to be artists. They don't define themselves as poets. Is it the sign of a conceptual separation between two concepts of artistic praxis and existence: a traditional one and an experimental one? Will Verlaine's idea of the basic identity of poetry and music be revised?
ENDRE SZKAROSI
Vaci ut 34
1132 Budapest Hungary
** EndreSzkarosi teaches Italian Literature at Budapest University. He is a scholar of experimental poetry and an international performer. Included in many audio collections, he has organized many events related to sound poetry and polypoetry
Copyright Visible Language 2001
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Iranian Muslim Philosopher
965-1040
Abu Ali Hasan Ibn al-Haitham was one of the most eminent physicists, whose contributions to optics and the scientific methods are outstanding. Known in the West as Alhazen, Ibn al-Haitham was born in 965 A.D. in Basrah, and was educated in Basrah and Baghdad. Thereafter, he went to Egypt, where he was asked to find ways of controlling the flood of the Nile. Being unsuccessful in this, he feigned madness until the death of Caliph al-Hakim. He also travelled to Spain and, during this period, he had ample time for his scientific pursuits, which included optics, mathematics, physics, medicine and development of scientific methods on each of which he has left several outstanding books.
He made a thorough examination of the passage of light through various media and discovered the laws of refraction. He also carried out the first experiments on the dispersion of light into its constituent colours. His book Kitab-al-Manadhir was translated into Latin in the Middle Ages, as also his book dealing with the colours of sunset. He dealt at length with the theory of various physical phenomena like shadows, eclipses, the rainbow, and speculated on the physical nature of light. He is the first to describe accurately the various parts of the eye and give a scientific explanation of the process of vision. He also attempted to explain binocular vision, and gave a correct explanation of the apparent increase in size of the sun and the moon when near the horizon. He is known for the earliest use of the camera obscura. He contradicted Ptolemy's and Euclid's theory of vision that objects are seen by rays of light emanating from the eyes; according to him the rays originate in the object of vision and not in the eye. Through these extensive researches on optics, he has been considered as the father of modern Optics.
The Latin translation of his main work, Kitab-al-Manadhir, exerted a great influence upon Western science e.g. on the work of Roger Bacon and Kepler. It brought about a great progress in experimental methods. His research in catoptrics centred on spherical and parabolic mirrors and spherical aberration. He made the important observation that the ratio between the angle of incidence and refraction does not remain constant and investigated the magnifying power of a lens. His catoptrics contain the important problem known as Alhazen's problem. It comprises drawing lines from two points in the plane of a circle meeting at a point on the circumference and making equal angles with the norrnal at that point. This leads to an equation of the fourth degree.
In his book Mizan al-Hikmah Ibn al-Haitham has discussed the density of the atmosphere and developed a relation between it and the height. He also studied atmospheric refraction. He discovered that the twilight only ceases or begins when the sun is 19° below the horizon and attempted to measure the height of the atmosphere on that basis. He has also discussed the theories of attraction between masses, and it seems that he was aware of the magnitude of acceleration due to gravity.
His contribution to mathematics and physics was extensive. In mathematics, he developed analytical geometry by establishing linkage between algebra and geometry. He studied the mechanics of motion of a body and was the first to maintain that a body moves perpetually unless an external force stops it or changes its direction of motion. This would seem equivalent to the first law of motion.
The list of his books runs to 200 or so, very few of which have survived. Even his monumental treatise on optics survived through its Latin translation. During the Middle Ages his books on cosmology were translated into Latin, Hebrew and other languages. He has also written on the subject of evolution a book that deserves serious attention even today.
In his writing, one can see a clear development of the scientific methods as developed and applied by the Muslims and comprising the systematic observation of physical phenomena and their linking together into a scientific theory. This was a major breakthrough in scientific methodology, as distinct from guess and gesture, and placed scientific pursuits on a sound foundation comprising systematic relationship between observation, hypothesis and verification.
Ibn al-Haitham's influence on physical sciences in general, and optics in particular, has been held in high esteem and, in fact, it ushered in a new era in optical research, both in theory and practice.
By the time the Caliph had died, in 1021, Alhazen was teaching in Cairo, where he lived out his life. He spent much of his time conducting experiments, of which many involved a dark room with a hole in it. He hung five lanterns outside the room, adjacent to the wall with the hole, and noticed that there were five 'lights' on the wall inside his dark room. He would then place an obstruction between one of the lanterns and the hole, and observed one of the 'lights' on the wall disappear. Furthermore the lantern, the obstruction and the hole were in a straight line.
This demonstrated both that light travelled in straight lines and that, even though the light from the five lanterns all travelled through the little hole at the same time, it did not get mixed up: there were five 'lights' on the wall inside the room. He deduced that this is how the eye worked, which had been the subject of a long debate. Aristotle had believed the eye sent out rays to scan objects, but Alhazen believed the opposite to be true, that light was reflected into the eye from the things one observed, thus overturning a thousand years of scientific thought. His experiment was the first scientific description of the 'camera obscura' (dark room), the principle behind the pinhole camera.
Abu Ali al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham
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Born: 965 in (possibly) Basra, Persia (now Iraq)
Died: 1040 in (possibly) Cairo, Egypt
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Ibn al-Haytham is sometimes called al-Basri, meaning from the city of Basra in Iraq, and sometimes called al-Misri, meaning that he came from Egypt. He is often known as Alhazen which is the Latinised version of his first name "al-Hasan".
In particular this name occurs in the naming of the problem for which he is best remembered, namely Alhazen's problem:
Given a light source and a spherical mirror, find the point on the mirror were the light will be reflected to the eye of an observer.
We shall discuss this problem, and ibn al-Haytham's other work, after giving some biographical details. In contrast to our lack of knowledge of the lives of many of the Arabic mathematicians, we have quite a number of details of ibn al-Haytham's life. However, although these details are in broad agreement with each other, they do contradict each other in several ways. We must therefore try to determine which are more likely to be accurate. It is worth commenting that an autobiography written by ibn al-Haytham in 1027 survives, but it says nothing of the events his life and concentrates on his intellectual development.
Since the main events that we know of in ibn al-Haytham's life involve his time in Egypt, we should set the scene regarding that country. The Fatimid political and religious dynasty took its name from Fatimah, the daughter of the Prophet Muhammad. The Fatimids headed a religious movement dedicated to taking over the whole of the political and religious world of Islam. As a consequence they refused to recognise the 'Abbasid caliphs. The Fatimid caliphs ruled North Africa and Sicily during the first half of the 10th century, but after a number of unsuccessful attempts to defeat Egypt, they began a major advance into that country in 969 conquering the Nile Valley. They founded the city of Cairo as the capital of their new empire. These events were happening while ibn al-Haytham was a young boy growing up in Basra.
We know little of ibn al-Haytham's years in Basra. In his autobiography he explains how, as a youth, he thought about the conflicting religious views of the various religious movements and came to the conclusion that none of them represented the truth. It appears that he did not devote himself to the study of mathematics and other academic topics at a young age but trained for what might be best described as a civil service job. He was appointed as a minister for Basra and the surrounding region. However, ibn al-Haytham became increasingly unhappy with his deep studies of religion and made a decision to devote himself entirely to a study of science which he found most clearly described in the writings of Aristotle. Having made this decision, ibn al-Haytham kept to it for the rest of his life devoting all his energies to mathematics, physics, and other sciences.
Ibn al-Haytham went to Egypt some considerable time after he made the decision to give up his job as a minister and to devote himself to science, for he had made his reputation as a famous scientist while still in Basra. We do know that al-Hakim was Caliph when ibn al-Haytham reached Egypt. Al-Hakim was the second of the Fatimid caliphs to begin his reign in Egypt; al-Aziz was the first of the Fatimid caliphs to do so. Al-Aziz became Caliph in 975 on the death of his father al-Mu'izz. He was very involved in military and political ventures in northern Syria trying to expand the Fatimid empire. For most of his 20 year reign he worked towards this aim. Al-Aziz died in 996 while organising an army to march against the Byzantines and al-Hakim, who was eleven years old at the time, became Caliph.
Al-Hakim, despite being a cruel leader who murdered his enemies, was a patron of the sciences employing top quality scientists such as the astronomer ibn Yunus. His support for science may have been partly because of his interest in astrology. Al-Hakim was highly eccentric, for example he ordered the sacking of the city of al-Fustat, he ordered the killing of all dogs since their barking annoyed him, and he banned certain vegetables and shellfish. However al-Hakim kept astronomical instruments in his house overlooking Cairo and built up a library which was only second in importance to that of the House of Wisdom over 150 years earlier.
Our knowledge of ibn al-Haytham's interaction with al-Hakim comes from a number of sources, the most important of which is the writings of al-Qifti. We are told that al-Hakim learnt of a proposal by ibn al-Haytham to regulate the flow of water down the Nile. He requested that ibn al-Haytham come to Egypt to carry out his proposal and al-Hakim appointed him to head an engineering team which would undertake the task. However, as the team travelled further and further up the Nile, ibn al-Haytham realised that his idea to regulate the flow of water with large constructions would not work.
Ibn al-Haytham returned with his engineering team and reported to al-Hakim that they could not achieve their aim. Al-Hakim, disappointed with ibn al-Haytham's scientific abilities, appointed him to an administrative post. At first ibn al-Haytham accepted this but soon realised that al-Hakim was a dangerous man whom he could not trust. It appears that ibn al-Haytham pretended to be mad and as a result was confined to his house until after al-Hakim's death in 1021. During this time he undertook scientific work and after al-Hakim's death he was able to show that he had only pretended to be mad. According to al-Qifti, ibn al-Haytham lived for the rest of his life near the Azhar Mosque in Cairo writing mathematics texts, teaching and making money by copying texts. Since the Fatimids founded the University of Al-Azhar based on this mosque in 970, ibn al-Haytham must have been associated with this centre of learning.
A different report says that after failing in his mission to regulate the Nile, ibn al-Haytham fled from Egypt to Syria where he spent the rest of his life. This however seems unlikely for other reports certainly make it certain that ibn al-Haytham was in Egypt in 1038. One further complication is the title of a work ibn al-Haytham wrote in 1027 which is entitled Ibn al-Haytham's answer to a geometrical question addressed to him in Baghdad. Several different explanations are possible, the simplest of which being that he visited Baghdad for a short time before returning to Egypt. He may also have spent some time in Syria which would partly explain the other version of the story. Yet another version has ibn al-Haytham pretending to be mad while still in Basra.
