Articles de revues sur le sujet « Latin Sonnets »

These 3 sonnets explore the lives of pop-star Irene Cara, author and Nobel Prize winner Octavio Paz, and soccer legend Diego Maradona. Though one major sonnet form from literary history has included iambic pentameter, the sonnets here drop the iambic part, but keep the pentameter. In the history of the sonnet, there traditionally have been rhyme schemes. There is no particular rhyme scheme in these 3 sonnets. They are written with a mixture of free verse and rhyming. The poems span across Latin America -- from Mexico to Argentina and from Cuba to Puerto Rico -- and they celebrate the rich musical, literary, and sporting worlds of three icons and legends. The 3 sonnets employ ordinary language to describe extraordinary people, so that everyone and all readers can be inspired to be creative and to enjoy, shape, and impact the world.

This article analyses the emergence and development of Dutch sonnets through Netherlandish alba amicorum from the period 1560 to 1660. It discusses the advent of the sonnet in the Renaissance literature of the Low Countries in the 1560s, showing how artists, scholars, and poets with connections to the Dutch refugee community in London became early adapters of this genre through their alba amicorum. We argue that this group used the sonnet as a form of exile literature, which communicated attachment to the fatherland and the righteous causes of the Dutch Revolt. Next, the essay explores the Dutch sonnets in the alba amicorum of Janus Dousa and Jan van Hout. Instrumental in establishing Leiden University in 1575 and expanding its reputation, both Dousa and van Hout encouraged the writing of sonnets in their alba as a means to advocate the use of Dutch as a literary language. Tracing the Dutch sonnet within the alba amicorum of the Low Countries, it is clear that the Dutch sonnet should be considered as the outcome of an emancipatory effort. At a moment in time where traditional non-personal inscriptions in alba amicorum were the mode, these poets used the sonnet to distinguish themselves from other contributors in the album, while at the same time conveying a clear message. First, Dutch sonnets in alba were written to claim a specific group identity connected to a Dutch migrant community. Second, these sonnets were adopted within the friendship books of the intellectual elite in Holland in order to assert a forefront position for the vernacular language equal to that of Latin, and which supported political and linguistic emancipation. After the establishment of the Dutch Republic and the emancipation of the Dutch language were completed in the first quarter of the seventeenth century, the sonnet seemed to have achieved currency in Netherlandish culture. Around the same time the number of sonnets in alba drastically dropped. The lack of exclusivity might have been the main cause of this decline.

I read with great interest the paper by Peter Sturrock and Kathleen Erickson (Sturrock & Erickson, 2020) on the Dedication in Shakespeare’s Sonnets. I am neither a scholar of literature, nor of Shakespeare, and I do not want to enter the fray as to who was the author of Shakespeare’s sonnets and plays. But I must confess that I found the arguments presented by Sturrock and Erickson intriguing. It is in that vein I would like to communicate an interesting finding. On page 302, Figure 21, of their paper, they present the Dedication of the Sonnets as a grid of 12 x 12 letters. This was done under the assumption that cryptograms can be deciphered better if they are laid out in a certain format. They then present the message they assume is contained there: “PRO PARE VOTIS EMERITER” as a devotion of Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford to his supposed friend, the Earl of Southampton, Henry Wriothesley. I find this a possible meaning. My experience with Latin texts – based on a translation of a medieval mystical writer from Latin into German and the reading of many original Latin texts, mainly from the middle ages and beyond (Hugo de Balma, 2017; Walach, 1994, 2010) – let another sequence jump out at me: SI PATET PRO MIRE VERO RETIRO The translation would read: "If it becomes miraculously obvious [who I am], I retire." That this is a reference of the proposed author, Edward de Vere, to himself would become clear from the double use of “vero”.

