Variants of Identity – Identity in Change
Erzsébet Dani: Identitásgyarmatosítás Erdélyben. Identitásdrámák és interkulturális stratégiák a Trianon utáni székelymagyar irodalomban
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Erzsébet Dani: Identitásgyarmatosítás Erdélyben. Identitásdrámák és interkulturális stratégiák a Trianon utáni székelymagyar irodalomban
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Imre József Balázs is a Hungarian poet, literary critic, editor and literary historian from Romania. His main subject of interest and research area is the Hungarian avant-garde from Romania. His research and work prove his attachment to Romanian literature as well – especially with the avant-garde. For example, he deals with Gellu Naum’s poems for children and their translation. Thus, he fulfils the role of a mediator between Hungarian and Romanian literature not only through his studies and academic papers written in Romanian, but also through his contributions to the appearance of Hungarian poets in literary anthologies written in Romanian language. Furthermore, he plays an important role in publishing the Hungarian translations of Romanian poetry, thus becoming a mediator between the Hungarian and Romanian cultures.
More...A Study of Szemere’s Image-Forming Sources
The present study adds to my ongoing research into Irish-Hungarian relations in the nineteenth century. As such it is concerned with Bertalan Szemere’s representation of Ireland in his travelogue Utazás külföldön [A Journey Abroad]. It approaches Szemere’s work from the perspective of the following three questions. How does Szemere’s trip to Ireland fit into the tradition of Irish-Hungarian contacts? What urged Szemere to sail over to Ireland and extend his already long and tiring tour of Europe? And finally, what factors shaped Szemere’s image of Ireland in his travel account? A preliminary study of the conditions of Szemere’s trip and his actual account of the country has led me to the hypothesis that in the process of creating his own representation of Ireland Szemere heavily relied on external sources. I seek to answer these questions by identifying the place of Szemere’s travel account in the tradition of Hungarian-Irish contacts; by relating it to other texts on Ireland by Szemere’s Hungarian contemporaries; and by comparing it to particular reports on Ireland by European travellers. My aim is to prove that Szemere’s representation of Ireland was primarily informed and moulded by German and English sources as they were transferred to Szemere by some Hungarian periodicals. My study also emphasizes the importance of further research into the interaction of Hungarian and European discourse on Ireland in the nineteenth century.
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The article demonstrates that letters can play a visual role close to that played by images. Calligraphy, typography, calligrams, palindromes and anagrams are as many ways of attracting the reader’s/spectator’s attention and bringing to the fore the material quality of a text. Linguistic games also offer vivid instances of hybrid effects. They all play a part similar to that of anamorphosis. Numerous novels, such as Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, play with the many visual possibilities of letters. Conversely, numerous pictures include letters in their own mode and apparatus not only as signatures but also as simulacrа of speech, sound and language. Contemporary art enjoys using letters as the very matter of their production. Ranging from Mantegna to street art, going through Magritte and the works of the Art & Language group, to quote a few, letters partake of visual systems of expression and production. The article interrogates the functions of images either when they figure in a text and font image (make up an image) or when they are part of a picture or an image. In our digital age, words and images, letters, lines and colours are part and parcel of our relationship to the multimodal world which we inhabit.
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The article focuses on acts of intercultural and interlingual mediation and representations of language difference in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s posthumously published epistolary travelogue The Turkish Embassy Letters (1763). Montagu was probably the most important woman traveller to visit the Ottoman Empire in the eighteenth century. Having acquired first-hand knowledge of upper-class life in the empire, she strove to dispel prejudice and change her readers’ attitudes to Islam and Ottoman social mores. To achieve those ends, Montagu takes up the role of an intercultural and interlingual mediator in her epistolary travelogue. However, while stressing her own autonomous cultural and linguistic performance within the foreign context, she erases, or minimizes, the role of less privileged agents of mediation, such as hired guides and interpreters, who must have helped her communicate effectively with her Ottoman hosts. This simplifies her representations of otherwise complex intercultural encounters and seriously problematizes her claim to the authenticity of her account of the Ottoman Empire, which she regards as its distinguishing characteristic. In my analysis of Montagu’s representations of mediation and language difference, I rely on theoretical texts reflecting the “cultural turn” in translation and interpreting studies as well as on other writing analysing intercultural dialogue and multilingualism.
