Text and Intensification of Its Impact in Chishti Samā`

In my master’s thesis I analyse mystical Islamic poetry in ritualistic performance context, samā` , focusing on the poetry used by the Chishti Sufis. The work is based on both literary sources and ethnographic material collected in India. The central textual source is Surūd-i Rūhānī, a compilation of mystical poetry. Textual sources, however, can be understood properly only in relation to the living performance context and therefore I also utilise interviews of Sufis and performers of mystical music and recordings of samā` assemblies along with texts. First part of the thesis concentrates on thematic overview of the poems and the process of selecting a suitable text for performance. The poems are written in three languages, viz. in Persian, Urdu and Hindi. Among the authors are both Sufis and non-Sufis. The poems, mystical and non-mystical alike, share the same poetic images and they acquire a mystical meaning when they are set to qawwali music and performed in samā` assemblies. My work includes several translations of verses not previously translated. Latter part of the thesis analyses the musical idiom of qawwali and the ways in which the impact of text on listeners is intensified in performance. Typically the intensification is accomplished in the level of a single poem through three different techniques: using introductory verses, inserting verses between the verses of the main poem and repeating individual units of text. The former two techniques are tied to creating a mystical state in the listeners while the latter aims at sustaining it. It is customary that a listener enraptured by mystical experience offers a monetary contribution to the performers. Thus, intensification of the text’s impact aims at enabling the listeners to experience mystical states.

Empire, Tourism, Nostalgia: Joseph Brodsky and Travel Writing

Joseph Brodsky, one of the most influential Russian intellectuals of the late Soviet period, was born in Leningrad in 1940, emigrated to the United States in 1972, received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987, and died in New York City in 1996. Brodsky was one of the leading public figures of Soviet emigration in the Cold War period, and his role as a model for the constructing of Russian cultural identities in the last years of the Soviet Union was, and still is, extremely important. One of Joseph Brodsky’s great contributions to Russian culture of the latter half of the twentieth century is the wide geographical scope of his poetic and prose works. Brodsky was not a travel writer, but he was a traveling writer who wrote a considerable number of poems and essays which relate to his trips and travels in the Soviet empire and outside it. Travel writing offered for Brodsky a discursive space for negotiating his own transculturation, while it also offered him a discursive space for making powerful statements about displacement, culture, history and geography, time and space—all major themes of his poetry. In this study of Joseph Brodsky’s travel writing I focus on his travel texts in poetry and prose, which relate to his post-1972 trips to Mexico, Brazil, Turkey, and Venice. Questions of empire, tourism, and nostalgia are foregrounded in one way or another in Brodsky’s travel writing performed in emigration. I explore these concepts through the study of tropes, strategies of identity construction, and the politics of representation. The theoretical premises of my work draw on the literary and cultural criticism which has evolved around the study of travel and travel writing in recent years. These approaches have gained much from the scholarly experience provided by postcolonial critique. Shifting the focus away from the concept of exile, the traditional framework for scholarly discussions of Brodsky’s works, I propose to review Brodsky’s travel poetry and prose as a response not only to his exilic condition but to the postmodern and postcolonial landscape, which initially shaped the writing of these texts. Discussing Brodsky’s travel writing in this context offers previously unexplored perspectives for analyzing the geopolitical, philosophical, and linguistic premises of his poetic imagination. By situating Brodsky’s travel writing in the geopolitical landscape of postcolonial postmodernity, I attempt to show how Brodsky’s engagement with his contemporary cultural practices in the West was incorporated into his Russian-language travel poetry and prose and how this engagement thus contributed to these texts’ status as exceptional and unique literary events within late Soviet Russian cultural practices.

Olla elävän sanat : Roolirunon laji Maila Pylkkösen teoksessa Arvo. Vanhaäiti puhuu runonsa

Maila Pylkkönen (1931 1986) was one of the most important modernist poets in Finland and a central figure in developing the dramatic monologue in Finnish literature. The study examines Pylkkönen s poetic work Arvo. Vanhaäiti puhuu runonsa (Value. An old woman speaks her poem, 1959) as an example of the dramatic monologue, approaching it from three perspectives: its generic features and background, and the poetic framework to which it connects in the context of Pylkkönen s poetry. In addition to methods of literary scholarship, the poetic analysis benefits from a linguistic approach. The study shows that the dramatic monologue genre drives Pylkkönen s first work, Klassilliset tunteet (Classical feelings, 1957), in a context of finding poetic identity, characterised by the expression to be the words of a living creature . The study demonstrates that important generic features of the dramatic monologue, namely, a poem representing a speech-event and a hierarchical structure, are also Arvo s most significant generic features. Arvo s poems as speech-events are examined for their internal progressive, pragmatic unity constructed through single line units; for their function as narratives dealing with the life story of an old woman, Arvo s speaker; and from the perspective of the communication between the old woman and the poems other characters. Arvo s speech-events can also be seen as semantic shifts from one poem to another: the poems construct semantic stages representing different phases of the old woman s life. The study demonstrates that analysis of Arvo s hierarchical structure, that is, the relationship between the speaker and the rhetorical levels, reveals the work s structural and ideological wholeness by focusing on the old woman s emotions: longing, loneliness and alienation from the world. In other words, the contradictions between the explicit level of the speaker and an implied rhetorical level open up the tragedy of an old woman s daily life. Study of Arvo s hierarchical structure also highlights the special position of the reader in the framework of a dramatic monologue. The elements of a dramatic present in which the old woman s emotions are conveyed, an italicized opening poem, and the work s title Value invite the reader to consider Arvo as a structural and ideological whole. The function of Arvo s hierarchical structure is to ask the reader to recognise the hopelessness of the old woman s situation, understand it, and even identify with it.

Käännösten historia, kirjallisuushistoria, kulttuurihistoria

Abstract (The history of translations, the history of literature, the history of culture): The article first introduces the extensive exhibition catalogue published in Marbach in 1982, which illustrates the wideranging interest for translations during the epoch of Goethe, and secondly it gives an overview of research on the history of translations conducted in Finland. Furthermore, the relevance of the history of translations both for the history of literature and for the history of culture is discussed. The history of literature is interpreted in terms of four various forms: the history of culture and the history of ideas, or as a part of them; the history of the literary field, or as the history of the change of this field (the sociology of literature); the history of different styles; and as the history of individual authors. In all these fields, translations represent interesting research material: they function as clear indicators of various phenomena in the history of literature. In the history of translation, translators are also highlighted as profound but often forgotten individuals with cultural impact. At the end of the article, a brief case study is presented with focus on a new interest in Spanish literature in 19th century Finland, with a background in the German Romanticism and its interest for Spain.