Journal articles on the topic 'Nonsense poems'

The nonsense rhymes that were almost ubiquitous in First World War trench newspapers (periodicals produced by servicemen while on active service) present vivid, humorous, and arresting representations of violence. This article draws attention to servicemen’s widespread use of limericks and parodic nursery rhymes to depict soldiers being, variously, shot, shelled, and bayoneted, and establishes the hitherto unrecognised representational significance of these poems. Those portrayals of the First World War most frequently celebrated for their truthfulness and emotiveness tend to be both solemn and, in different ways, ‘new’. In contrast, written in the traditions of nineteenth-century nonsense literature and reflecting the popularity of nonsense in contemporary comic periodicals, nonsensical trench newspaper poems indicate the durability of nonsense as a form of Great War representation.

Nonsense and humour are two cognitive and linguistic phenomena that frequently overlap. The focus of this article falls on chosen instances of humorous nonsense poetry, targeted at English-speaking children, which contains verbal and visual modes of expression. Formal sources of nonsense-creation in natural language can be several, among others semantic anomaly, syntactic ill-formedness and structural ambiguity, phonetic and graphological experimentation. The interplay of nonsense with the visuality of the text in children's poetry assumes three distinct forms: 1) visual poems, 2) multimodal texts,, where illustrations, often nonensical and funny in themselves, support the verbal text, and 3) texts based on the phonetic play. Examples will be drawn from the classics of the Anglophone children's poetry: Mother Goose, the Victorian classics L. Carroll and E. Lear, 20th-c. British and American poets - L. Hughes, e.e. cummings, T. Hughes, J. Agard, as well as the Polish-British pair W. Graniczewski and R. Shindler. In all the poems to be analyzed multimodality has an important role to play in the creation and strengthening of the effect of humorous bisociation/incongruity. A tight intertwining of the phonetic, semantic and visual layers in such texts becomes an additional challenge for their translators. The theoretical keystone for our considerations remains H. Bergson's study Laughter (1900/2008), which deftly combines the Superiority, the Incongruity and the Release Theory of Modern Humour Studies. Bergson rightly links the sources and effects of the nonsensical and the comic to the notion of game/play and to the idea of dream-like illusion they create.

A lot of research has been done on the effects of music and sounds on performance in many areas of study. However, there have been mixed results about what kind of effects music can have. Musical pleasure was able to influence task performance, and the shape of this effect depended on group and individual factor (Gold B., et al. 2013). According to Fassbender (2012), music does have an effect on memory, music during a study or learning phase hindered memory but increased mood and sports performance. The objective of this experiment is to find if music can help memorize different tests like nonsense syllables, numbers and poems with rhyme. Students were from different faculties, N=74 (75% females) between age 17-22, participating in this experiment. Experiment had 4 different tests, self-created according to the experiment of nonsense syllables from (Ebinghaus 1885). First test had 50 nonsense syllables to lead to the next phase of experiment. Students were separated in 3 groups with almost the same numbers of correct nonsense syllables from the first test. First group was taking the tests without music at all and in silent, second group was doing the test with lyrics music and the third group with relaxing music. All three groups had 5 minutes for each 3 different tests to memorize 50 other nonsense syllables (including 3 same syllables), 12 lines from poems and 50 different order of numbers, then to write down how much they memorized. The music was the same during memorizing phase and was repeated during writing phase with same volume and with headphones on. Result showed that there are significant differences memorizing lines from poems and the same syllables between students without music and them with music. T-test for each group also showed the significant differences between these two groups. Regression analyses explain 33% of variance factors for memorizing the lines and 50% of variance factors for memorizing the same syllables, groups have the most impact on regression. Conclusions of this research are that music affects memory negatively resulting that students are able to memorize better without music. This research also concludes that silent is a key factor to recognize the same nonsense syllables. When it comes to memorizing better keep the music down!

Edward Lear left a rich and precious poetic legacy from the Victorian Age even though accompanied by illness, loneliness, and melancholy throughout his life. Before nearly one hundred years, scholars have pointed out how Lears subject differed from other nonsense verse writers, as well as the autobiographical elements of his poems. But this self-writing in the form of nonsense is never straightforward. It is often confusing whether Lears poems are meant to take people to the land of nonsense to wander or explore, hoping that people will feel the same pleasure and spiritual support in nonsense as he does himself, or whether he wants people to see him calling out for cares and hopes, to see his own desires, frustrations and sorrows. Based on The Dong with a Luminous Nose, this article examines and explains how the Dong is a symbol of Lears self. Lear projects his suffering from loneliness and unrequited love and his eccentric lifelong sense of exile into this poem; yet at the same time satisfies some of his desires, his quest for the aesthetic of sadness, his own idealism and his deeply hidden histrionic personality. This article fully integrates Lears biography, his status as a landscape painter and his creative talents brought about by his illnesses, and draws to the conclusion that this poem is Lears bittersweet attempt to be seen as a person alone in a landscape.

Nonsense Literature has always been an obscure viewpoint of literature studies. Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (referred to as Through the Looking-Glass hence) witnessed Lewis Carroll bring this peculiar genre into the spotlight. He designed a series of fictional characters and devised several poems on which he endowed the united characteristic of talking nonsense. This essay aims at analyzing the nonsensical discourse in Through the Looking-Glass, which includes nonsensical utterances, nonsensical poems, and illogical narrations. Starting with skepticisms from the proposals on implicature, the essay proceeds onto the Language Game theory of Wittgenstein, followed by the life story of Carroll himself and the analysis of a typical nonsensical poem. As the existing studies of Nonsensical Literature fails to merge the work with the man, this essay intends to establish a new method of cross referencing in order to achieve a more profound understanding of said literature as well as Lewis Carroll.

Abstract This essay explores the nonsensical elements of the composition and staging of “A Short Program of Poems for Young People, in Four Chapters,” a fifty-minute poetry reading by Michael Heyman and Joseph T. Thomas, Jr. prepared for the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association’s 2019 annual conference, “Send in the Clowns,” focusing primarily on the theory and practice of nonsense in relation to the writing and staging of “A Short Program of Poems for Young People, in Four Chapters,” which was performed in San Diego by Joseph T. Thomas, Jr. and Michael Heyman at the 2019 Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association conference, “Send in the Clowns.”

Cet article a pour ambition de saisir du point de vue de la sémantique interprétative un court-texte poétique de Edward Lear intitulé « The two old bachelors »1 (tiré de Laughable lyrics, a fourth book of nonsense poems, songs, botany, music, etc, 1877) traduit en français exactement un siècle plus tard par Patrick Hersant (Edward Lear – Nonsense, 1977, éd. Ombres). Outre une analyse proprement sémantique de la version originale anglaise du poème et de ce qui en fait un texte absurde, nous souhaitons montrer sur la base de cette analyse préparatoire comment Patrick Hersant a tranché le dilemme traductologique auquel il a été confronté : en effet, une partie de l'absurde reposant sur l'homonymie en anglais, le traducteur a livré une interprétation très peu fidèle à l'original, peut être volontairement.

