“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.

The Potency of Pastoral in Hispanic Baroque poetry

This monograph demonstrates that aesthetic and ontological anxieties continue to find diverse expression within the contrived textual artifice of the bucolic space. Drawing upon expansive definitions of the Hispanic literary Baroque, (Beverley, 1980, 2008, Echevarría 1993, Ross 1993, Chemris 2008 , Egido 2009 ) the study analyses the pastoral verse of representative poets of the period to demonstrate that they re-enter an Arcadia that has been defamiliarized but is nonetheless inexorably connected to the classical origins of the mode. Pastoral, in common with other literary forms, is subject to a process of re-evaluation which was latent in its classical legacy. Within the intricacies of this literary construct, surface artistry sustains an effect of artless innocence that is vibrantly contested across the secular, sacred, parodic and colonial text.

On Theft: Teaching Poetry Composition to Undergraduates

This chapter discusses the potential uses of both found poetry and imitiation poetry as teaching material for undergraduate creative poetry students.

Introducing Students to Pre-Nineteenth-Century Poetry in the Language Classroom

We as language instructors are tasked with preparing students to transition from language to literature courses. The shorter length of many poems makes them ideal for presentation in the language classroom, where the acquisition of communicative competence is the priority. Introductory and intermediate textbooks’ poetry offerings, however, are frequently drawn from a canon of poems by only a few nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors (Verlaine, Apollinaire, Prévert) and fail to expose students to broader aspects of French literature. This article offers strategies for presenting pre-nineteenth-century poetry to first- and second-year students of French using dizains from Scève’s Délie as examples.