Ibn al-Haytham's writings are too extensive for us to be able to cover even a reasonable amount. He seems to have written around 92 works of which, remarkably, over 55 have survived. The main topics on which he wrote were optics, including a theory of light and a theory of vision, astronomy, and mathematics, including geometry and number theory. We will give at least an indication of his contributions to these areas.
A seven volume work on optics, Kitab al-Manazir, is considered by many to be ibn al-Haytham's most important contribution. It was translated into Latin as Opticae thesaurus Alhazeni in 1270. The previous major work on optics had been Ptolemy's Almagest and although ibn al-Haytham's work did not have an influence to equal that of Ptolemy's, nevertheless it must be regarded as the next major contribution to the field. The work begins with an introduction in which ibn al-Haytham says that he will begin "the inquiry into the principles and premises". His methods will involve "criticising premises and exercising caution in drawing conclusions" while he aimed "to employ justice, not follow prejudice, and to take care in all that we judge and criticise that we seek the truth and not be swayed by opinions".
Also in Book I, ibn al-Haytham makes it clear that his investigation of light will be based on experimental evidence rather than on abstract theory. He notes that light is the same irrespective of the source and gives the examples of sunlight, light from a fire, or light reflected from a mirror which are all of the same nature. He gives the first correct explanation of vision, showing that light is reflected from an object into the eye. Most of the rest of Book I is devoted to the structure of the eye but here his explanations are necessarily in error since he does not have the concept of a lens which is necessary to understand the way the eye functions. His studies of optics did led him, however, to propose the use of a camera obscura, and he was the first person to mention it.
Book II of the Optics discusses visual perception while Book III examines conditions necessary for good vision and how errors in vision are caused. From a mathematical point of view Book IV is one of the most important since it discusses the theory of reflection. Ibn al-Haytham gave [1]:-
... experimental proof of the specular reflection of accidental as well as essential light, a complete formulation of the laws of reflection, and a description of the construction and use of a copper instrument for measuring reflections from plane, spherical, cylindrical, and conical mirrors, whether convex or concave.
Alhazen's problem, quoted near the beginning of this article, appears in Book V. Although we have quoted the problem for spherical mirrors, ibn al-Haytham also considered cylindrical and conical mirrors. The paper [36] gives a detailed description of six geometrical lemmas used by ibn al-Haytham in solving this problem. Huygens reformulated the problem as:-
To find the point of reflection on the surface of a spherical mirror, convex or concave, given the two points related to one another as eye and visible object.
Huygens found a good solution which Vincenzo Riccati and then Saladini simplified and improved.
Book VI of the Optics examines errors in vision due to reflection while the final book, Book VII, examines refraction [1]:-
Ibn al-Haytham does not give the impression that he was seeking a law which he failed to discover; but his "explanation" of refraction certainly forms part of the history of the formulation of the refraction law. The explanation is based on the idea that light is a movement which admits a variable speed (being less in denser bodies) ...
Ibn al-Haytham's study of refraction led him to propose that the atmosphere had a finite depth of about 15 km. He explained twilight by refraction of sunlight once the Sun was less than 19 below the horizon.
Abu al-Qasim ibn Madan was an astronomer who proposed questions to ibn al-Haytham, raising doubts about some of Ptolemy's explanations of physical phenomena. Ibn al-Haytham wrote a treatise Solution of doubts in which he gives his answers to these questions. They are discussed in [43] where the questions are given in the following form:-
What should we think of Ptolemy's account in "Almagest" I.3 concerning the visible enlargement of celestial magnitudes (the stars and their mutual distances) on the horizon? Is the explanation apparently implied by this account correct, and if so, under what physical conditions? How should we understand the analogy Ptolemy draws in the same place between this celestial phenomenon and the apparent magnification of objects seen in water? ...
There are strange contrasts in ibn al-Haytham's work relating to Ptolemy. In Al-Shukuk ala Batlamyus (Doubts concerning Ptolemy), ibn al-Haytham is critical of Ptolemy's ideas yet in a popular work the Configuration, intended for the layman, ibn al-Haytham completely accepts Ptolemy's views without question. This is a very different approach to that taken in his Optics as the quotations given above from the introduction indicate.
One of the mathematical problems which ibn al-Haytham attacked was the problem of squaring the circle. He wrote a work on the area of lunes, crescents formed from two intersecting circles, (see for example [10]) and then wrote the first of two treatises on squaring the circle using lunes (see [14]). However he seems to have realised that he could not solve the problem, for his promised second treatise on the topic never appeared. Whether ibn al-Haytham suspected that the problem was insoluble or whether he only realised that he could not solve it, in an interesting question which will never be answered.
In number theory al-Haytham solved problems involving congruences using what is now called Wilson's theorem:
if p is prime then 1 + (p - 1) ! is divisible by p .
In Opuscula ibn al-Haytham considers the solution of a system of congruences. In his own words (using the translation in [7]):-
To find a number such that if we divide by two, one remains; if we divide by three, one remains; if we divide by four, one remains; if we divide by five, one remains; if we divide by six, one remains; if we divide by seven, there is no remainder.
Ibn al-Haytham gives two methods of solution:-
The problem is indeterminate, that is it admits of many solutions. There are two methods to find them. One of them is the canonical method: we multiply the numbers mentioned that divide the number sought by each other; we add one to the product; this is the number sought.
Here ibn al-Haytham gives a general method of solution which, in the special case, gives the solution (7 - 1)! + 1. Using Wilson's theorem, this is divisible by 7 and it clearly leaves a remainder of 1 when divided by 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. Ibn al-Haytham's second method gives all the solutions to systems of congruences of the type stated (which of course is a special case of the Chinese Remainder Theorem).
Another contribution by ibn al-Haytham to number theory was his work on perfect numbers. Euclid, in the Elements, had proved:
If, for some k > 1, 2k - 1 is prime then 2k-1(2k - 1) is a perfect number.
The converse of this result, namely that every even perfect number is of the form 2k-1(2k - 1) where 2k - 1 is prime, was proved by Euler. Rashed ([7], [8] or [27]) claims that ibn al-Haytham was the first to state this converse (although the statement does not appear explicitly in ibn al-Haytham's work). Rashed examines ibn al-Haytham's attempt to prove it in Analysis and synthesis which, as Rashed points out, is not entirely successful [7]:-
But this partial failure should not eclipse the essential: a deliberate attempt to characterise the set of perfect numbers.
Ibn al-Haytham's main purpose in Analysis and synthesis is to study the methods mathematicians use to solve problems. The ancient Greeks used analysis to solve geometric problems but ibn al-Haytham sees it as a more general mathematical method which can be applied to other problems such as those in algebra. In this work ibn al-Haytham realises that analysis was not an algorithm which could automatically be applied using given rules but he realises that the method requires intuition. See [18] and [26] for more details.
Article by: J J O'Connor and E F Robertson
November 1999
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MacTutor History of Mathematics
http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Mathematicians/Al-Haytham.html
ABU ALI HASAN IBN AL-HAITHAM (ALHAZEN) (965 - 1040 AD)
Al-Haitham, known in the West as Alhazen, is considered as the father of modern optics. Ibn al-Haitham was born in 965 C.E. in Basrah (present Iraq), and received his education in Basrah and Baghdad. He traveled to Egypt and Spain. He spent most of his life in Spain, where conducted research in optics, mathematics, physics, medicine and development of scientific methods.
Al-Haitham conducted experiments on the propagation of light and colors, optic illusions and reflections. He examined the refraction of light rays through transparent medium (air, water) and documented the laws of refraction. He also carried out the first experiments on the dispersion of light into colors. In detailing his experiment with spherical segments (glass vessels filled with water), he came very close to discovering the theory of magnifying lenses which was developed in Italy three centuries later. It took another three centuries before the law of sines was proposed by Snell and Descartes.
His book Kitab-al-Manazir was translated into Latin in the Middle Ages, as also his book dealing with the colors of sunset. He dealt at length with the theory of various physical phenomena such as the rainbow, shadows, eclipses, and speculated on the physical nature of light. Roger Bacon (thirteenth century), Pole Witelo (Vitellio) and all Medieval Western writers on Optics base their optical work primarily on Al-Haitham's 'Opticae Thesaurus.' His work also influenced Leonardo da Vinci and Johann Kepler. His approach to optics generated fresh ideas and resulted in great progress in experimental methods.
Al-Haitham was the first to describe accurately the various parts of the eye and gave a scientific explanation of the process of vision. He contradicted Ptolemy's and Euclid's theory of vision that the eye sends out visual rays to the object; according to him the rays originate in the object of vision and not in the eye. He also attempted to explain binocular vision, and gave a correct explanation of the apparent increase in size of the sun and the moon when near the horizon. He is known for the earliest use of the Camera Obscura.
In Al-Haitham's writings, one finds a clear explanation of the development of scientific method, the systematic observation of physical phenomena and their relationship to theory.
His research in optics focused on spherical and parabolic mirrors and spherical aberration. He made the important observation that the ratio between the angle of incidence and refraction does not remain constant and investigated the magnifying power of a lens. His catoptrics contains the important problem known as Alhazen's problem. It comprises drawing lines from two points in the plane of a circle meeting at a point on the circumference and making equal angles with the normal at that point. This leads to an equation of the fourth degree. He also solved the shape of an aplantic surface for reflection.
In his book Mizan al-Hikmah, Al-Haitham has discussed the density of the atmosphere and developed a relation between it and the height. He also studied atmospheric refraction. He discovered that the twilight only ceases or begins when the sun is 19o below the horizon and attempted to measure the height of the atmosphere on that basis. He deduced the height of homogeneous atmosphere to be 55 miles.
In mathematics, he developed analytical geometry by establishing linkage between algebra and geometry.
Al-Haitham wrote more than two hundred books, very few of which have survived. His monumental treatise on optics has survived through its Latin translation. During the Middle Ages his books on cosmology were translated into Latin, Hebrew and other European languages.
by Dr. A. Zahoor
Eliminem la lectura en veu alta eliminem la lectura ...
Poesia T/47 (p. 19) Guillem Viladot
Faithful to the visual culture of our times, the Basque author Ainize Txopitea offers us a series of poster-images which are, to a certain degree, visual poems that share a current subject: violence. Sign and fate of our age, social, political, sexual, informative, cultural and counter-cultural violence has become our shadow accompanying us at any time and everywhere.
The artist, receptive to our daily and anonymous shouts, unmasks motivated historical disasters in the twinkling of an eye, creating a language or a “Langu(im)age”, which is a chronicle of desolated and violated worlds. Ainize images produce a visual chronicle of critique and denounce; a visual writing of protest against violence of any type, against the spirit’s death and against the notion of art understood in compartments of separate disciplines.