In addition to his outstanding poems for adults, George Seferis, the Nobel Prize-winning Greek poet, also wrote verses for children. The limericks he composed as gifts for children of his family were published in a volume entitled Poiḗmata me Zōgraphiés se Mikrá Paidiá [Poems with Drawings for Young Children] (1975), discussed in this paper. With these limericks, Seferis turned to the Anglo-Saxon poetic tradition of nonsense to oppose the ‘seriousness’ of adult life, while also coping with painful family memories and the dark atmosphere of World War II. He employed humour and playfulness as an antidote to harsh realities. Accompanied by surreal drawings, the playful verses became the playground where Seferis met his child readers as well as his childness.

Among numerous books of poetry for children written by Danuta Wawiłow – famous XXth century Polish poet and writer – one book is special: Poems for Naughty Children [Wiersze dla niegrzecznych dzieci] published in 1987. The book is unique not only because of the poetical qualities it represents – rhythmicity, melodiousness, catchiness, melancholy and lyricism equally with pure nonsense, absurdity, grotesque, (black) humour and numerous equivoques and puns, which are characteristic for Wawiłow’s poetical works; above all else Poems for Naughty Children is a collection of translations of the traditional English nursery rhymes, made by Danuta Wawiłow, who claimed more than once that she was a translator long before she had become a writer. The article aims to explore Wawiłow’s translation work which (up to now) remains almost unknown and un-described in Polish theoretical discourse. Moreover, the author presents the outcome of her research conducted to find “missing originals” of translated nursery rhymes, offers the classification of them and undertakes critical reflection over translation strategy adopted by Danuta Wawiłow.

This paper focuses on the specifics of rendering lexical nonsense into the target language. The research is done on the basis of one of the outstanding poems of all times belonging to the genre of nonsense, namely Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll and 12 translations into French. As a result of the research it was established that the interpretation of any nonsensical representation of the lexical level has a significant impact on its reproduction in the target language, but does not limit translators in their creative approaches. We claim that nonsense is an interesting, complex, and ambiguous phenomenon which implies a plurality of potential options for its interpretation, and reproduction in the target language. Lexical nonsense units are deprived of one single sense and thus one single variant of their interpretation due to their word formation. In most cases, Lewis Carroll chose blending, which resulted in coining new words with two or more meanings “packed up” into one word. To make interpretation easier, the author gave his commentaries on the pages of the literary work. In most cases, L. Carroll’s game with meanings is reproduced in French translations by means of calquing the word-formation pattern. In certain cases, translators are guided by the author’s commentary and they select the means of the French language as accurately as possible to reproduce Carroll’s intentions. In most cases, Carroll’s lexical nonsense units are reproduced in the French translations by means of blending and compounding. In some cases, the translators take a creative approach bringing new meanings into Carroll’s game, different from his initial intention. And their game becomes so specific that it goes beyond the reader’s imagination. The translators’ preference to use calque to coin their equivalents is a manifestation of the domestication strategy in most analyzed translations. Only one translator borrowed English nonsensical lexemes to name main characters in his French translation, which we consider to be the manifestation of foreignization strategy.

This research aims to (1) describe the analysis of the Andung Sian Sirambe poetry collection by Cisilia Siagian (2) describe the relevance of the meaning of the Andung Sian Sirambe poetry collection by Cisilia Siagian. The data in this research are Toba Batak poetry in an anthology book entitled Andung Sian Sirambe Poetry Collection by Cisilia Siagian, taking 10 works. The instrument in this research is a human instrument, namely researchers who play an important role in the research. This study used descriptive qualitative method. The results of the research obtained in the poem Andung Sian Sirambe by Cisilia Siagian with 10 poems are the change of metaphor meaning in 4 poetry quotes, allegory 1 poetry quote, simile 11 poetry quotes, personification 8 poetry quotes, metonymy 4 poetry quotes, epic parable 2 poetry quotes . Furthermore, there are deviations in meaning, ambiguity consisting of 2 poetry quotes, nonsense, found in 8 poems, contradiction in 2 poetry quotes. Andung Sian Sirambe's poetry collection has the relevant meaning of each poem, such as respect for parents, suffering and difficulties in life, unfair fate, cultural preservation, sacrifice, and life's journey. It is important for readers of the Batak Language Poetry Collection to pay attention to the meaning of the poetry and the language style contained in the poetry in order to be able to understand the picture or essence of the story of the poetry.

Research indicates that humor is an effective method to reinforce learning, yet humor is rarely used in horticultural textbooks. Use of humor in horticulture is easier than in many disciplines because humor dealing with plants is less likely to offend specific population segments since plants, not people, are usually the butt of the jokes. A large collection of plant humor has been assembled, including the following: Edward Lear's 32 line drawings of “Nonsense Botany”, e.g. Manypeeplia upsidonia; Gary Larson's macabre Far Side cartoons dealing with plants, e.g. the “Venus kidtrap”; periodic tables of vegetables and of fruits & nuts; Arcimboldo's Renaissance paintings of faces composed of flowers, vegetables, and plant parts and their modern imitations; Robert Wood's book, How to Tell the Birds From The Flowers, containing drawings and poems; Axel Erlandson's fantasticly grafted trees; plant movies like the two versions of Little Shop of Horrors, which is set in a flower shop; Joke Fountains of the Renaissance; and numerous cartoons from science periodicals.

The article attempts to explore the features of early 21st century Ukrainian poetry for children. The purpose of exploration is to identify the genre and ideographic features of poetry: innovation and traditionalism. Tracing the genre modifications of poetry and their common and distinctive features, the author addresses the key features of poetry for children in general: artistic and literary discourse, the functions of poetry, thematic direction, strophic structure of the poem, the existence of images, characters and others. The article proves that the basis for the renewal of poetic genres is traditional genres of folklore and poetry. There are organically updated folk genres in modern poetry for children (praise, scarecrows, fables, nonsense, counters, patter, games) and newly created genres (poetry-pictures, tricks, coloring books, checks, stumbling blocks, therapeutic poems). The search for new forms of expression of idiosyncrasies of artists leads to the emergence of original genres. These have appeared as an original phenomenon in the Ukrainian literature of the early 21st century and offer a wide scope for further research.

The article considers the poetics of the grotesque and the absurd in the literature for children, in particular, the stories of T. Sobakin (“The Bald Monster”, “Motya”, “Then I Thought”), N. Nosov (“Dreamers”), M. Yessenovsky (“Ur-Yur-vyr”), as well as poems by A. Givargizov (“Unusual”), A. Orlova (“I am growing...”) and A. Usachev (“Vobla and the magazine”). Ideas about the wholeness of images and their harmony towards the created artistic reality are considered key characteristics for both concepts. So, absurd images are created by multiple points of view and contradictions between them, they clearly express the border between the ordinary and the implausible. The elements there are not completely combined and can be separated from each other by the means of imagination. Grotesque images in literature for children, created by objectifying individual elements or combining plans that do not contradict each other, are more natural and can also be visualized, and that is what distinguishes grotesque and absurdity from nonsense. The physicality and the variability of the image remain the most common ways of creating the grotesque in children’s literature. The grotesque and absurd does not depend on the fantastic assumption, which allows such images to exist both inside and outside the category of the fantastic.

