Laganside: Poetry from Northern Ireland Today

An analysis of Alan Gillis's poem 'Laganside' as exemple of a post-ceasefire Northern Irish poetic.

Primary angle closure glaucoma:A descriptive study in Scottish Caucasians

Purpose: The aim of this study is to describe the ocular and demographic features of Caucasian patients newly presenting with primary angle closure glaucoma and the proportion of workload it represents at a tertiary university hospital glaucoma service. Methods: A retrospective case notes review was conducted for all Caucasian patients newly diagnosed with narrow angles, primary angle closure, acute primary angle closure and primary angle closure glaucoma that were seen over a period of 2 years. Demographic and ocular variables were compared and statistical analysis was carried out with the paired t -test and chi-squared test. Number of primary open angle closure glaucoma and acute angle closure cases were compared with total number of new referrals to the department, new patients diagnosed with glaucoma and population numbers for the North East of Scotland. Results: One hundred and four patients were analysed. Twenty-four (23.1%) had narrow angles, 30 (28.8%) had primary angle closure and 50 (48.1%) had primary angle closure glaucoma. Twelve (11.5%) presented with acute primary angle closure. There was no significant difference for gender, age, hypermetropia or visual acuity between groups. Primary angle closure glaucoma constituted 22.9% (50/128) of newly diagnosed glaucoma cases. Based on the 2001 Scotland census, the crude annual incidence of newly diagnosed primary angle closure glaucoma was estimated at 14.8 per 100000 and 3.6 per 100000 for acute primary angle closure in the over-45-year-old population. Conclusion: Our study confirms that primary angle closure glaucoma is uncommon in Caucasians, but not as rare as originally perceived as it makes up a fair proportion (22.9%) of glaucoma workload. © 2009 The Authors Journal Compilation © 2009 Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Ophthalmologists.

“La littérature est la seule patrie”: Nabile Farès and the Poetry of Postcolonial Displacment

Nabile Farès is a key author within postcolonial studies, due in particular to his uniquely expressive writing style. This article discusses writing style in his 1982 text, L’état perdu: précédé du discours pratique de l’immigré. Throughout the mainly French text, different alphabets are woven, alluding to the complexity of Algerian linguistic history and the importance of language in the construction and expression of identity. Meanwhile, the grammar and structure of the French language seems confused and at times illogical, raising further questions about use of a colonial language in a postcolonial context. Farès’s writing style is avant-garde in nature, and deliberate intertextuality with the Surrealists situates the text within an avant-garde tradition in the French language, developing new ideas surrounding the effect of this written genre in the aftermath of colonialism.

'Translated Verse': Milton's Latin Poetry in the Long Eighteenth Century

This chapter assesses ways in which the emergence in the long eighteenth century of a cluster of verse translations of Milton’s Poemata engendered an intellectual discourse and debate on translation itself, not dissimilar to the magazine warfare of the day. It argues that poetical renderings of Milton’s Latin verse, and the biographical and literary contexts in which they appeared, facilitated the interrogation of key issues that are still being debated by modern translation theorists: the nature and function of translation; the viability of rendering a source text in a target language that is also in this instance a poetic language; the potential ‘fetters’ which, in Drydenesque terms, might constrain ‘the verbal copier’; or by contrast the quasi-liberating fluency, the ‘fluent strategy’, attendant upon recourse to verse as translational medium; canonicity, amplification and omission; the much-debated issue of authorial equivalence, evinced here, it is suggested, by the editorial showcasing of the translator; and not least, the perennial question of translation as reading and critical interpretation. In short, verse renderings of Milton’s Latin poetry and the debates that they engendered assume a not inconsequential place in the history of translation theory, which, as Venuti notes, is forever concerned with ‘the changing relationships between the relative autonomy of the translated text and two other categories: equivalence and function.’

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Marvell's Latin Poetry and the Art of Punning

This chapter analyses Marvell’s linguistic ingenuity as exemplified by his Latin poetic corpus. Here, it is argued, a pseudo Lucretian sensitivity to the parallelism between the structure of Latin words and the structure of the world co-exists with a linguistic methodology that is essentially Marinesque. Close examination of the Latin poems as a whole assesses the nature and significance of etymological play, paronomasia, puns on juxtaposed Latin words, on place names, and on personal names. It is suggested that such devices demonstrate ways in which the neo-Latin poetic text can serve both as a linguistic microcosm of the literary contexts in which they are employed, and as a re-invention of the artifice, extravagant conceits, and baroque wit of Marinism. The result is a neo-Latin ‘echoing song’ that is both intra- and intertextual. Through bilingual punning and phonological wit Marvell plays with a classical language only to demonstrate its transformative potential. The chapter concludes by offering a new reading of Hortus in relation to the garden sections of Marino’s L’Adone, in which an extravagantly luscious setting confounds the senses and is mirrored linguistically by word-clusters and labyrinthine punning.