Txopitea’s “Cartelería Poética” includes 24 posters and it opens up its doors with an epigraph by Joan Brossa that refers to the eternal dilemma of tempus fugit and the importance of getting the “essential things” at the first glimpse. The author locates its spectators within this belief, so important by the avant-garde artists of all times, by using mainly a visual language. And by just taking a look at these posters we can recognize the speed at which certain contents are emitted and perceived. This makes possible to transmit a series of sensations and emotions which are related to the thematic of violence with a minimal verbal syntax focused in lexical variants but making us paying attention to color and a selection of icons from popular culture.
The minimal verbal syntax of these posters, although static, acquires a degree of dynamism that is in consonance with the graphic images of the poems. An outstanding aspect is for example, the combination of simple verbal games of associative and dissimilative nature, which gives body to the visual content in which they are inserted. We can read for instance in two different posters: M ATAME and MATAMATA-.
There are several lexical combinations such as: Kill me (MATAME), or Tie me (ATAME) and Kill Kill (MATA), Tie, Tie (ATA), Love (AMA). At first we may think that the author is evoking in us a locus amoenus of love and mysticism but in the whole context these verbal games acquire a critical and demystifying tone against the exploitation of certain stereotypes produced by the mass media (film industry, consumerist propaganda, etc.). The verbal components employed in this series of posters are a recurrent element that reinforces the central theme of her critique against violence.
With regards to the visual aspect of these images, the technique of collage becomes a functional element in relation to the theme of violence, creating a fast and sharp sort of pace. Another technique, the accumulation of elements, icons, objects in a single image, acts in a similar functional way, increasing a degree of tension. In addition, the dissimilar nature of objects and icons included, reinforces a sense of chaos and urban noises, basic condition of today’s human being. Another compositional and graphic element, original in these posters that emphasizes vertical and tense territories is the use of a visual background composed of pixels, squares, and black and white dots. This evidences not only a techno-graphic awareness but also a thematically functional visual writing.
Another significant element of this visual writing stands out by the recurrent use of chromatic contrasts such as –black and white and black and red-. These visual contrasts stress the theme of violence. Passion, sensuality (symbolized in the myth of Lauren Bacal), sex, blood, death (the gas children and the nazi’s swastika), pain and incomprehension (Fridha), terrorism, Iraq (Bush), violence on the streets, anonymous voices in protest (graffiti), are only some of the main messages emitted in these image collages.
The first visual poem of this series is “Ser Palabra” (To be Word), where violence acts as a weapon to our external senses: sight, smell, taste. The woman’s face of the poem is shut up. She cannot speak, she cannot see, and she cannot smell. Also, the absence of color in the poem reinforces, in this case, the theme of violence. The scissors in the mouth and nose of the woman and the letters covering her eyes can be interpreted here as an omnipresent and repressive social apparatus. This visual poem is a poem of urgency, panic, pain, and also of the death of the spirit. It is a poem in black and white with a crossword as a background, with spaces in black and white to fill out; spaces that are symbolic of young people making decisions and pastimes stepping at us with the sign of a crisis. The same concept of crossword acts as a leitmotif of the “Cartelería Poética” offering us a world to decipher in verbal-visual codes.
As we can see, in these poems the author does not use the attractive element of nostalgia evoking wonderful past or lost paradises. These images pretend to be a chronicle of the barbaric acts –individual or collective- of our historical times charged with the multiple signs of violence, emptiness, pain and desperation. The death of the spirit and the death of the body present themselves as a compulsory result of our acts that are neither fecund nor natural, filling out the black and white spaces of the crosswords/world that we are living in.
The main theme of these posters is not new neither the visual techniques used by the author. By using materials and techniques common to the visual arts, she “speaks” to us about one of the biggest crises of our epoch. Fragmentation and multiplicity operate as ethic and aesthetic elements of her visual writing. What the author offers us is neither a visual nor a verbal delight to escape from the daily conflicts. She is not interested in a visual locus amoenus but in a recyclable and significant space that in just a few seconds offers us critical, esthetic and political flashes, about dark aspects of our world dominated by stress and emptiness.
The author following Joan Brossa and other pioneers in this interdisciplinary and hybrid language uses several languages to produce a synaesthetic message which includes more than only one language, verbal or conceptual. Her visual poems are away from gender and genre limitations and do not impose limits to our perception, which “speaks” to us through a variety of languages such as color, image, graphic techniques, and words.
As a complementary reading to her “Cartelería Poética” it is necessary to see her web page, especially the section entitled “Experimental Poetry”: http://www.cyberpoetry.net/web_content/menu.html . In this site we are offered visual, cybernetic and kinetic poems open to lexical and therefore semantic variants. But these poems in order to exist do need the physical participation of the reader. At the beginning we see a static matrix of letters that can be activated by clicking a bottom and we can stop this activation at any moment by clicking the bottom again. When we stop it, at that precise moment we materialize a unique reading, and poem by deactivating other readings, and other poems. In this writing, time and space are two determining factors of the semantics of the poem. Mobility has become here an essential valence.
Behind this poetic production the author apply principles of the theory of Chaos and of Fractal Geometry, communicating among other things, an intrinsic conception of the mechanics of the universe as something open and dynamic but at the same time with certain patrons and order beneath Chaos.
Without any doubts Ainize Txopitea has in her artistic career a wide repertoire of visual writings, being Fractal Writing, a pioneer in the Hispanic poetic world.
*****************************************************
Laura López Fernández
laura.lopez-fernandez@canterbury.ac.nz
University of Canterbury
New Zealand
Knighton, Mark
Maria Rubins. Crossroad of Arts, Crossroad of Cultures: Ecphrasis in Russian and French Poetry. New York: Palgrave, 2000. ix, 302 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $55.00, cloth.
Maria Rubins offers a comprehensive account of two separate traditions of ecphrastic writing: one culminating in the French Parnassian movement of the 1860s and 1870s and the other in Russian Acmeism, starting from 1911. She settles on a simple and flexible definition of ecphrasis as a "type of text," regardless of genre, which describes a work of visual art. The introductory chapter, perhaps the best in the book, gives a brief survey of some classic texts and ends with a "structural model of ecphrasis," a concise and illuminating schema which takes into account virtually all of the structural elements that may be found in texts that have pictures, sculpture, or architecture as their subject. Rubins does not draw the line at ecphrasis, however, and deals with pictorialism in the broadest sense, from the use of colour epithets to almost any sort of visually evocative language.
One of the attractions of ecphrasis for poets is the opportunity it offers to meditate on the nature of art itself, yet Rubins downplays this "metapoetic" dimension, especially among the Parnassians, who valued it more as an escape from Romantic subjectivity or from a sense of historical decline into a world rendered clear, stable and durable by art. Different writers have put painting, sculpture and architecture to very different uses, and the ecphrastic treatment of each medium has its own traditions and conventions. Rather than providing a systematic analysis of the uses to which poets have put the various media, Rubins tends to address these matters ad hoc as they arise in her readings of poetic texts.
Having at least broached most of the theoretical issues involved, Rubins launches into a survey of the French tradition of pictorialism, concentrating on the work of the Parnassians Heredia, Leconte de Lisle, Banville and especially Gautier. Baudelaire is also enlisted as an honorary member. She deals quickly with pre-Romantic French literature, then singles out Hugo, especially in Les Orientales, and Sainte-Beuve's Joseph Delorme as immediate influences on the Parnassians. Among distinctly Parnassian features she lists neoclassical respect for clarity and form and a preference for the distinct outlines of the visual arts as opposed to "insubstantial," evanescent music, the art form especially favoured by the Romantics. Stasis and clarity are enlivened by eclectic cultural references: orientalism, exoticism and a fresh approach to the classical and medieval visual legacy.
The "Parnassian roots of the Acmeist movement," already well attested in both primary and secondary sources, are the subject of the third chapter. The influence of Parnasse is seen primarily in the Acmeists' esteem for technique and craftsmanship over inspiration, in their emulation of the visual and plastic arts and in their fondness for metaphors involving architecture and stone as the archetypal artistic medium. Other affinities between Parnasse and Acmeism include an admiration for Francois Villon, a fascination with medieval art, and the cultivation of the sonnet form. Partly in reaction to the metaphysical orientation of their Symbolist elders, the Acmeists favoured organicist metaphors for creativity. Rubins does not see this as a legacy of Parnasse, but suggests that it does reflect contemporary styles in the visual arts, especially art nouveau. As with the Parnassians, the cult of form went together, at least in Gumilev, with an appetite for exoticism.
By this point, the case for Parnassian influence on the Acmeists, incontrovertible as it is, begins to sound overstated, but Rubins corrects the imbalance in the following two chapters by pointing out that Parnassian elements had already been thoroughly assimilated by the Symbolists, especially those of the first wave and especially by Briusov, who managed to be both a Parnassian after the fact and an Acmeist avant la lettre. Thus the Acmeists had the advantage of a stereoscopic view of Parnassian aesthetics.
The background to Acmeism is further fleshed out in a "Trio from the Acmeist Entourage: Annensky, Voloshin and Kuz'min." All three poets were conversant with French traditions and had a very sophisticated approach to visual art, and they incorporated it into their poetry to a greater degree than perhaps any of the Symbolists except Briusov. Thus the immediate Russian context out of which Acmeism arose seems to have been richer in its imaginative engagement with the visual arts than Parnasse itself.
Among the many other examples taken from pre-Acmeist Russian literature are Tolstoy's use of portraiture in Anna Karenina, Gogol's demonic "Portrait," and Holbein's "Descent from the Cross" in The Idiot. Rubins sensibly does not linger over the most famous example of ecphrasis in the nineteenth century, Pushkin's Bronze Horseman, but distinguishes it from many other instances of literary statues coming to life: "the animation of statues in Pushkin is a fact of life, albeit a supernatural one, and not a rhetorical device to indicate how lifelike the sculpture appears."
Most surprising is the omission of any reference to Baratynskii's version of Pygmalion in "Skul'ptor" (1841), a crucial link in the tradition of sculptural metaphor from Ovid and Michelangelo up to the Symbolists, who valued its insights into the erotic element of artistic creativity and the interrelationship between medium, content, and form. Erotic and gender-determined aspects of visual perception figure in Rubins' analyses of certain texts, notably Gautier's "A une robe rose," Gumilev's "Perseus" and some poems of Akhmatova in which her lyric persona confronts a rival beauty in statues or portraits.