This paper presents the results of a comparative study of the collection of poems Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939) by T. S. Eliot and the collection of children’s verses Mother Goose Old Nursery Rhymes (published in 1760), compiled and illustrated by A. Rackham (1913). Consisting of 15 poems, and distinguished by its frivolity against the background of other works by Eliot, the cycle Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats has been overlooked by both Russian and foreign researchers for a long time. Recently a surge of interest in this book of verse has been provoked by the release of a feature film Cats (2019) based on the world-famous musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber. This fact as well as the lack of serious academic studies of Eliot’s book of verse has determined the urgency and novelty of this paper. It is also important to show the involvement of this segment of Eliot’s poetry into the English literary tradition. The aim of this research is to identify the influence of Victorian aesthetics of nonsense on the poetry of T. S. Eliot’s cycle. The method of comparative analysis has been chosen as the main research method. Besides, structural-semantic and linguistic-cultural methods have been used. In understanding and interpreting the term “tradition” the author relies on Eliot’s aesthetics, in which this concept is central. The terminological unit “nursery rhymes” is used in its original traditional meaning since its historical and cultural background disappears in any Russian translation or scholarly interpretation. In the course of work, certain features of nursery rhymes have been identified in the poetic texts by the great Modernist. The study of the specificity of this genre (the playful atmosphere of the text, the special rhythms and forms of coding historical events, animalistic perspectives, the use of various repetitions and imitations, the creation of author’s occasionalisms and unusual names of characters, etc.) confirms strong influence of the tradition of English nursery rhymes on T. S. Eliot’s works.

Since the very beginning of its proliferation, the Homeric epic has been subject to various ways of interpretation and modes of understanding. Particular attention has been paid to those passages from Homeric poems in which the gods commit obscene, absurd, or comical actions. In the opinion of critics of Iliad and Odyssey, such myths were not worthy of the appropriate faith in the Greek gods. Therefore, my article focuses on the third, “comical” group of these Homeric grey areas, and deals with the following questions: how and why did Homer’s comical passages move from a discourse of the ridiculous and the funny to a discourse of the serious by means of philosophical interpretation over the centuries? I will try to uncover the general principles and conditions of that hermeneutical mechanism which made it possible to translate Homer’s comical plots from the language of Olympic “domestic” nonsense into the language of the most important physical, ethical, and metaphysical truths. To achieve this task, my article will conditionally distinguish two ways of transition from the comical to the serious: the first, which was carried out in ancient allegorism, was to directly produce a translation, and to declare that the “superficial” meaning of the myth is false, and its deep level is true. The second way – ancient symbolism – was to turn the comical into the serious through the immediate translation of comical myths into the religious discourse of the sacred, which did not imply a stark contrast between the comical and the serious but, on the contrary, harmonized them.

O trabalho tem por objetivo levantar os poemas infantis no estado do Rio Grande do Sul, bem como os autores que se dedicaram a escrever para o público infantil, de modo a organizar uma listagem exaustiva dessa literatura. Para tanto, iniciou-se com o estudo da poesia infantil no Brasil e no Rio Grande do Sul, desde o seu surgimento, atrelado e comprometido com a escola, até o momento em que o aspecto lúdico apareceu com força nas produções infantis. Em seguida, citam-se as especificidades do gênero quando dirigido ao público infantil e as obras e poetas gaúchos encontrados nas pesquisas. O material levantado foi categorizado por tendências temáticas de elaboração dos poemas e foram analisados os efeitos que a leitura do poema causa no leitor: humorístico, lúdico, nonsense e lírico.

On the 3rd November 1984 there appeared in The Guardian newspaper (London and Manchester) an article entitled ‘The earth lay gloog, the cattle bollowed deep’. It was the work of MAGGIE COOK, the founder of the Boscobel Poets of Hastings, and lies squarely in the tradition of English literate nonsense. The article is reproduced below, with a commentary by TOM McARTHUR.

Synopsis Philosophical truths are hidden in Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poems, such as “The hunting of the snark.” When the poem is used as a scientific allegory, a snark stands for the pursuit of scientific truth, while a boojum is a spurious discovery. In the study of female biology, boojums have been the result of the use of cultural stereotypes to frame hypotheses and methodologies. Although female reproduction is key for the continuation of sexually reproducing species, not only have females been understudied in many regards, but also data have commonly been interpreted in the context of now-outdated social mores. Spurious discoveries, boojums, are the result. In this article, we highlight specific gaps in our knowledge of female reproductive biology and provide a jumping-off point for future research. We discuss the promise of emerging methodologies (e.g., micro-CT scanning, high-throughput sequencing, proteomics, big-data analysis, CRISPR-Cas9, and viral vector technology) that can yield insights into previously cryptic processes and features. For example, in mice, deoxyribonucleic acid sequencing via chromatin immunoprecipitation followed by sequencing is already unveiling how epigenetics lead to sex differences in brain development. Similarly, new explorations, including microbiome research, are rapidly debunking dogmas such as the notion of the “sterile womb.” Finally, we highlight how understanding female reproductive biology is well suited to the National Science Foundation’s big idea, “Predicting Rules of Life.” Studies of female reproductive biology will enable scholars to (1) traverse levels of biological organization from reproductive proteins at the molecular level, through anatomical details of the ovum and female reproductive tract, into physiological aspects of whole-organism performance, leading to behaviors associated with mating and maternal care, and eventually reaching population structure and ecology; (2) discover generalizable rules such as the co-evolution of maternal-offspring phenotypes in gestation and lactation; and (3) predict the impacts of changes to reproductive timing when the reliability of environmental cues becomes unpredictable. Studies in these key areas relative to female reproduction are sure to further our understanding across a range of diverse taxa.

AbstractThe poem discussed has long been regarded as a “nonsense” poem that was extemporized as part of some kind of poetry game at Court. This article presents evidence to demonstrate that through the use of puns and double entendre the poet in fact ingeniously devised a witty scatological verse. Rather than “nonsense”, the poem is discovered to offer covertly a deeply satirical social commentary on the contemporaneous relationships between men and women, aristocrats and outcastes.

The article is devoted to Vl. Solovyov’s aesthetic evaluation of K.M. Fofanov’s works, well-known poet of the 1880s–1900s. The reconstruction of V. Solovyov's perception of the poet's lyrics was carried out, due to the philosopher's lack of a separate work on K.M. Fofanov. It allowed to establish Fofanov's place in Solovyov’s hierarchy of the leading lyricists of the second half of the XIX century (A.A. Golenishchev-Kutuzov, A.N. Maykov, Ya.P. Polonsky, A.K. Tolstoy, A.A. Fet) and reveal the connection between the aesthetic evaluation of Fofanov's creative work and the general attitude of the thinker to the decadent trends in the literary process of the 1890s. These trends distort the “eternal truth” and “universal meaning”and cause Solovyov’s rejection of other authors of this period (V.Ya. Bryusov, A.L. Volynsky, D.S. Merezhkovsky, N.M. Minsky, V.V. Rozanov, etc) as well as to identify the coincidences or discrepancies of Solovyov's position with contemporary literary criticism (N.M. Sokolov, N.N. Strakhov). For a holistic presentation of V. Solovyov’s aesthetic assessments of K.F. Fofanov’s lyrics it is necessary to take into account his views in such areas as ethics and historiosophy. It is shown that the rejection of Fofanov-the lyricist is also connected with his categorical protest against ethical and historical “decadence”, which, among other things, includes the newest “patriots” who, in their national, ethical and religious blindness, reached the apotheosis of the reign of Ivan the Terrible. This allows us to hypothesize that the aesthetic denial of Fofanov-the lyricist is associated in Solovyov's mind with the general process of diagnosing the “spiritual disease” of modern society, which makes itself felt in various forms (literary or social). This disease makes itself known also in a specific ideological division into “parties” in Russian society in the 1880s–1890s (apotheosis of Ivan the Terrible in the poems by A.N. Maykov in Katkov's “Russkij Vestnik”, as well as the patronage of Fofanov by A.S. Suvorin's “Novoe Vremia”). It is shown that Fofanov's lyrics seem to Solovyov to be one of the examples of substitution of concepts (a phenomenon characteristic of the epoch): Christ – superman, the idea of monarchy – tyranny, the Russian idea – Byzantinism, self –consciousness – narcissism, the higher sense – pretentious nonsense. It is no coincidence that Fofanov becomes the cult-figure of the ego-futurist Igor Severyanin, who, partly recognizing Fofanov's involvement in decadence, makes a step further from the “formulaic” and “banal” in Fofanov's poetry to the avant-garde cult of “the trivial”, blurring the distinction between “true” and “false”.