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Texts authored by maritime explorers occupy a special place in the body of travel literature in English dealing with the exploration of the Pacific in the modern period. This article focuses on a specimen of scientific travel writing in epistolary form authored by Commander Matthew Flinders, the officer under whose command HMS Investigator completed the first circumnavigation of Australia in 1803. I analyse Matthew Flinders’s official despatch to Evan Nepean, Secretary of the Admiralty at the time, as an example of early nineteenth-century epistolary travel writing, paying special attention to the textual strategies employed by Flinders in order to produce a coherent and accurate travel account, on the one hand, and to negotiate his professional status and persona with his interlocutor(s), on the other.
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The study focuses on the peculiar challenges raised by rendering one of Tibor Zalán’s plays into Romanian. We shall take into account the linguistic, aesthetic, and conceptual differences that might emerge in the Romanian translation as compared to its original. The theoretical part of the research is built upon the idea that translation implies “rewriting” (Lefevere 1992) under certain constraints. Being “refracted” texts, translations naturally include not only a change of the language but also a change of the socio-cultural context, a change of the ideology (i.e. the “world view”), and a change of the poetics of the original (Lefevere 1984: 192). Thus, the comparative analysis aims at the major changes operated by the Romanian translator while conveying certain culture-bound meanings.
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Travel narratives written in the mid-nineteenth century served as valuable sources of information for the Western society regarding remote and exotic places as well as different cultures. Hungary and Transylvania became increasingly interesting and challenging destinations for British and American travellers, especially in the pre- and post-revolutionary periods. Julia Pardoe’s The City of the Magyar, or Hungary and Her Institutions in 1839–1840 (1840) and Nina Elizabeth Mazuchelli’s memoir, Magyarland (1881), provided extensive accounts of a multi-ethnic Hungary, discussing various populations as being distinct from the mainstream society, as well as their folklore, history, manners, and customs. In analysing Pardoe’s and Mazuchelli’s memoirs, I am interested in the ways in which they portray Hungarian otherness as contrasted to Western, more precisely British national ideals. Making use of the theories of imagology, I will argue that the perceptions of a national character (hetero-images) as well as the defining of the (travellers’) self against the Other (auto-images) are determined and perpetuated by cultural distinctions and by the various forms of cultural clash of the British and the East-Central European. Moreover, through a comparative approach, I will also look at the differences in the travellers’ perception of the same country but in two very different historical and political time periods: Pardoe’s journey in Hungary took place in 1840, before the War of Independence, while Mazuchelli visited the country in 1881, long after the Austro-Hungarian Compromise in 1867. The findings will indicate that the main features of the image of Hungarian national identity, as it is represented in the travelogues, are generated by the historical, cultural, and socio-political developments before and after the Hungarian War of Independence (1848–49).
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The characters of children in Samokovlija’s stories left a distinctive and recognizable mark in the literature of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Following the postulates of Ariès, this Paper examines the phenomenon of childhood from the perspective of the changeability in the comprehension of the position of the child and childhood in various social and ideological contexts. The children's characters, according to the considerations included, are contextualized between real and literary–fictional aspects of the Sephardic heritage. Based on the selected examples of Samokovlija's stories about childhood and children, we perceive the author's most important narrative strategies. The Paper also points to how much traditional comprehension of the child and childhood in the literature of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and in the Bosnian – Sephardic literary heritage made typically and characteristically social, cultural, and historical elements of the identity be incorporated in Samokovlija's characters of children.