The last and longest chapter is a catalogue of the diverse uses to which ecphrasis and pictorialism are put in the work of Gumilev, Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Komarovsky, Odoevtseva and Georgy Ivanov. As in the rest of the book there is a vast range of references here: Persian miniatures and Chinese poetry (via Judith Gautier) in Gumilev; the vogue for Italy inherited from the Symbolists; japonisme and art nouveau in Akhmatova; architecture and the cinema in Mandelstam and neoclassical statuary in Komarovsky, Ivanov and Odoevtseva. A recurrent theme in Rubins' remarks is the Acmeists' use of visual metaphor as a reflection of their "nostalgia for world culture," and a means of recapturing and enlivening the cultural heritage through dynamic language and stable forms. There is an inadvertent diminuendo effect in this chapter as it moves from major to minor figures and we end up with Komarovsky, Odoevtseva and the early Georgy Ivanov, in whom familiar themes are encountered in rather conventional and even hackneyed forms.
Rubins concludes by drawing a distinction between the French and Russian movements. She regards the Parnassians as escapists from contemporary life, using pictorialism to create a parallel reality of perfected forms, whereas the Acmeists used ecphrasis to bring the artistic legacy into contact with contemporary reality, to reactivate the aesthetic values of the past and thus realize a modernist aim of eclectic cultural unity.
It is difficult to summarize a book that is so extraordinarily rich in interesting detail and which touches on so many themes, and yet lacks an overall, governing argument. The structure is basically a writer-by-writer, text-by-text survey of interesting examples, with background information adduced as needed. Thus some remarks on visual features in Akhmatova lead to an excursus on japonisme in France and Russia which, though extremely interesting in itself, is out of all proportion to the few, elegant lines it was supposed to elucidate. While one would like to commend the use of versified translations (from various sources) instead of the usual prose paragraphs, the results here are too often inadequate and sometimes inept, as when pafosskij (Paphian) is rendered as "Pathian," or "alleja" as "alley." Fortunately, the same cannot be said of Rubin's prose, which is clear, brisk and unflagging. She gives us perceptive and imaginative analyses of a great many texts and is generous in providing background on the poets and contexts for their poems. This remarkably lively and readable survey is sure to launch many more closely focused studies, and the opening discussion of the structure of ecphrastic texts will no doubt become a standard reference.
Mark Knighton, Memorial University of Newfoundland
Copyright Canadian Assosciation of Slavists Sep-Dec 2002
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved
Tatiana Nazarenko
The synthesis of the verbal and the visual message can be observed in many early literary works from various cultures. The earliest literary sources, with unconventional textual configuration, known as technopeignia,1 were created in the Hellenistic period (between 325 B.C.E. and C.E. 200) by individuals such as Simmias of Rhodos and Theocritus. These were followed by a few Byzantine pattern poems, tabuloe iliacce by the Rome-based Greek poet Theodoros (between 50 B.C.E. and C.E. 50), anonymous Greek and Latin samples from early Christian period, some shaped texts by two Latin poets Lavius (Ist century C.E.) and Optatian (fl. C.E. 325),2 and versus intexti invented by latter.3 The listing of the Eastern Slavic visual texts traditionally begins with the Baroque period. Ivan Velychkovskyi (seventeenth century) and Mytrofan Dovhalevskyi (eighteenth century) are usually referred to as the poets who made the most valuable contribution to the development of Ukrainian visual poetry; while the Russian court poet of Belarusian descent, educated in Ukraine, Samuil Petrovskii-Sitnianovich, known by his monastic name Simeon Polotskii (1629-1680), is credited as the author of Russian carmina figurata. Even though Ukrainian visual poetry was fully established within the framework of the Baroque period, and in Russia this poetic form originated in the Baroque era, Eastern Slavic visual writing has a longer tradition than it is commonly believed.
It is difficult to establish exactly when Eastern Slavic visual writing originated. However, its introduction was unquestionably connected with the conversion of Kievan Rus' to Christianity. Christianity, which came from Greek Byzantium,4 bringing with it the verbal culture of Constantinople.5 The Greek Orthodox Church introduced Byzantine education, literature and art to its newly converted neighbour, thus setting grounds for a new literary activity in Kievan Rus'. The works, which reached the Eastern Slavs were exclusively religious texts, "oriented towards establishing proper monastic habits than toward serious systematic theology or philosophical inquiry."6 They met the Christian demands in the Kievan land, and therefore served their purpose. No doubt, they were not the finest part of the Byzantium literary tradition. However, the question of the existence of the Byzantine visual poetry (or visual literature in general) as a popular, or at least developed literary genre remains open. Visual poetry expert, Dick Higgins, who documented several Byzantine pieces of pattern poetry,7 doubts the potential of the Byzantine culture, which influenced the Kievan literature, to develop visual poetry as a specific poetic form. In his opinion, formally conservative Byzantine literature "is not notably visual" and thus "it is not the sort of milieu where one might expect to find much pattern poetry," although some pieces do exist.8 Nonetheless, Higgins suggests that the pillage of the Byzantine libraries in 1204 during the Fourth Crusade, as well as the collapse of Constantinople in 1453, might quite possibly have resulted in the destruction of many manuscripts.9
The question of the possible import of this intellectual product from Byzantium to the Kievan Rus' is more complex. Western and Eastern European scholars both share the opinion that Byzantine literature was represented in the diversity of genres and forms of both religious and secular writing. There is little plausibility, however, that Byzantium could direct secular literature to the newly converted lands. The literary works which continued "the antique practice in the most refined traditions of formalism and scholastic casuistry and which were created for the Byzantine nobility" had never been exported to the Kievan Rus' which was perceived as a Byzantine cultural colony.10
The works, which were sent to Kievan Rus', either met the most imperative needs of the Christian religious leaders or else they could promote by their specific features and content the Byzantine cultural hegemony over the "barbarians" who had to be "civilized."11 It is debateable whether that the "dogmatically narrow framework served to retard rather than encourage the development of verbal culture"12 among the Eastern Slavs, and yet these religious texts, however narrow and unsophisticated their application, were the most available material for the development of a written culture in the Kievan Rus'.
Byzantine religious books were originally hand copied. Calligraphy and ornamentation was widely used in the layouts of the exported religious texts and it inspired Kievan copyists and authors in their own artistic pursuits. According to Dmitrii Likhachev in Kievan Rus' literature "a word and the image were linked closer than in the modern time."13 The artistic representation was based on religious and secular texts; art illustrated scenes from the Scriptures and Apocrypha, vitae of saints and martyrs, or various events from chronicles. In their creative interpretation, medieval artists often made up for the deficiency of the textual expressiveness. Thus, "the word itself was the basis for many works of art serving as a peculiar 'protograph' or `archetype."'14 The oldest dated monument of East Slavic literature, the Ostromir Gospel (1056-1057) was richly adorned with variegated floral ornamentation, frames and the sophisticated design of the initial letters. The Izbornik (Miscellany) of 1073-the collection of theological texts, historical essays as well as a treatise on poetics copied from the Bulgarian original for Prince Sviatoslav of Kiev-apart from the decorative elements contains fragments of shaped texts whose meaning is partially conveyed by the way they look on the page. In the Izbornik of 1076(15)-a compilation of religious and moral advice for laymen-the technique of figurative chapter tailpieces was used for both practical and artistic purposes. This tendency towards rich visual and verbal ornamentation is noticeable in other literary works of eleventh-twelfth centuries. As Dmytro Chyzhevskyi observes,
[T]he 11th and the beginning of the 12th century were in Byzantium and in the West a period of transition to the "highly ornate" and "amplified" style. This process of transition took place both in Byzantine literature and in the Latin literature of Western Europe, as well as in the national languages where such already existed. This literary transition among the Eastern Slavs merely proves that the Eastern Slavs were part of all-European world of letters and underwent the same processes. Important influences from the West were possible among the eastern Slavs mainly through Byzantine mediation.16
In his study of early Slavic literature, Chyzhevskyi pays attention primarily to the variety of ornamental adornments in the style and the complexity of East Slavic literature of the eleventh-thirteenth centuries. He notes that a profuse and consistent application of artistic devices and symbolic imagery (especially when symbols are used exclusively for the purpose of stylistic ornamentation) often conceals "entirely the leading thought of the work."17 The same tendency towards a more complicated visual composition was one of characteristics of early East Slavic manuscripts, which contained lavishly adorned coloured illuminations, highly decorative frontispieces, tail-pieces and initial letters of each chapter or section, etc. The period of the eleventh-twelfth centuries is rightfully considered to be the Golden Age of the Kievan literature, when the most valuable works of the Eastern Slavic legacy were created. At the same time, the art of manuscript ornamentation was highly developed and the traditions of the manuscript layout and decoration were set. These traditions, as well as the influence of the Kievan literary school in a broad sense, were quite noticeable in later centuries in the new cultural centres of Southern and later Northern Rus', even after Kiev's cultural expansion gradually decreased and finally ended. Thus, describing the Old Slavic page layout, the well-known Russian palaeographer Karskii refers to several postscripts in the form of a circle or a funnel in the Russian manuscripts of the fifteenth century. Further he states that in the sixteenth century, this manner of writing was transferred to the first printed books18 (Fig. 1). However, the same funnel-like ending appeared for the first time (or at least was documented) in the Kievan Izbornik (Miscellany) of 1076 (Fig. 2), drawing the reader's attention to the completion of a text fragment in a distinctly eye-pleasing manner and simultaneously diversifying the page layout.