Leitura do livro de poemas Segunda classe, de Cacaso e Luís Olavo Fontes, destacando suas qualidades de livro de viagem, a partir das categorias de testemunho, do humor e do paradoxo. Os poemas de ambos os poetas captam com perplexidade a existência de elementos da modernidade imbricados na realidade arcaica do sertanejo, criando uma sensação de nonsense e desconforto que oscila entre a apatia e a dor na percepção do nosso atraso social.

In this article the “translatability” (and/or untranslatability) of nonsense is addressed. For this purpose, five Swedish versions of Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem “Jabberwocky” from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass (1871) are examined: the vocabulary, the syntax, the metre and rhythm, as well as the poem’s contextual framing, here mainly understood as the narrative in which Jabberwocky is embedded. Attention is also paid to the generic and stylistic context of the poem, and the corpus of Swedish translations. Such an exegesis is warranted by the status of Jabberwocky both as a seminal work of nonsense and as a translation showpiece. Influential critics, from Elizabeth Sewell (1952) to Jean-Paul Lecercle (1994) have used Jabberwocky as a key nonsense text. And even when it is to question whether Jabberwocky is a good example or not – Michael Heyman, for instance, argues that Jabberwocky is something of an “outlier” in the realm of nonsense since its nonsense is linguistic rather than logical (2015) – it remains a defining nonsense text. Moreover, it also a pivotal text in translation history. Indeed, because of the perceived difficulties in translating it, Jabberwocky has rightfully been called “the holy grail of translation” (Heyman 2015), something that is borne out by the large number of studies devoted to it, such as Orero Pilar’s 2007 monograph of several Spanish versions of Jabberwocky. What I bring to this critical discussion is empirical material that has not been brought to light before (the Swedish translations), and a new perspective.

Este trabalho apresenta e localiza historicamente o conceito de nonsense a partir do poema “Jabberwocky”, de Lewis Carroll, comentando certas escolhas de tradução da obra feitas por Augusto de Campos para a edição de 1980 da Editora Summus. “Jabberwocky”, um clássico nonsense de língua inglesa, começou a ser composto por Carroll em 1855, tendo sido mais tarde integrado à obra Através do Espelho e o que Alice Encontrou Lá, em 1871. Tanto Carroll quanto Augusto de Campos tornam inteligível um texto que à primeira vista parece inacessível, através da criação de palavras novas e singulares (neologismos e portmanteaus). Os resultados de ambos os esforços compõem uma história compreensível, contada em versos. O entendimento do poema faz-se possível também em outras traduções para o português, porém optamos por comentar as escolhas feitas por Augusto de Campos, na tradução denominada “Jaguadarte”, por configurarem a marca autoral de um dos mais renomados tradutores de poesia no Brasil. O trabalho representa, em suma, uma nota de apreciação sobre a genialidade da construção poética deste tradutor.

This article discusses selected “rewritings” of Edward Lear’s nonsense poem “The Akond of Swat”, focusing specifically on the translators’, illustrators’, adapters’ and editors’ attitudes towards the allusive nature of the poem – and specifically the reference it makes to the historical figure of the Pashtun religious leader Abdul Ghaffūr, also known as the Akond (or Wali) of Swat or Saidū Bābā, which may be viewed as orientalist or parodistic from a contemporary viewpoint. Recent translated and illustrated versions of the poem inscribe it with new aesthetic and ideological values. Two Polish translations considered in this article, produced by Andrzej Nowicki and Stanisław Barańczak respectively, demonstrate changing approaches to the nonsense genre evidenced in Polish literary circles (revealing a gradual transition from pure to parodistic nonsense). Graphic representations of the poem discussed in the article testify to the artists’ interpretive powers in redefining the genre of Lear’s poem, rebranding it as an infantile fairy tale on the one hand and a disturbing reflection on tyranny and “the war on terrorism” on the other.

Abstract Japanese modernist writer Taro Hirai (1894–1965) admired Poe so much that he crafted a pseudonym, Edogawa Rampo, based on Poe’s name. I contend that Rampo’s reimaginings of “The Masque of the Red Death” in “The Red Chamber” and of “The Man That Was Used Up” in “The Caterpillar” correspond closely with the aesthetic principles of 1920s and ’30s Japan. One might say that by the age of modernism in Japan, Poe’s grotesque and arabesque had (d)evolved into erotic grotesque nonsense. What Rampo’s deliberate misreadings and his inventive rewritings teach us is that Poe is endlessly contemporary. The relationship between the two writers is not so much a one-way influence as a reverberation or an oscillation between Poe and Rampo. Rampo’s work offers a creative retelling that is modern and Japanese and maybe even changes the way we look at Poe.

It has been suggested that in nonsense literature the form sometimes directs the events of the story (Tigges 1988, Lecercle 1994). Translation of a poem may make this even more evident, as with "Mr Pii Poo" (1956, originally “Herra Pii Poo”), a poem by the Finnish author Kirsi Kunnas, born in 1924. "Mr Pii Poo" tells a story about a magician in a conflict between rural and urban elements, a figure who is introduced also as a witch and who could at the same time be interpreted as an alter ego for the poet Kunnas. In this poem, Kirsi Kunnas binds a bizarre bundle of rhymed and free verses around the Finnish word noita (a witch) and its multiple uses as a noun, a pronoun and a case ending. Sirke Happonen discusses nonsense elements of this witty and whimsical poem by describing its translation process from Finnish into English – a piece of work she has done with the help of her nonsensical colleagues. (As a small epilogue, Happonen presents a "movable reading" of another poem by Kunnas called “Kattila ja perunat”, "The Pan and the Potatoes".)

Este artigo se apropria de algumas obras literárias para discutir e apresentar propostas de escritas criativas para a Educação Matemática, que ponham em coexistência a racionalidade desta disciplina com a inventividade da escrita literária, abrindo espaços à criatividade. Tomando como referência de destaque as obras de Lewis Carroll e o modo como ele trabalha a ruptura do tempo e do espaço em algumas de suas narrativas, este texto é uma exegese de seu mais longo poema nonsense: A caça ao turpente (The hunting of the snark). O resultado, a partir de estudos da obra carrolliana e de aspectos da historiografia de seu tempo, é a apresentação de três conteúdos matemáticos que emergem de sua narrativa. Tal qual o autor a concebeu, assim serão apresentados os passos desta pesquisa: do final para o princípio, isto é, das referências bibliográficas para a introdução.