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One of the features of Viktor Neborak’s multifaceted work is its intersemioticity, its connection with other types of art. The article reveals the role of rock music in Neborak’s works. The main focus is on the collection Flying Head (1990), twenty poems from which were set to music. The importance of rhythm is emphasized. Neborak’s cooperation with Lviv rock musicians (The Cry of Jeremiah, Dead Rooster, Neborak rock band, bard and translator Viktor Morozov), his participation in the Nebo-rock musical project are highlighted. The album Terrible Birthday (1995) of this project as the beginning of the tradition of performances of Ukrainian poets accompanied by musicians.
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The paper is a reflection about ways in which notions related to valuation function in literary criticism, focusing on processes of constructing, consolidating, and exchanging notions in socio-cultural circulation. Based on essays by, among others, Kacper Bartczak and Natalia Malek, who have different opinions about Louise Glück’s poetry, such notions as universality, honesty, female writing are considered.
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Two starkly different aspects of the Brexit phenomenon may be seen in the recent work of two British poets, Vidyan Ravinthiran and Nicholas Hagger. Ravinthiran’s most recent book consists of love sonnets composed for his wife. These are addressed to an intimate “you” which, upon publication, is expanded to vicariously include his readership. In the course of their everyday life as a mixed-race couple in northern England, the context of Brexit occasionally intrudes. When it leads him to communicate something to his wife, the poet organically transcribes these experiences. While ultimately a secondary (if often inescapable) theme in Ravinthiran’s sonnet sequence, the Brexit negotiations are the leitmotif of Hagger’s Fools’ Paradise. Taking his cue from the sixteenth and seventeenth century mock epic, the poet offers an erudite satire excoriating a short-sighted political class. Hagger appears to move easily in such circles, presumably due to the diplomatic and intelligence contacts in his past. Assuming the guise of an insider or pundit, “your poet” provides a meticulous, tactical critique of the inefficacy of foolish parliamentarians.
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Although it would be absurd to compare the 2016 Brexit referendum and whatever happened in its aftermath to the tragedy of the Great War, surprising as it may seem, the two have something in common. This is so because the 1914–1918 period triggered a flood of poetry, written not only by established literary figures, but also by thousands of civilians who found it a means of expressing their emotions. By the same token, the post-referendum years produced a poetic response on the part of ordinary citizens. This article tries to take a closer look at how once again British citizens turn to poetry to voice their fears and frustration.
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This study analyses the novel Povestirile mamei bătrâne by Radu Ţuculescu, a novel which has a very productive narrative space: the action takes place in Petra, an isolated Transylvanian village, now condemned to extinction, having an aging population. The stories in the novel display a very skilful narrative game between the past and the present of the settlement, with lively characters, who support the narrative with paradoxical or grotesque incidents. Reality always slips beyond its conventional limit due to a well-established mechanism of producing fiction, maintained by the imagination of the narrators. Mystery and tragedy remain present, even if the dislocated realities create the absurd, they generate comedy, or they produce magic.
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Octavian Paler’s writing Caminante though liable to fall into the journey diary category along with Journeys through memory. Egypt. Greece, Journeys through memory. Italy, still contrasts through personal load, through the need for confession. Therefore, in Caminante Octavian Paler nevertheless breaks free from Journey through memory leaving the travel memories genre and entering the authentic journal territory. Paler uses his journey to Mexico as a pretext for a series of essays on Cortés, Ciudad de Mexico, Moctezuma, aztecs and mayans, pyramids and life in general. The writer will assume in Caminante the traveller’s condition, for whom the journey means self-awareness, confrontation with himself and his dilemmas. Through myths, Paler is trying to offer himself a compensation of the struggle against an overwhelming reality, in a world created without fissures and upsetting questions. Octavian Paler’s journeys display a profound intellectual adventure, meaningful and shining, one detectable on the ideatic level rather than on the level of an immediate reality.
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The article attempts from a modern point of view to analyze the genre of the two parts of Elin Pelin's novel - Yan Bibiyan. Incredible adventures of a kid and Yan Bibiyan on the Moon and to be defined as a whole, as the diology represents. The author argues that the work offers many contexts as one of the most important is the vision and prognosis of the writer regarding the scientific progress of mankind in the mastery of the Cosmos.
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