Kievan manuscript ornamentation was based on two principle styles: the geometrical one, borrowed from Byzantium and widely used in the eleventh-twelfth centuries, and the teratological (concerned with the depiction of monsters and other fantastic creatures), which was most probably adopted from Bulgaria and flourished from the second part of the thirteenth up to the fifteenth century. The conversion from the geometrical to the teratological style was prepared by the kind of transitional style or manner known as "barbaric." This manner was geometrical in its nature, although its elements were visibly distorted and decorated by faunal patterns instead of floral ones. Generally, Kiev and Novgorod calligraphers imitated the elaborate Byzantine style with a high degree of accuracy and skill, while the provincial scribers and draughtsmen, who in most cases could not understand the details of Byzantine ornamentation, simplified and mixed them with their own ethnic motifs in the process of copying.19 The "living creature" motif, whether it was a bird, a snake, an animal or a human being, was the dominant one in the "barbaric" manner. Later this tendency was developed by the teratological style, where the initial not only freed the motif of the "living creature" but also "gave it an independent meaning by turning it into a kind of miniature, which in most cases could not be easily recognized as a definite letter."20 It is interesting that this approach to a typesetting which is meant to be perceived as an art work in addition to its function as an orthographic symbol, was revived by the twentieth-century graphics and poets, primarily concerned with the pictorial dimensions of letters. In 1917-1919 the Ukrainian graphic artist Heorhii Narbut created fifteen alphabet compositions for his incomplete series Abetka [Alphabet] employing stylized letter, some of which show a resemblance to early Kievan manuscript initials (Fig. 3) The "poezographical" compositions of Ukrainian practitioners Tetiana and Volodymyr Chuprynin are first and foremost perceived as refined works of graphic art. In each composition the letters are arranged in a sequence in perspective which spell out the definite word, i.e. mif [myth] (Fig. 4), and dim [house or home] (Fig. 5), while at the same time provide the viewer with an elaborate motif. Beginning in 1928 Russian born artist Romain de Tirtoff known as Erte started creating his famous alphabet shaping anthropomorphized letters. In writing his own name in stylized format the artists occasionally used Old Church Slavonic titlo over the last letter of his name. Currently, both Ukrainian visual poet and graphic artist Myroslav Korol' and Ukrainian-Canadian visual practitioner, Jars Balan, have created composition in a similar anthropomorphic vein, with personalized letterforms and typographical signs distorted in a pictorial fashion.
It is debatable whether the Baroque creators of the carmina curiosa (whose accomplishments are consciously employed by the contemporary visualists) were aware of the legacy of the Kievan period. However, Mykola Soroka, researching Ukrainian sixteenth-eighteenth centuries visual poetry links it to the first experimentation with the text and the visual image attempted by the early Kievan authors.21
In Kievan manuscripts, individual letters, especially initials, were created as a separate composition or miniature, standing apart from the body of the text. Other decorative elements (multi-coloured drawings, ornamentations, illuminations, etc.) were often inserted into the text and even interfered with the discourse itself. They both illustrated the text and provided its commentary by using ample explicative devices.22 The specific layout of early East Slavic manuscripts considerably influenced the reader's perception of the text as an integral part of the whole body of the work. The same tendency can be traced in the medieval icon-painting. Most captions and inscriptions accompanying the pictorial images were not mechanically transferred from the known texts but skilfully adjusted to the particular pictorial setting.23 As Likhachev suggests:
A word appeared not only in its auditory essence but also in its visual context. It was not just a word in the general sense but a specific word of a specific text. To a certain extent it was also timeless. That is why the captions were so organically integrated into composition, becoming an ornamental element of the icon. And that is why it was so important to embellish the text with initials and miniatures, to produce a beautiful page, even write with a beautiful stroke.24
Together with the period's highly elevated style, this fusion of verbal and visual devices represented "the world in considerably more vivid colours, with stress on its luxury, riches, colours, and gold..."25 in both a literal and figurative sense.
Probably, the most interesting and original examples of Kievan visualized and ornamented texts are represented by the medieval graffiti. The graffiti messages deal with both religious (mostly supplications to God and saints) and secular matters. The latter form only a small part of the Kievan epigraphic legacy, as the clergy persistently destroyed them for censorship reasons.26 It is possible to suggest that graffiti's authors enjoyed a greater freedom of expression than did medieval manuscript copyists or icon-painters, as in most cases their creative endeavours were not commissioned. Admittedly, Byzantine ornamental tradition influenced the way graffiti were shaped and arranged in the interiors (and to a lesser extent in the exteriors, where in most cases they have not survived) of the eleventh-thirteenth century architectural monuments, as some graffiti demonstrated their authors' familiarity with the technique of manuscript ornamentation.27 And yet the graffiti's authors often resorted to challenging experimentation.
The richest graffiti collection (416 inscriptions) is preserved in St. Sophia Cathedral, the Byzantine style cathedral modelled on the Hagia Sophia of Constantinople. It was completed in 1037 at the height of Kievan Rus' during the reign of Prince Iaroslav the Wise. Among other monuments notable for their epigraphical findings from that period, are the Golden Gates and the Vydubychy Monastery in Kiev (both built in the eleventh century), churches and edifices above catacombs as well as in caves of the eleventh-century Kievan Cave Monastery, the twelfth-century Church of St. Cyril in Kiev and the eleventhcentury Sophia Cathedral in Novgorod.28
The shape and spatial arrangement in Kievan and Novgorodian graffiti, as well as the make-up and size of letters vary considerably, thus attracting the eye by visual form in addition to the message itself.29 Some medieval inscriptions and drawings strike one by their refined technique and apparent artistic qualities. Thus, a gravestone inscription in the Near Caves of the Kievan Cave Monastery dating from 1150, attracts attention by its truly calligraphic properties (Fig. 6). The letters of the inscription are neat, clearly cut, well-balanced and elegant. The text is aligned properly, as if on a page. The visual power of the image is intensified by the red paint inserted into each individual letter.30 The carving was obviously done by a professional literate copyist. It is readily visible that the letters resemble the decorative style characteristic of Medieval Slavic manuscripts, although the inscription is carved on the sandstone. In fact, many scholars observe that in terms of their decorative character, many Kievan graffiti are highly reminiscent of the early Christian texts or metal engravings, which typically adorned chalices, crosses and other objects of early Eastern Slavic culture.31 Being informative messages, they simultaneously perform an explicit aesthetic function.
Some Kievan graffiti are framed. This framing device intensifies the graphic properties of the message by visually singling it out from the rest of the mural inscriptions. Occasionally the framed text is shaped as a triangle or trapezium, strengthening its visual potential, since the diagonal line is generally perceived as more exciting and sensational.32 In this case as both the frame and the shape compliments each other (Fig. 7).
Other graffiti are decorated with various symbols and pictorial images. Religious images (accompanying or overlapping the graffiti) are usually identified as "symbolic drawings,"33 although their actual meaning can be interpreted in various ways, especially if the inscription resists decoding. This category includes the diverse Christian crucifixes (varying in their design and configuration), monograms of Jesus Christ, praying hands, images of prelates or saints, or various magic signs. Some of the symbolic drawings possess a complex if not technically sophisticated design, such as the documented magic sign, based on the four-ended cross, whose extended beams are transformed into a complicated weave, located in the north-west tower of the Kievan St. Sophia Cathedral.34 On all sides of the sign, the monograms of Jesus Christ are noticeable. However, the image's semantics remain unclear.
Another example of a composition containing a symbolical meaning is the one in the apse of the St. Michael side-altar in the same cathedral. It depicts a militant looking warrior (or a regal ruler with a mace) strangling a snake, which typically represents the devil in Christian lore,35 and for an enemy in Old Slavic folklore (Fig. 8). Due to the fact that the composition is located in one of the altars, accessible only by priests, it is possible to suggest that the warrior's triumphant victory most likely symbolizes the victory of the Christianity over the paganism.36 The partially preserved inscription implicitly suggests the same as it is referred to a sinner who was probably pagan. However, by no means can it be considered the drawing's title. Most likely the verbal element duplicates the message conveyed by the visual image, thus intensifying its significance, which was characteristic of ancient South and Eastern Slavic writing. For the medieval author, neither media, if used separately, seemed to sufficiently convey the message's spiritual and emotive connotation. He attempted fusing the visual and the verbal levels in his composition to ensure the more comprehensive and all-- round (within the available means) presentation.
The secular images and scenes, mostly drawings of warriors, birds and animals, or genres scene, including the appreciation of ancient feats of valour, a criminal's punishment, the prancing horse as well as geometrical ornaments, resembling labyrinths, are not that frequent. Most drawings are accompanied by a verbal message. Unfortunately, many of them are badly preserved, which prevents their full decoding or more accurate interpretation of the depicted scene.
The graffiti's pictorial components are of a predominantly aesthetic nature. But even those drawings with accompanying graffiti which are identified as "secular drawings,"37 they often convey a symbolic message in addition to pleasing the viewer and influence his/her perception, as in the graffito in the south external gallery of St. Sophia Cathedral (Fig. 9). The figure of the jumping horse, common for Kievan graffiti merges with both, the undeciphered linear inscription in the top and the capital letter in the middle of the composition, creating a multi-layered image. The horse is depicted in the process of jumping over the front letter (identified as Cyrillic V38) and then charging towards another capital letter (which can possibly be identified as Cyrillic V39 or B) in the left corner of the composition. The Christian crucifix image both at the cross at the top of the composition and the letter "T" within the inscription obviously conveys a Christian religious meaning, which may have various specific connotations depending on the nature of the verbal message. The ornamentation of the graffito capital letter is much simpler and plainer than it would have been the manuscript format.40 Thus, it is difficult to say whether the author was directly influenced by the ornamentation style of Kievan manuscripts. However, the individual details of this ornamentation (swirls of ribbon in particular) do not exclude such a possibility.
The authors of both, symbolic and secular, every day compositions often resort to the technique of "artistic diminution,"41 most likely for establishing the hierarchy of the pictorial images in the context of the graffiti when the most significant figure in the scene (a saint, a warrior or other pictorial image) considerably exceeds all other figures in size. In this case, the idea is communicated primarily through a visual image, not necessarily duplicated at the verbal level. The same technique was used in medieval Russian icon painting.42
Besides being written in two alphabets, the Glagolitic and the Cyrillic, Kievan graffiti vary in their letter style, arrangement and layout. Although the inscriptions are most commonly arranged horizontally, there are several instances of semi-circular and vertical arrangement. Few inscriptions are written in large double-lined letters (Fig. 10); occasionally double letters are ornamented with floral wreathing and animal's heads (Fig. 11). The latter technique, widely used in the early Kievan manuscripts,43 makes the letters look more volumetric, although it should be noted that Byzantine tradition emphasized two-- dimentionality.44 Manuscript copyists employed this technique to decorate the text and to direct the reader's attention to the especially important fragments. Most likely the graffiti authors were motivated by the same considerations.45 In any case, this particular inscription apparently stands out against others, less technically and aesthetically sophisticated graffiti.