Resum: Editem i anotem un plec solt del segle xvii (Barcelona, Sebastià i Jaume Mathevat, 1627), de contingut poètic i tema nadalenc, que mai no havia estat reimprès malgrat la seva qualitat literària, i del qual existeixen almenys tres exemplars. És una obra firmada però d’autor desconegut, reelaboració culta, amb elements doctrinals i moralizadors, d’un gènere de caràcter essencialment tradicional.Paraules clau: plec solt poètic, refrany-bagatel·la, Rafel Ribella, segle xvii, poema nadalenc.Abstract: Annotated edition of a four page poetic chapbook from the 17th century (Barcelona, Sebastià i Jaume Mathevat, 1627), a Christmas poem, never reprinted despite its literary quality. At least three copies are known as preserved. It is a signed work but the author is completely unknown to us, a cultured reworking of a traditional genre, a cultured reworking of a traditional genre, with addition of doctrinal and moralizing elements. Keywords: Four page poetic chapbook, nonsense rhyming word, Rafel Ribella, 17th century, Christmas poem.

ABSTRACT This study aims to analyze the figure of speech in the poem “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” by William Wordsworth. The study's design is descriptive qualitative with no changes in the variables. It described the result of the semiotic analysis of the poetry “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”. The research technique has been done by using the super reader theory of analysis by Michael Riffaterre which focuses on three concepts: displacing, distorting, and creating. The result of the analysis shows that William Wordsworth’s poem represents super reader theory. Displacing the meaning of semiotic Super Reader reveals figurative language such as metaphor, personification, simile, and synecdoche. The figurative language revealed by the displacing and distorted meaning shows how the reflection of solitudes is described and his view on the sound of crowded society in the romantic age. This creates meaning when he feels lonely, angry, and alienated from it. The figurative language of metaphor has more dominance in this poem that relates to distorting meaning that some phrases or clauses have ambiguity, contradiction, and nonsense.

This research aims to find out the explicit meaning of the poem Out of The Blue which is analyzed using Riffaterre's Semiotic theory, which according to Riffaterre, poetry is a sign system that needs to be interpreted further. According to Riffaterre, the meaning of poetry is divided into four stages. First, indirectness of expression in the form of changing meaning in the form of metaphor, simile, personification, metonymy, deviation of meaning in the form of ambiguity, contradiction and nonsense, to the creation of meaning in the form of rhyme, symmetry and homology. Heuristic reading to find linguistic meaning. Hermeneutic reading to clarify the meaning of poetry. Then find matrices, models and variants to find keywords contained in the poetry. Finally, a hypnogram to find out the background to the creation of the poem Out of The Blue. The research method used in this research is a qualitative descriptive method to describe and interpret the data studied. The data in this research are primary and secondary data. The primary data in this research are lines in the poem Out of The Blue. Meanwhile, for secondary data, researchers used Riffaterre's Semiotics theory, journals for writing scientific papers, and books related to literary works. The results of this research show that the poem Out of The Blue describes the suffering of New Yorkers in the form of a struggle to survive when terrorists attack, which is implied through certain verses. The terrorist attacks in America caused great traumatic feelings, including the loss of loved ones, deep sadness, depression, hopelessness, and even material and immaterial losses.

Este artigo analisa o livro brasileiro Museu desmiolado, escrito por Alexandre Brito e ilustrado por Graça Lima, voltado ao público infantil. A obra é composta por poemas e, a cada página dupla, apresenta um tipo de museu. O que prevalece como contínuo no livro é a temática dos museus, o nonsense e a intertextualidade com as artes plásticas. Diante disso, o objetivo deste artigo é analisar elementos visuais presentes em alguns museus, sua relação com os versos poéticos expressos pela palavra e a aproximação das imagens com obras de arte ou períodos artísticos. A investigação desses elementos se deu com base nos estudos de Biazetto (2008), Farthing (2011), Fittipaldi (2008), Nikolajeva e Scott (2011), Proença (2007) e Ramos (2010) por meio de abordagem qualitativa e análise documental. A referência visual a criações artísticas e a temática faz com que o livro se configure como uma galeria que convida o leitor a passear por diferentes obras a cada virar de páginas. Assim, o livro ilustrado é uma obra de arte acessível aos leitores e que os conduz em uma jornada pela história da arte e pelo jogo de sentidos das palavras.

The degree of untranslatability depends on the lack of equivalence present in the target language. Translation of nonsense literature poses a huge challenge because of its inherent linguistic and cultural specificity. The following paper looks at Satyajit Ray’s translation of Edward Lear’s nonsense rhymes, in Toray Bandha Ghorar Dim (1986) with particular reference to the ‘Jumblies’ and ‘Dong with a Luminous N ose’. This paper traces the journey of cultural metamorphoses t hat Lear’s poems go through to become presentable to a Bengali reading publi c for whom Ray writes and discusses the strategies unde rtaken by Ray for the purpose.

Making Sense of Nonsense: Readings of Children’s Poetry as Play and Creative Thinking Abstract: Nonsense and meaning are not necessarily conflicting concepts, but can be conceived of as a hendiadys, that is, not opposites, the one or the other, but as one and the other. The idea that meaning and nonsense are related and coexist is a premise for this article, which describes different structures of meaning in the nonsense poetry of Birgitte Krogsbøll and Kamilla Wichmann’s picture book Funkelgnister: Rim, råb og remser (2015, Glittersparks: Rhymes, Roars and Rigmaroles). By linking our analysis of Funkelgnister to Johan Huizinga’s theory of play as a prerequisite for culture, we reveal how the specific structures and logics of the poems generate meaning and thereby we disclose how children’s nonsense poetry is simultaneously meaningful and nonsensical, as a creative thinking akin to culture developed through play and playfulness. We describe how meaning can be sought in three directions, suggested by Gilles Deleuze: above, below and on the surface. In the first case, we consider nonsense as a seductive acoustic phenomenon. In the second, we focus on nonsense poetry as subversive. And finally, in the third case, we show how it is an event. In all, these different aspects demonstrate how nonsense poetry functions as play and challenges our understanding of what it means to read. Following Jurij Lotman’s understanding of pictorial language as creative thinking, we show how nonsense in Funkelgnister opens up a free space by utilizing an in-between, where meaning takes on different forms as signs and sounds, and how the inherent rejection of normative rules of reading in such a venture, initiates a production of meaning as metonymic activity. We thereby highlight how nonsense generates a ground for a creative development of meaning.