Archaeological research in Novgorod's St. Sophia Cathedral also revealed several striking inscriptions. On the south side of the vestry, there is a graffito from the turn of the thirteenth century, which is inserted between the spurs of the sign identified by some palaeographers as Kiev prince's trident46 (Fig. 12). Another interesting example is the twelfth-century inscription inside the cross with the mutually perpendicular arrangement of words (Fig. 13). Horizontally it reads "To the Saviour," but the meaning of the whole inscription remains obscure.47 Interestingly, that later the same perpendicular arrangement of words began to be used on tomb stones. Several inscriptions of the eleventh and twelfth centuries are written in the reverse order,48 although the palaeographers who reported and documented them do not refer to them as a form of wordplay or cryptographic writing. Soroka is inclined to identify the intention behind the reverse writing of the text as the authors' craving for originality.49 He does not view unorthodox inscriptions as hypothetical magical formulas. Admittedly, without documentation neither interpretation of reverse writing can be justified. Nonetheless, it would not be erroneous to ascribe some experimental whim to medieval graffiti authors. The inscriptions with unorthodox layout (even those which are not samples of cryptographic writing) presented a challenge for the medieval reader, as their decoding required more efforts than the reading of the plain text with a typical left-to-right sequence of letters. In this sense, medieval graffiti are akin to contemporary visual poems, which presume the reader's active participation in the decoding game.
As it has been already mentioned, just like craftsmen ornamenting their works with inscriptions, graffiti authors enjoyed more creative freedom than the copyists of the religious manuscripts. In most cases, they were fully responsible for the semantics of their inscriptions (within established limitations, of course) as well as for their design, layout and ornamentation. Therefore, their choice of graphic and verbal means, motivated by various reasons, was not an arbitrary decision. We can speculate the reasons for their deliberate intention to introduce elements of game (or cryptography) in their works, but we should not totally exclude this possibility of conscious experimentation. It is obvious that many graffiti authors (whether the clergy or laymen) were concerned with both the verbal component of the message and its visual dimension.
Preserved early medieval manuscripts and the mural inscriptions on the architectural monuments attest to the fact that visual writing was not alien to the ancient Eastern Slavic culture. However, we have no record of any original Eastern Slavic work of visual literature of the period, even examples of acrostics, which were common in Byzantium and to a certain extent in the South Slavic literatures. According to Karskii, Greek acrostics were resistant to translation into Old Church Slavonic and thus the first acrostic in Russian written by Pakhomii Serb appeared no earlier than in the fifteenth century.50 Another Russian researcher, Berkov noted that acrostics were a popular poetic device developed by the Eastern Slavs.51 However, no example was provided. Even if some occasional pieces of the Old Eastern European visual writing ever existed, none survived. The Tatar-Mongol invasion of the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, besides restricting creative activity in Kievan Rus', destroyed many cultural monuments and manuscripts, which could have represented various aspects of the early medieval East Slavic literary and cultural legacy. It is possible that samples of visual literature (which probably were not numerous) were among them. Nonetheless, surviving literary and architectural materials, make it possible to suggest that the foundations of the East Slavic visual writing were laid in the medieval period. These were later developed fully in the Baroque era, under the strong European Baroque influence.
Although the anonymous manuscript copyists and graffiti authors cannot be regarded the predecessors of contemporary visual poets, their modest accomplishments in the domain of the text layout, spatialization, letter arrangement and the technical means of visual diversification, are significant for the form's further development. It is possible to suggest that many of their attempts towards text visualization were an original exploration of pictorial resources rather than a direct borrowing from Byzantine text ornamentation. This timid experimentation with the visual properties of discourse have found its own place in the Eastern Slavic literary tradition. They have set the basics for the perception of the written text as an artistic product, as well as for the potential for a creative reading and decoding of this text. Although they were probably not intended to be wordplays, some texts or inscriptions obviously fascinated and challenged their viewers by their non-traditional layout or letter arrangement. Kievan copyists and graffiti authors succeeded in creating their own tradition of text decoration and-in a minimal scope-visualization. For these reasons, their achievements should not be minimised or, at least, ignored.
1 The term technopaignion (pl. technopaignia) includes both the pattern poetry and other forms of technically accomplished poetic discourse. See: Dick Higgins, Pattern Poetry: Guide to an Unknown Literature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987) 19.
2 Higgins 19-28.
3 Charles Doria, "Visual Writing Forms in Antiquity: the Versus Intexti," in Richard Kostelanetz, ed., Visual Literature Criticism (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979) 64.
4 A. Zhukovsky, "Volodymyr the Great," in Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Vol. 5, Danylo Husar Struk, ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993) 643.
5 According to Dean S. Worth, "writing was not unknown in the pre-Christian Rus', but its use was very restricted." See Dean S. Worth, "Language," in Nicholas Rzhevsky,
ed, The Cambridge Campanion to Modern Russian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) 25-26.
6 Ibid. 26.
7 Higgins 22-23.
8 Higgins 22.
9 Higgins 23.
10 Bilets'kyi, O. "Perekladna literature vizantiis'ko-bolhars'koho pokhodzhennia," in Zibrannia prats'u p"iaty tomakh. Vol. 1 (Kyiv: Naukova dumka, 1965) 130.
11 Bilets'kyi 130.
12 Worth 27.
13 Dmitrii Likhachev, Poetika drevnerusskoi literatury (Moscow: Nauka, 1979) 22. 14 Likhachev 23.
15 According to some scholars (most notably 0. Bilets'kyi) the collection also contains original texts and one of the contributors might be the Metropolitan Ilarion, the first Kievan (not Greek) Metropolitan Bishop and the author of the well-known Sermon on Law and Grace. See: 0.1. Bilets'kyi, Khrestomatiia davn'oi ukrains'koi literatury: do kintsia XYIII st. (Kyiv: Radians'ka shkola, 1967) 9.
16 Dmitrij Cizevskij, History of Russian Literature: From the Eleventh Century to the End of the Baroque (The Hague: Mouton & Co, 1962) 85.
17 Cizevskij 82.
18 E.F. Karskii, Slavianskaia kirillovskaia paleografiia (Moscow: Nauka, 1979) 244, 246.
19 V.N. Shchepkin, Russkaia paleografiia (Moscow: Nauka, 1967) 63-5. 20 Shchepkin 66.
21 Mykola Soroka, Zorova poeziia v ukrains'kii literaturi kintsia XVI-XVIII St (Kyiv: Holovna spetsializovana redaktsiia literatury movamy natsional'nykh menshyn Ukrainy, 1997) 18-25.
22 Likhachev 23. 23 Likhachev 25. 24 Likhachev 28. 25 Cizevskij 85.
26 A.A. Medyntseva, Drevnerusskie nadpisi novgorodskogo Sofievskogo sobora (Moscow: Nauka, 1977) 149.
27 S.A. Vysotskii, Kievskii graffiti XI-XVII vv (Kiev: Naukova dumka, 1985) 291.
28 Novgorod the Great was a city-state in northern Rus' from the twelfth to the fifteenth century. It was established by Slavs who had migrated to the north from the middle Dnieper basin and the Kievan Rus' in particular. Despite the local opposition to Kievan rule both cities had strong economic and cultural ties. Kiev's architecture was copied in Novgorod as it most evident in the similarity of the St. Sophia Cathedrals in the two cities. According to some scholars the style of the Novgorod chronicles also displays obvious Kievan influence.
29 A detailed analysis of the ancient and Medieval Kiev and Novgorod graffiti is given in the following books: S. Vysotskii, Drevnerusskiie nadpisi Sofii Kievskoi XI-XIV vv. (Kiev: Naukova dumka, 1966); S. Vysotskii, Srednevekovye nadpisi Sofii Kievskoi (Kiev: Naukova dumka, 1976); Medyntseva, Drevnerusskie nadpisi Novhorodskogo Sofievskogo Sobora XI-XIV veka; Vysotskii, Kievskii graffiti XI-XVII vv.
30 Vysotskii, Kievskie graffiti XI-XVII vv. 63.
31 See Vysotskii, Drevnerusskiie nadpisi Sofii Kievskoi XI-XIV vv. 12; Vysotskii, Kievskii graffiti XI-XVII vv 64; Soroka 20.
32 J.J. de Lucio-Meyer, Visual Athetics (New York: Icon Editions, Harper & Row, 1973) 20.
33 Vysotskyi, Srednevekovye nadpis Sofii Kievskoi 117-24. 34 Ibid., 122.
35 See The New Testament, Revelation 12:7-9.
36 Vysotskii, Srednevekovye nadpisi Sofi Kievskoi 126, 426-27.
37 Vysotskii, Srednevekovye nadpisi Sofii Kievskoi 124-29.
38 Ibid., 128.
39 Ibid., 128.
40 Ibid., 128.
41Likhachev 39.
42 Likhachev 39.
43 Likhachev 50
44 de Lucio-Mayer 31.
45 Vysotskii, Srednevekovye nadpisi Sofii Kievskoi 54, 316-17.
46 Medyntseva 155-56, 289.
47 Medyntseva 171, 296.
48 Medyntseva 84, 160.
49 Soroka 22.
50 Karskii 247.
51 P. Berkov, Virshi. Sillabicheskaia poeziia XVII-XVII vekov (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel, 1935) 29.
Copyright Canadian Assosciation of Slavists Jun-Sep 2001
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved
Ekphrasis: an extended definition
"Seeing is believing."--unknown
Ekphrasis: what it is
Ekphrasis, alternately spelled ecphrasis, is a term used to denote poetry or poetic writing concerning itself with the visual arts, artistic objects, and/or highly visual scenes. This style of writing is characteristic in such works as Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn," Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, and Shelley's "On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery." Given that the Romantic era is characterized by protracted, poetic musings upon the visual aspects of nature, it is not surprising that ekphrasis found a home in Romantic poetry. However, ekphrasis has its origins much earlier -- as far back as the Classical era. The term is found in Aphthonius's Progymnasmata, an early textbook on style. For example, Virgil took great pains to describe the hero Achilles' shield at the beginning of the Aeneid. Furthermore, the end of the Romantic era did not signify the demise of ekphrasis. Indeed, it flourished among the pre-Raphaelite poets. Furthermore, although the slums of London are hardly artistic, they are provocative visual images as depicted in the works of Dickens, George Gissing -- and notably in T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, which recalls Blake's images of a gray, fetid city. Although poetry about works of art is the most obvious form of ekphrasis, it need not be the only one as, again, ekphrasis can be about any visually powerful scene or subject. Nor need it only be applied to poetry or even traditionally high-brow "classic" literature. Ray Bradbury's short story, "The Veldt," read by high schoolers and college freshman comp students nationwide contains a particularly striking visual description of the grasslands of southern Africa. A sharply contrasting image of simulated sterility in a futuristic Tokyo is found in William Gibson's Neuromancer.