Humour in Two Contemporary Norwegian Poetry Picturebooks: Pling i bollen and 123 for barske barn Abstract: This article examines visual and verbal humour in two contemporary Norwegian poetry picturebooks for children. The main aim is to study how different types of humour and various poetic devices are expressed through the interplay of words and images. Moreover, the article discusses in which ways the two books represent a continuation and a renewal of classic humour traditions. The theoretical framework mainly consists of intermedial theory, picturebook theory, children’s poetry studies, and studies on literary humour traditions such as nonsense, parody, and the Bakhtinian carnivalesque. The selected books are Pling i bollen: Fine og ufine barnerim (Off One’s Chump: Delicate and Indelicate Children’s Verses) from 2011 by Ingvild Rishøi and Bendik Kaltenborn and 123 for barske barn: Tull med tall (123 for Rough Children: Nonsense with Numbers) from 2020 by Anne Østgaard and Egil Nyhus. The analyses point to examples of both playful and sophisticated interactions between poems and illustrations, suggesting that the picturebook medium includes more diverse combinations of visual and verbal humour compared to traditional illustrated poetry books. In addition, the various types of humour appear to be wilder and coarser than in classic children’s poetry. 123 for barske barn combines pedagogical and aesthetic qualities by featuring nonsense and carnivalesque humour with numbers, while Pling i bollen offers an even wider range of humour by combining satire, parody, and sophisticated nonsense with more playful and carnivalesque qualities. These compounds of humour tend to transgress the classic genre of children’s verse and to include a cross-generational audience.

Abstract The works of John Taylor the Water Poet (1578–1653) have in recent years been reappraised by scholars of early modern material culture for their expression of a working-class voice, for their inventive manipulation of the print market, and above all for their embodiment, in contrast to dominant Renaissance paradigms of literary worth, of a poetics of physical labour. In this article I revisit the figure of the tailor in Taylor’s defences of his own literary practice, showing that he cleaved to a simplistic distinction between originality and theft, identifying tailoring with the latter. I then examine three examples of his reworkings of previous poems—a micro-drama about the Thirty Years War, an anti-Papist dialogue, and an extended piece of nonsense verse—in an attempt to demonstrate that, despite Taylor’s critical assertions, they can after all best be thought of retailorings, neither properly original nor stolen. This category, however, is a modern one, and I conclude that we have no choice but to appreciate Taylor’s poems, or those of any other early modern writer, on our own terms.

This ‘Provocation essay’ is aimed at triggering reflection and fostering renewed research into organizational stupidity and its intersections with management learning. It opens with a critical poem evoking diverse aspects of our daily encounters with the idiocy, nonsense, and absurdity that pervades organizations. It continues with a more comprehensive review of the still diffuse research literature to reveal a typology of three approaches to studying organizational stupidity (systemic-mechanistic, critical-sociological and cultural-functionalist). It closes with a discussion of how stupidity detracts from reflexivity but can also play useful roles in organizations, which ultimately invites more management learning research on the topic.

Vivendo atualmente na cidade de São Paulo, a pernambucana Micheliny Verunschk publicou dois livros de poesia em 2003: O observador e o nada (Edições Bagaço) e Geografia íntima do deserto (Landy). O primeiro é um longo poema narrativo assinalado pelo nonsense. O segundo foi finalista do Prêmio Portugal Telecom e mereceu o endosso crítico de João Alexandre Barbosa, que destaca, em prefácio do livro, o fato de essa ser uma poesia da intimidade, mas não intimista ou de intimidades. Verunschk tem prontos para publicação um livro de poesia intitulado A cartografia da noite e ainda o romanceNossa Teresa. A seguir, a autora, entrevistada pela Textopoético, fala, com a objetividade e a exatidão que são também peculiares à sua poesia, sobre seu processo criativo, suas principais influências, o leitor, a poesia contemporânea em sua relação com a modernidade, entre outras questões afins.

Cookbooks can be interpreted as sites of exchange and transformation. This is not only due to their practical use as written instructions that assist in turning ingredients into dishes, but also to their significance as interconnecting mediums between teacher and student, perceiver and perceived, past and present. Hinging on inescapable notions of apprenticeship, occasion, and the passing of time—and being at once familiar and unfamiliar to both the reader and the writer—the recipe “as text” renders a specific brand of culinary uncanny. In outlining the function of cookbooks as chronicles of the everyday, Janet Theophano points out that they “are one of a variety of written forms, such as diaries and journals, that [people] have adapted to recount and enrich their lives […] blending raw ingredients into a new configuration” (122). The cookbook unveils the peculiar ability of the ephemeral “text” to find permanence and materiality through the embodied framework action and repetition. In view of its propensity to be read, evaluated, and reconfigured, the cookbook can be read as a manifestation of voice, a site of interpretation and communication between writer and reader which is defined not by static assessment, but by dynamic and often incongruous exchanges of emotions, mysteries, and riddles. Taking the in-between status of the cookbook as point of departure, this paper analyses the cookbook as a “living dead” entity, a revenant text bridging the gap between the ephemerality of the word and the tangibility of the physical action. Using Joanne Harris’s fictional treatment of the trans-generational cookbook in Five Quarters of the Orange (2001) as an evocative example, the cookbook is read as a site of “memory, mourning and melancholia” which is also inevitably connected—in its aesthetic, political and intellectual contexts—to the concept of “return.” The “dead” voice in the cookbook is resurrected through practice. Re-enacting instructions brings with it a sense of transformative exchange that, in both its conceptual and factual dimensions, recalls those uncanny structural principles that are the definitive characteristic of the Gothic. These find particular resonance, at least as far as cookbooks are concerned, in “a sense of the unspeakable” and a “correspondence between dreams, language, writing” (Castricano 13). Understanding the cookbook as a “Gothic text” unveils one of the most intriguing aspects of the recipe as a vault of knowledge and memory that, in an appropriately mysterious twist, can be connected to the literary framework of the uncanny through the theme of “live burial.” As an example of the written word, a cookbook is a text that “calls” to the reader; that call is not only sited in interpretation—as it can be arguably claimed for the majority of written texts—but it is also strongly linked to a sense of lived experience on the writer’s part. This connection between “presences” is particularly evident in examples of cookbooks belonging to what is known as “autobiographical cookbooks”, a specific genre of culinary writing where “recipes play an integral part in the revelation of the personal history” (Kelly 258). Known examples from this category include Alice B. Toklas’s famous Cook Book (1954) and, more recently, Nigel Slater’s Toast (2003). In the autobiographical cookbook, the food recipes are fully intertwined with the writer’s memories and experiences, so that the two things, as Kelly suggests, “could not be separated” (258). The writer of this type of cookbook is, one might venture to argue, always present, always “alive”, indistinguishable and indivisible from the experience of any recipe that is read and re-enacted. The culinary phantom—understood here as the “voice” of the writer and how it re-lives through the re-enacted recipe—functions as a literary revenant through the culturally prescribed readability of the recipes as a “transtextual” (Rashkin 45) piece. The term, put forward by Esther Rashkin, suggests a close relationship between written and “lived” narratives that is reliant on encrypted messages of haunting, memory, and spectrality (45). This fundamental concept—essential to grasp the status of cookbooks as a haunted text—helps us to understand the writer and instructor of recipes as “being there” without necessarily being present. The writers of cookbooks are phantomised in that their presence—recalling the materiality of action and motion—is buried alive in the pages of the cookbook. It remains tacit and unheard until it is resurrected through reading and recreating the recipe. Although this idea of “coming alive” finds resonance in virtually all forms of textual exchange, the phantomatic nature of the relationship between writer and reader finds its most tangible expression in the cookbook precisely because of the practical and “lived in” nature of the text itself. While all texts, Jacques Derrida suggests, call to us to inherit their knowledge through “secrecy” and choice, cookbooks are specifically bound to a dynamic injunction of response, where the reader transforms the written word into action, and, in so doing, revives the embodied nature of the recipe as much as it resurrects the ghostly presence of its writer (Spectres of Marx 158). As a textual medium housing kitchen phantoms, cookbooks designate “a place” that, as Derrida puts it, draws attention to the culinary manuscript’s ability to communicate a legacy that, although not “natural, transparent and univocal”, still calls for an “interpretation” whose textual choices form the basis of enigma, inhabitation, and haunting (Spectres of Marx 16). It is this mystery that animates the interaction between memory, ghostly figures and recipes in Five Quarters of the Orange. Whilst evoking Derrida’s understanding of the written texts as a site of secrecy, exchange and (one may argue) haunting, Harris simultaneously illustrates Kelly’s contention that the cookbook breaks the barriers between the seemingly common everyday and personal narratives. In the story, Framboise Dartigen—a mysterious woman in her sixties—returns to the village of her childhood in the Loire region of France. Here she rescues the old family farm from fifty years of abandonment and under the acquired identity of the veuve Simone, opens a local crêperie, serving simple, traditional dishes. Harris stresses how, upon her return to the village, Framboise brings with her resentment, shameful family secrets and, most importantly, her mother Mirabelle’s “album”: a strange hybrid of recipe book and diary, written during the German occupation of the Loire region in World War II. The recipe album was left to Framboise as an inheritance after her mother’s death: “She gave me the album, valueless, then, except for the thoughts and insights jotted in the margins alongside recipes and newspaper cuttings and herbal cures. Not a diary, precisely; there are no dates in the album, no precise order” (Harris 14). It soon becomes clear that Mirabelle had an extraordinary relationship with her recipe album, keeping it as a life transcript in which food preparation figures as a main focus of attention: “My mother marked the events in her life with recipes, dishes of her own invention or interpretations of old favourites. Food was her nostalgia, her celebration, its nurture and preparation the sole outlet for her creativity” (14). The album is described by Framboise as her mother’s only confidant, its pages the sole means of expression of events, thoughts and preoccupations. In this sense, the recipes contain knowledge of the past and, at the same time, come to represent a trans-temporal coordinate from which to begin understanding Mirabelle’s life and the social situations she experienced while writing the album. As the cookery album acts as a medium of self-representation for Mirabelle, Harris also gestures towards the idea that recipes offer an insight into a person that history may have otherwise forgotten. The culinary album in Five Quarters of the Orange establishes itself as a bonding element and a trans-temporal gateway through which an exchange ensues between mother and daughter. The etymological origin of the word “recipe” offers a further insight into the nature of the exchange. The word finds its root in the Latin word reciperere, meaning simultaneously “to give and to receive” (Floyd and Forster 6). Mirabelle’s recipes are not only the textual representation of the patterns and behaviours on which her life was based but, most importantly, position themselves in a process of an uncanny exchange. Acting as the surrogate of the long-passed Mirabelle, the album’s existence as a haunted culinary document ushers in the possibility of secrets and revelations, contradictions, and concealment. On numerous occasions, Framboise confesses that the translation of the recipe book was a task with which she did not want to engage. Forcing herself, she describes the reading as a personal “struggle” (276). Fearing what the book could reveal—literally, the recipes of a lifetime—she suspects that the album will demand a deep involvement with her mother’s existence: “I had avoided looking at the album, feeling absurdly at fault, a voyeuse, as if my mother might come in at any time and see me reading her strange secrets. Truth is, I didn’t want to know her secrets” (30). On the one hand, Framboise’s fear could be interpreted as apprehension at the prospect of unveiling unpleasant truths. On the other, she is reluctant to re-live her mother’s emotions, passions and anxieties, feeling they may actually be “sublimated into her recipes” (270). Framboise’s initial resistance to the secrets of the recipe book is quickly followed by an almost obsessive quest to “translate” the text: “I read through the album little by little during those lengthening nights. I deciphered the code [and] wrote down and cross-referenced everything by means of small cards, trying to put everything in sequence” (225). As Harris exposes Framboise’s personal struggle in unravelling Mirabelle’s individual history, the daughter’s hermeneutic excavation into the past is problematised by her mother’s strange style: “The language […] in which much of the album was written was alien to me, and after a few abortive attempts to decipher it, I abandoned the idea […] the mad scrawlings, poems, drawings and accounts […] were written with no apparent logic, no order that I could discover” (31). Only after a period of careful interpretation does Framboise understand the confused organisation of her mother’s culinary thoughts. Once the daughter has decoded the recipes, she is able to use them: “I began to make cakes [...] the brioche and pain d’épices of the region, as well as some [...] Breton specialties, packets of crêpes dentelle, fruit tarts and packs de sablés, biscuits, nutbread, cinnamon snaps [...] I used my mother’s old recipes” (22). As Framboise engages with her mother’s album, Mirabelle’s memory is celebrated in the act of reading, deciphering, and recreating the recipes. As a metaphorically buried collection waiting to be interpreted, the cookbook is the catalyst through which the memory of Mirabelle can be passed to her daughter and live on. Discussing the haunted nature of texts, Derrida suggests that once one interprets a text written by