Ekphrasis: what it does
Ekphrasis, since it is defined as representative of not only tangible pieces of art but also any expressly visual scene, can also be used to describe that which we see in our imagination. William A Covino, in a discussion of the magical qualities of literacy, devotes a number of pages to phantasms -- those random, yet intensely visual images that our mind creates. These emanate from various situations: memories, dreams, fantasies, fleeting glimpses, imaginings. While many of these are not in fact actual (even memories can be distorted, and often they are), they nevertheless represent a form of "truth" and/or "reality" in that our eyes have "seen" them. A consideration of Aristotle is helpful here, in that he wrote extensively on both the visual and the truth in conjunction with rhetoric -- which he defined as "an ability in each case to see the available means of persuasion" (On Rhetoric 1.2.1)
Some other statements from Aristotle also can illuminate this point, so to speak:
--"Persuasion occurs through arguments when we show the truth or the apparent truth from whatever is persuasive in each case" (1.2.6).
--"Since few of the premises from which rhetorical syllogisms are formed are necessarily true (emphasis mine)....and since things that happen for the most part and are possible can only be reasoned on the basis of other such things, and necessary actions from necessities, it is evident that [the premises] from which enthymemes are spoken are sometimes necessarily true [only] for the most part" (1.2.14).
--"...people do everything they do for seven causes: through chance, through nature, through compulsion, through habit, through reasoning, through anger, through longing" (1.10.7).
--"...and the source of the metaphor should be something beautiful; verbal beauty, as Licymnius says, is in the sound or in the sense, and ugliness the same..." (3.2.13).
As Aristotle points out in various places throughout On Rhetoric, we tend to believe what is reasonably possible and what is effectively argued. Stories abound of 19th century frontier families taken in by quacks, who traveled from town to town hawking miracle cures for every disease imaginable -- and distributing, in exchange for varying amounts of money, medicinal-looking bottles filled with sugar water. The latter 20th century and early 21st century equivalent would be the handsome, charming man who entices single, wealthy women to allow him to sweep them off their feet, then run off with their cash as soon as he has convinced her that she is making a good investment by lending him fairly large amounts of money. Chances are, those who have been deceived did not completely trust those who have wronged them -- since absolutes are near-impossible in a world that revolves around qualifiers on a daily basis-- but since they chose to give others the benefit of the doubt, they acknowledged enthymemes that they perceived to be necessarily true. In both cases, these charlatans have represented themselves physically and rhetorically as honest people. They have presented "verbal beauty" through conveying an apparent truth. Furthermore, Aristotle points out, those who appear truthful are more likely to persuade than those who ado not -- actual truth is not at issue here, only that which is perceived (seen).
A second example of deception based upon a combination of spoken rhetoric and visual cues can be found among those who fabricate and/or exaggerate, either to others or to themselves. More than a few plain, plump women have sought remedies through plastic surgery, makeovers, and the like. They wish to persuade themselves and those who see them that deep down, there is a woman who is cat-like in appearance, poise, and bearing. I can attest to this, as I have in my bedroom a full-length mirror that I am convinced makes me look 30 pounds lighter than I actually am because it is vertical and because I have learned to stand in just the "right" way in order to pull off this effect. Certainly, while I can fool myself at home, as soon as I walk away from the mirror and leave the house, the truth comes out. But really, what is this "truth"? If I wish to fool others, I can simply wear a body shaper, put on a long shirt with vertical lines, suck in my stomach -- and voila! Because I look thinner, I can be thinner -- I have demonstrated an apparent truth. Of course, I have done so through longing to look thinner and through rationalizing that if I take certain steps, I can convey a non-truth as a truth or at least a relative truth. If I really wanted to push it, I could drive down to the space camp in Birmingham, AL, hop into a simulated moon walk, and weigh 20 pounds because we weigh so much less in a "weightless" atmosphere. I could pick up the phone, call my mom, tell her I weigh 20 or 80 or whatever pounds....and in that particular rhetorical situation, it has become necessarily true. Aristotle would consider this an example of a fallacious topic in that action has been "amplified" and I have not sufficiently accounted for the altered circumstances that led to such exaggeration (2.24.4).
Another interesting occurence in our everyday lives is that of suggestion. As a child, I was fascinated by flying saucers and aliens. Consequently, everything that seemed in the very least out of the ordinary -- as my visual perception of ordinary was at that time -- had to be as a result of an impending alien landing on Earth. That's what was on TV, anyway, and my favorite TV shows at that time were syndicated episodes of Lost in Space (apparent fiction) and the news (apparent fact). And movies such as Star Wars, Aliens, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind were raking in the bucks. One summer evening when I was eight or nine, I looked up at the sky -- and I saw rotating lights. I ran in the house and yelled for my mom to come outside because there was a flying saucer. Mildly annoyed that I'd interrupted her in the middle of The Rockford Files, she shuffled outside with me. I pointed out the orb, resplendent with rotating, flashing lights. She yelled something resembling "Hah!" and explained that what we were looking at wasn't a flying saucer but an airplane with one of those scrolling-light marquees. "They use those for advertising," she told me. Needless to say, I was disappointed -- but even my child self was able to recognize that this approach was successful because it had gotten my attention. And it really did look like a flying saucer. If there were actual words scrolling around in a circle, they were too small to read; nevertheless, because the lights conveyed something wondrous -- and beautiful, as Aristotle terms it -- the approach was successful. Had I known of Aristotle and his rhetoric, I could have argued that because my mom could not see that what was in the sky was an airplane (we could only see the lights that simulated a flying saucer), she could not prove me wrong. My contention, therefore (and according to Aristotelian logic), might have been valid because the "truth" of the flying saucer was apparent.
"Have you ever had the feeling you've been here before?" We call that deja vu. Most of us have, at least once, been driving down a road we've never traveled before -- and have suddenly thought, or actually said, "I've seen this place before!" If it happens on an interstate highway, it's to be expected since there are so many standards: green road signs marking exits, blue for rest areas, yellow for road construction, some trees here and fields there. And desert highways look even more alike for their lack of landmarks. But what happens when the trees form a military-style gauntlet on either side of the road and drape in a way that's just so. You could be driving in Michigan, for example, and think you're back home in Tennessee because there's a road that runs a mile from your house....and along a certain stretch of that road is a group of trees on either side of the road that drape in a way that's just so. Memory in this case has been transplanted into new experience -- and our eyes have convinced us through relative truth that we have been here before when we actually have not. Aristotle might well contend that this situation has arised for several of the seven reasons we have for doing everything we do; in this case it could be through chance (we just happened to notice and to make the connection between the two), through habit (we travel the road back home so often that anything anywhere else that looks even remotely similar will "take us back home"), and -- perhaps -- from an unconscious longing to be back home where the image "belongs" or to remove it from the place in which we now see it.
Lastly, there are those images we conjure for ourselves due to visual conditioning. For example, it's likely that if we ask someone to describe Jesus, he or she will tell us that Jesus is a bearded man of medium-build, about 6 feet tall, with long brown hair parted in the middle, wearing a calf-length white robe trimmed with blue and brown leather sandals. What if that description is correct, but with some of the facial features different -- and Jesus resembled Charles Manson? What if such description were totally inaccurate and Jesus actually looked like Charles Barkley (a tall, chubby black guy with a shaved head)? Perhaps Jesus was a red-headed dwarf. Those who are deeply religious would call such sentiment blasphemous -- and when George Burns portrayed God in the film, Oh, God, at least a few did protest. Was it because the producers of Oh, God represented the title role as a funny guy who smoked cigars and sounded a bit curmudgeounly in his older, yet still hilarious, years, instead of a more benevolent-seeming presence? Or was it because this God didn't look anything like the God we've been conditioned to see: a bearded guy with long white hair parted in the middle, wearing a calf-length white robe trimmed with blue and brown leather sandals -- in other words, someone who looks like Jesus' father? And that's assuming that one, or both, are male or even resemble humans.... Such perceptions of Jesus and God would stem from habit, according to Aristotle. Furthermore, the Christian church has long been a persuasive influence on large blocks of the American population -- and that, as Aristotle would see it, is sufficient to earn those particular representations of Jesus and God the distinction of "truth."
Ekphrasis: what it signifies
Ekphrasis, as we have seen, is at once art and life. It need not represent actual art work, or anything tangible for that matter. Those visions (objects) in our heads are themselves art in that they are created and that they represent our vision (world view). Covino discusses the latter as being phantasms. While an ekphrasis may or may not be a phantasm, a phantasm is an ekphrasis. Although most definitions of ekphrasis emphasize poetry or poetic writing, we can certainly extend the definition to include poetic thought if it is represented by a combination of images and words (signifieds and signs) produced by an individual's (signifier's) imagination. Indeed, Covino believes that since phantasms, visual or otherwise, are housed among the stars and released into the soul at birth, they are of both the physical and spiritual world (33). He asserts, "As a process for determining and producing human language; for mystical contemplation and philosophical speculation; and for generating vivid speech (enargeia), phantasy is closely and explicitly connected with both magic and rhetoric" (33). Thus, ekphrasis is connected with truth via this same magic and rhetoric.
Furthermore, as Covino points out, "we are looking at the process of inducing belief and creating community, and asking how the mind creates impressions and controls their powers and effects" (33). This process is represented by phantasms, which are forms of ekphrasis, and by rhetoric -- "an ability, in each [particular] case, to see the available means of persuasion. Some of these available means, as illustrated throughout this essay, are based upon that which is generally accepted as truth; others, through skillful representation of non-truths as truths through the use of several rhetorical and emotional appeals.
Michael Basinski talked with Ge(of)* Huth about his minimalist poetic practices (pictured above) and about his press, dbqp (317 Princetown Rd, Schenectady NY 12306?). Send SASE for a catalog.
Basinski: Ge(of), tell me about your press (dbqp) and your magazine (The Subtle Journal of Raw Coinage) and how you see these integrated, if you do, into the map of contemporary poetry.
Huth: I come from a literary tradition, which is important for me to say because the writing world I interact with now is that of visual and language poetry. Many of the makers of visual poetry are actually artists working with letterforms as visual matter, but I am first a writer.
I started my micropress, dbqp, in 1987 because I needed to print a minimalist piece of mine (the woords) on certain pieces of bark. One poem needed to be printed on pine bark, for instance, another on dogwood bark. If I didn?t use the correct bark, the entire scheme would fall apart. It would fail to function. I didn?t know of any press that would be interested in publishing ?the woords?, so I had to publish it myself, but to keep from turning into a self-publisher I branched out into a few other publishing endeavors.
I started The Subtle Journal of Raw Coinage (SJRC) the same day I started dbqp. What this magazine does is present invented words in heightened visual contexts. The format of the magazine, as a matter of fact, changes with each issue. Since the reader is never given words in context or words with definitions, the journal remains subtle and the coinage raw.