another, that text “comes back” and “lives on” (‘Roundtable on Translation’ 158). In this framework of return and exchange, the replication of the Mirabelle’s recipes, by her daughter Framboise, is the tangible expression of the mother’s life. As the collective history of wartime France and the memory of Mirabelle’s life are reaffirmed in the cookbook, the recipes allow Framboise to understand what is “staring [her] in the face”, and finally see “the reason for her [mother’s] actions and the terrible repercussions on [her] own” life (268). As the process of culinary translating takes place, it becomes clear that her deceased mother’s album conceals a legacy that goes beyond material possessions. Mirabelle “returns” through the cookbook and that return, in Jodey Castricano’s words, “acts as inheritance.” In the hauntingly autobiographical context of the culinary album, the mother’s phantom and the recipes become “inseparable” (29). Within the resistant and at times contradictory framework of the Gothic text, legacy is always passed on through a process of haunting which must be accepted in order to understand and decode the writing. This exchange becomes even more significant when cookbooks are concerned, since the intended engagement with the recipes is one of acceptance and response. When the cookbook “calls”, the reader is asked “to respond to an injunction” (Castricano 17). In this framework, Mirabelle’s album in Five Quarters of the Orange becomes the haunted channel through which the reader can communicate with her “ghost” or, to be more specific, her “spectral signature.” In these terms, the cookbook is a vector for reincarnation and haunting, while recipes themselves function as the vehicle for the parallel consciousness of culinary phantoms to find a status of reincarnated identification through their connection to a series of repeated gestures. The concept of “phantom” here is particularly useful in the understanding put forward by Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok—and later developed by Derrida and Castricano—as “the buried speech of another”, the shadow of perception and experience that returns through the subject’s text (Castricano 11). In the framework of the culinary, the phantom returns in the cookbook through an interaction between the explicit or implied “I” of the recipe’s instructions, and the physical and psychological dimension of the “you” that finds lodging in the reader as re-enactor. In the cookbook, the intertextual relationship between the reader’s present and the writer’s past can be identified, as Rashkin claims, “in narratives organised by phantoms” (45). Indeed, as Framboise’s relationship with the recipe book is troubled by her mother’s spectral presence, it becomes apparent that even the writing of the text was a mysterious process. Mirabelle’s album, in places, offers “cryptic references” (14): moments that are impenetrable, indecipherable, enigmatic. This is a text written “with ghosts”: “the first page is given to my father’s death—the ribbon of his Légion d’Honneur pasted thickly to the paper beneath a blurry photograph and a neat recipe for buck-wheat pancakes—and carries a kind of gruesome humour. Under the picture my mother has pencilled 'Remember—dig up Jerusalem artichokes. Ha! Ha! Ha!'” (14). The writing of the recipe book is initiated by the death of Mirabelle’s husband, Yannick, and his passing is marked by her wish to eradicate from the garden the Jerusalem artichokes which, as it is revealed later, were his favourite food. According to culinary folklore, Jerusalem artichokes are meant to be highly “spermatogenic”, so their consumption can make men fertile (Amato 3). Their uprooting from Mirabelle’s garden, after the husband’s death, signifies the loss of male presence and reproductive function, as if Mirabelle herself were rejecting the symbol of Yannick’s control of the house. Her bittersweet, mocking comments at this disappearance—the insensitive “Ha! Ha! Ha!”—are indicative of Mirabelle’s desire to detach herself from the restraints of married life. Considering women’s traditional function as family cooks, her happiness at the lack of marital duties extends to the kitchen as much as to the bedroom. The destruction of Yannick’s artichokes is juxtaposed with a recipe for black-wheat pancakes which the family then “ate with everything” (15). It is at this point that Framboise recalls suddenly and with a sense of shock that her mother never mentioned her father after his death. It is as if a mixture of grief and trauma animate Mirabelle’s feeling towards her deceased husband. The only confirmation of Yannick’s existence persists in the pages of the cookbook through Mirabelle’s occasional use of the undecipherable “bilini-enverlini”, a language of “inverted syllables, reversed words, nonsense prefixes and suffices”: “Ini tnawini inoti plainexini [...] Minini toni nierus niohwbi inoti” (42). The cryptic language was, we are told, “invented” by Yannick, who used to “speak it all the time” (42). Yannick’s presence thus is inscribed in the album, which is thereby transformed into an evocative historical document. Although he disappears from his wife’s everyday life, Yannick’s ghost—to which the recipe book is almost dedicated on the initial page—remains and haunts the pages. The cryptic cookbook is thus also a “crypt.” In their recent, quasi-Gothic revision of classical psychoanalysis, Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok write about the trauma of loss in relation to psychic crypts. In mourning a loved one, they argue, the individual can slip into melancholia by erecting what they call an “inner crypt.” In the psychological crypt, the dead—or, more precisely, the memory of the dead—can be hidden or introjectively “devoured”, metaphorically speaking, as a way of denying its demise. This form of introjection—understood here in clear connection to the Freudian concept of literally “consuming” one’s enemy—is interpreted as the “normal” progression through which the subject accepts the death of a loved one and slowly removes its memory from consciousness. However, when this process of detachment encounters resistance, a “crypt” is formed. The crypt maps, as Abraham and Torok claim, the psychological topography of “the untold and unsayable secret, the feeling unfelt, the pain denied” (21). In its locus of mystery and concealment, the crypt is haunted by the memory of the dead which, paradoxically, inhabits it as a “living-dead.” Through the crypt, the dead can “return” to disturb consciousness. In Five Quarters of the Orange, the encoded nature of Mirabelle’s recipes—emerging as such on multiple levels of interpretation—enables the memory of Yannick to “return” within the writing itself. In his preface to Abraham and Torok’s The Wolf-Man’s Magic Word, Derrida argues that the psychological crypt houses “the ghost that comes haunting out the Unconscious of the other” (‘Fors’ xxi). Mirabelle’s cookbook might therefore be read as an encrypted reincarnation of her husband’s ghostly memory. The recipe book functions as the encrypted passageway through which the dead re-join the living in a responsive cycle of exchange and experience. Writing, in this sense, re-creates the subject through the culinary framework and transforms the cookbook into a revenant text colonised by the living-dead. Abraham and Torok suggest that “reconstituted from the memories of words, scenes and affects, the objective correlative of loss is buried alive in the crypt” (130). With this idea in mind, it is possible to suggest that, among Mirabelle’s recipes, the Gothicised Yannick inhabits a culinary crypt. It is through his associations with both the written and the practical dimension food that he remains, to borrow Derrida’s words, a haunting presence that Mirabelle is “perfectly willing to keep alive” within the bounds of the culinary vault (‘Fors’ xxi). As far as the mourning crypt is concerned, the exchange of consciousness that is embedded in the text takes place by producing a level of experiential concealment, based on the overarching effect of Gothicised interiority. Derrida remarks that “the crypt from which the ghost comes back belongs to someone else” (‘Fors’ 119). This suggestion throws into sharp relief the ability of the cookbook as a haunted text to draw the reader into a process of consciousness transmission and reception that is always and necessarily a form of “living-dead” exchange. In these terms, the recipe itself—especially in its embodiment as instructed actions—needs to be understood as a vector for establishing the uncanny barriers of signification erected by the bounds of the cookbook itself as a haunted site of death, enchantment, and revenant signs. In this way, eating, a vital and animated activity, is “disturbingly blended with death, decomposition and the corpse” (Piatti-Farnell 146). And far from simply providing nourishment for the living, Mirabelle’s encrypted recipes continue to feed the dead through cycles of mourning and melancholia. Mirabelle’s cookbook, therefore, becomes a textual example of “cryptomimeses”, a writing practice that, echoing the convention of the Gothic framework, generates its ghostly effects through embodying the structures of remembrance and the dynamics of autobiographic deconstructive writing (Castricano 8). As heimliche and unheimliche collide in practices of culinary reading and writing, the cookbook acts as quasi-mystical, haunted space through which the uncanny frameworks of language and experience can become actualised. ReferencesAbraham, Nicolas, and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994. Amato, Joseph. The Great Jerusalem Artichoke Circus. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. Castricano, Jodey. Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida’s Ghost Writing. London: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2003. Derrida, Jacques. “Fors: the Anglish words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok.” Eds. Nicholas Abraham, and Maria Torok. The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonomy. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Pr, 1986. xi–xlviii ---. “Roundtable on Translation.” The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation. London: U of Nebraska P, 1985. 91–161. Floyd, Janet, and Laurel Foster. The Recipe Reader: Narratives–Contexts–Traditions. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. Harris, Joanne. Five Quarters of the Orange. Maidenhead: Black Swan, 2002. Kelly, Traci Marie. “‘If I Were a Voodoo Priestess’: Women’s Culinary Autobiographies.” Kitchen Culture in America: Popular Representations of Food, Gender and Race. Ed. Sherrie A. Inness. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2001. 251–70. Piatti-Farnell, Lorna. Food and Culture in Contemporary American Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2011. Rashkin, Esther. Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992. Slater, Nigel. Toast: The Story of a Boy’s Hunger. London: Harper Perennial, 2004. Theophano, Janet. Eat My Words: Reading Women’s Lives Through The Cookbooks They Wrote. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Toklas, Alice B. The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book. New York: Perennial,1984.