The endeavor seems useless to most people. But the reason I ended up producing SJRC is that I was already working in the most minimal realm of literature I could imagine, that of the one-word poem (what I call the pwoermd). The origin of pwoermds, for me, is the work of Aram Saroyan. These poems are single words that are usually neologistic or transmogrified by expressive spelling. By incorporating new significance to single words, pwoermds present what I call the abstract image, an intellectual idea.
The reason for my minimalism (in writing and publishing is twofold. The primary reason is that small things are easier to print. I can publish more issues of a one-page magazine than of a 100-page magazine per year. So speed and economy are directing factors. The second reason for my minimalism is that it has a hyper-intellectual quality that I find attractive. With minimalism, you aren?t reading a piece necessarily for entertainment the same way that you might read other texts. You can?t sit down with it for a long time and become involved in a situation. You have to look at the piece, consider it intellectually, and begin to break it apart. This is also probably the most obvious problem with my work: It has a hard intellectual edge to it.
Minimalist writing is certainly on the outskirts of literature, barely within literature at all. But it does fit within contemporary poetry in the vicinity of the language poets and the visual poets. The language poets reside nearby because they are poets who break apart syntax with their poems. They break all syntactical rules apart, but present their poems as if there were actually some sense beneath the words, although each poem is basically a plan on the field of language. The connection between minimalism and visual poetry is that once you break works and language into small bits, those pieces take on a visual character. At this point, they evolve out of what I call the invisibility of the text. That invisibility is what you experience when you are reading, and reading quickly, understanding the message of the words, but impervious to the visual form the text takes upon the page. But when you do break words down into clumps of letters, or work with single words or only a few words or their fragments, then a visual element is inescapable.
Basinski: Do you see your press and your own minimalist writing in contention with any other program of writing? Let?s say, for example, writing as imagined by the editors of the Pitt Poetry Series. Do you have a political agenda?
Huth: No, I have no political agenda. My writing (the more mainstream examples of it) have been published in well-known poetry magazines, including the American Poetry Review and Poetry Northwest. I?m still, in a fashion, connected to the mainstream of North American poetry. I even graduated from Syracuse University?s graduate creative writing program. So, of course, I know what the mainstream thinks of minimalism, and I am well aware of how little value they attach to it. My minimalist writing doesn?t seem difficult or literary, and those are the criteria we generally use to judge writing.
I hope not to work in contention with other modes of writing, but with them. I?m eclectic in my writing, and I see value in all types of writing. I feel (or hope) that I am a node between camps of writers, that I am connected with many areas and networks of writing. My energies are merely directed towards minimalism now, because that is the fastest way for me to write, and I have little time available.
Basinski: Any last words?
Huth: Yes, I?d like to thank my mother. Seriously: my mother did tell me a story a few times about how, as a child, before I could read, I would spend hours crawling over newspapers and examining the words there. I obviously had no idea what the words meant, but apparently I had some idea that they captured and preserved meanings. I must have been entranced by the visual nature of the text. This story makes me understand why writing is always as visual art for me.
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The poetry scene thrives in cafés and on the internet, says Alvin Pang.
(As printed in the Spring 2004 issue of Poetry News)
Due to our colonial heritage and English-based education system, Singapore is one of the few territories in Asia with a strong tradition of writing in English. This dates back to at least the late 19th century. Perhaps the first significant native writing occurred in the ’50s and ’60s, energised by the independence movement, and the decades of “nation-building” which followed. Many writers (mostly poets) active at the time, soon came to occupy influential positions in academia. These scholar-poets – among them Edwin Thumboo, Arthur Yap, Lee Tzu Pheng and Kirpal Singh – still receive critical attention internationally, but are less well-known outside the university and literary circuit, although they exert a palpable influence behind the scenes.
Poetry in the late ’90s enjoyed something of a renaissance, with the happy confluence of several positive factors: the rise of the internet, the emergence of small literary presses, and the arrival of a new generation of young poets. Radically, none of the new poets of note are academics: typically in their twenties to early thirties, many are professionals in fields far removed from poetry. Several have been educated at top schools overseas. I believe their very different backgrounds allow this new breed of Singaporean poets a fresh perspective and energy that has been lacking in the scene for decades. The new poetry is wonderfully diverse, yet distinctively urban and cosmopolitan, modern, frequently street-wise, often startlingly intimate (even solipsistic, some have protested). The celebrated literary prodigy Alfian Saat is a prime example. Still in his twenties and a medical student, his deeply politicised and highly articulate poems, fiction and plays have attracted much adulation, from teenagers to university professors. Other names of note include: Cyril Wong, Felix Cheong, Toh Hsien Min and Paul Tan.
It wasn’t all easy going. Market forces being what they are, poetry seldom makes the headlines: there is no longer even a literary section in the national broadsheet. As elsewhere, the literary arts play poor cousin to glitzier genres such as the performing arts, visual arts and music – hence attracting a miniscule fraction of an already shrinking arts budget. Local writing is also glaringly absent from our schools, which at any rate are steeped in the Cambridge exam syllabus and tend to eschew the “difficult” subject of literature. Astonishingly, we’ve nevertheless managed to spawn quite a few gifted student writers, including several Foyle Young Poets (see page 7).
Our poets have had to stake their claim on the cultural map by becoming outright literary activists over the past eight years. They started and hosted readings, such as the monthly Subtext reading at the boutique Book Cafe (hosted by poet Yong Shu Hoong). They pushed small presses, notably Ethos Books, Landmark Books and Firstfruits, to publish a steady stream of high-quality, very well-designed volumes of poetry. Some of these books have gone on to win commercial design awards. Younger poets have also fronted a slate of non-scholarly anthologies such as Capsule and No Other City: The Ethos Anthology of Urban Poetry, and launched what I’m tempted to describe as aggressive tours to America, Australia, Asia and the UK (including the Edinburgh International Book Festival in 2003). They even put together Singapore’s first international poetry festival, Wordfeast (www.wordfe...) in January this year, and started a Literary Centre (www.litera...). We’ve seen readings in restaurants and wine-bars, by the sea, on roof-tops, even at the zoo. And poetry slams (a recent phenomenon) attract hundreds each month to Singapore’s top clubbing joint, Zouk.
The internet has also been a godsend. As high-impact, low-cost platforms for publication, publicity and public discussion, our literary websites attract thousands of readers from all over the world, and have become the primary means of spotting new talent or showcasing the latest events. Toh Hsien Min, a former Oxford University Poetry Society president, is the founding editor of Quarterly Literary Review Singapore (www.qlrs.c...), the premier literary journal on and off the web. Other lit-sites include The 2nd Rule (www.the2nd...), The Poetry Billboard (www.poetry...), and the Literary Singapore Infodesk (www.writer...), a literary news service.
Where is it all going? There’s definitely an audience for poetry now, but perhaps not yet a discerning readership. And something needs to be done about the dearth of new women poets (there are successful women novelists but hardly any published poets. Heng Siok Tian and Madeleine Lee are two exceptions). I’d also like to see more fertile exchanges between literary communities – it’s absurd, in a multi-cultural city like Singapore, that writers in our major language groups know so little about each other’s work. Interdisciplinary experiments between poetry and the other arts have only just begun. Drop by in person – or online – and see for yourself: there’s plenty brewing in this giddy, infuriating, unsentimental city on the edge that’s always on edge.
Poet, editor and webmaster Alvin Pang read at the poetry cafe in 2003. His most recent volume is City of Rain (ethos books 2003).
by Jirí Zizler. This article has been adapted by Transcript. Read the full text in our French or German versions.
Following the so-called period of 'normalisation' which began with the Russian invasion in the spring of 1968, the establishment had endeavoured to silence all Czech literary voices tinged with either spirituality or existentialism, encouraging only simplistic work which was happy to celebrate concrete aspects of the social order then in place.
Then, after November 1989, authors of several generations emerged on the Czech literary scene - the eldest of whose early work appeared at the time of World War 2, the youngest born after 1970 - who together formed a spectrum ranging from Catholicism on one hand to orthodox surrealism on the other. Czech poets saw their freedom of expression restored and looked to a future which promised uncensored communication. Three distinct threads - official literature, samizdat, and the literature of exile - were now woven together in a single cloth.
During the early 90s, poetry was perhaps the most influential genre in Czech literature. However, its importance was limited and it did not reach the greater part of the population: print-runs of the works of Nobel Prize Laureate Jaroslav Seifert, for example, ran to just 10,000 copies. Suffering from a lack of funding and of publicity, Czech poetry, once a major force in the life of the country, found itself consigned to the back seat.
This turn of events may be explained, in part at least, by a widespread scepticism regarding all forms of ideology. Other contributory factors were the prevalence of utilitarian values on the one hand, and on the other, a rejection of 'pretty words' and of the lyric for the lyric's sake. Different poetic tendencies mushroomed, some losing sight of the tradition, and a lack of cohesion and critical apparatus resulted in some literary and intellectual chaos.
During the mid- and late nineties, poet Jirí Kubena sought to counter an increasing lack of interest in poetry by organising regular events at Bítov Castle in Moravia. Publisher Martin Pluhácek took similar steps by setting up an international poetry festival in Olomouc.
Despite small print-runs, an average of 300-400 works of poetry appear now every year. As well as many first editions, publishers are taking it on themselves to anthologize the works of Czech poets who writing has remained uncollected; Jirí Kolár, Oldrich Mikulásek, Jan Skácel, Ivan Jelínek, Zdenek Rotrekl, Ivan Slavík, Bohuslav Reynek, and Jan Zahradnícek for example.
The work of songwriters (Karel Kryl, Vladimír Merta, Vlastimil Treanák, Jaroslav Hutka) who, for a number of years, spoke to the people in the absence of poets, has also been the object of attention.
The nineties is marked by a huge resurgence of spiritual poetry, much of it Catholic. Two major figures in this context are Ivan Slavik (1920-2002) and Zdenek Rotrekl (born 1920), both of whom made their literary débuts in the 1940s, but neither of whose complete works were available before the 90s. For both men, language is sacred and can lead to a heightened awareness of reality.
The poetry of Ivan Slavík may be described as a quest for hope and faith in a world plagued by uncertainty, and threatened by two forms of totalitarianism, one which has usurped traditional values, the other a mechanising and deshumanising force.
Zdenek Rotrekl spent thirteen years in communist prisons and his writing is indelibly marked by his experience. His work is an expression of faith in the dignity of freedom which emancipates man from otherwise inevitable ruin. His complete works became available only in 2001 entitled Nezdené mesto (City Without Walls)