L’Histoire de Marie Royne d’Escosse constitue la dernière étape d’une trajectoire éditoriale complexe. Cette publication de 1572 contient la seule traduction en français de la Detectio, texte latin à charge écrit par George Buchanan dans le contexte de la déposition de la reine d’Ecosse entre 1567 et 1568, et augmenté au fil de ses éditions successives de pièces diverses, dont les fameux sonnets de la cassette, lettres-sonnets constituant une pièce maîtresse dans l’accusation d’adultère et de complicité d’assassinat à l’encontre de la souveraine. La présente étude montre que l’effet-recueil produit par l’adjonction des sonnets et d’autres documents au texte initial de la Detectio, opère un déplacement quant à la nature même du texte, du politique vers le littéraire, qui se trouve particulièrement renforcé, dans le contexte français, par un jeu d’échos intertextuels qui font apparaitre avec force le caractère éminemment littéraire de la production du texte de la Detectio.

In human culture there are certain numbers of special importance. They are mostly used in old and modern writings as “sacred numbers” of religious and literary significance. They are present in the Greek myths, in Egyptian Pharaonic culture, in ancient Persian, in the Indian culture, and in Arab traditions; then (Islamic) culture as well as in the Biblical Western culture. These numbers are of two kinds: even and uneven or odd. The odd numbers 1, 3, 5, 7and 9 play a far more important part than the even numbers. One is Deity, three the Trinity, five the chief division, seven is the sacred number, and nine is three times three. These numbers have good function and been looked at as ‘Sacred’ or ‘Perfect’ numbers either of good omen or evil. There is another forth number, which is “10”, it comes mainly in Jewish and Islamic education in very few cases having similar religious suggestion. Shakespeare has used the number Ten in Sonnet 6 Then let not winter's ragged hand deface. “Sacred Numbers” have become a part of religion and even of modern belief, and mostly represented in the popular rituals. Shakespeare has used the “Sacred Numbers” in his works either prose or poetry, and this article is restricted to deal only with three Shakespearean sonnets where I imagine Shakespeare reciting his Latin Rosary in a poetic religious tone and drawing the cross sign on his chest and on the forehead of his sonnets in order to invoke divine protection. It seems that Shakespeare’s date of birth and death (1564 -1616) carries a certain secret of his fondness for sacred numbers; thus: The sum of the date of his birth (1564=16) is doubled in the date of his death (1616).

Soneti [Sonnets] by Svetlana Savić were composed between 2008 and 2012. The cycle comprises three pieces: "La Douce Nuit" for violoncello, piano, and electronics, as well as "Looking on Darkness" and "La vita fugge" for a female voice, violoncello, piano, and electronics. Here, the work is analysed from the perspective of the author's modernist orientation towards sound as a specific tool of music as a medium, which defined multiple poetic aspects in creating this work and had repercussions on the treatment of the text, the ensemble - both its acoustic and electronic layers - the forming and relationship between individual layers of texture, as well as the choice of music material. Dealing with sound, searching for a specific acoustic quality is revealed already in the title, Soneti, because the term sonnet, which refers to a 13th-century Italian poetic form, comes from the Italian word sonetto, derived from the Latin word sonus, meaning sound. However, although Savić looks for particular acoustic qualities and sound is her main material, the resulting work is full of associations, musical and extramusical alike, and reaches out to other kinds of artistic expression. The composer never loses sight of her extramusical content and thus her composition generates a peculiar sort of interference between the acoustic and the verbal - the music absorbs the verbal, turning words into sounds and sound into words. At certain moments, this is joined by the visual component.

If the Neapolitan humanist Jacopo Sannazaro (1458-1530) receives any recognition in scholarly circles these days, it is usually for his Arcadia, an elaborate pastoral in twelve books, each combining prose and verse, that forms one of the most important links between the work of Petrarch, its inspiration, and that of Sir Philip Sidney. The Arcadia, published first authoritatively in 1504, is written in Italian, as are the hundred or so surviving Rime (songs and sonnets), largely products of the last decade of the fifteenth century. But Sannazaro was also a prolific writer in Latin. It is a question worth asking why, after the success of his vernacular magnum opus, he opted to use primarily a classical language for the major poetry that occupied his attention for the opening decades of the subsequent century. Perhaps a confirmation of his allegiance to Christian humanism is one reason. Perhaps also it was his devotion to Virgil whose three great works provided him with the most telling impetus for his own achievements in the Augustan poet's tongue.

Abstract The Isaiah Sonne collection, today preserved in library of the Ben-Zvi Institute in Jerusalem, contains some seventy copies of Jewish books in several languages (Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Latin, and Dutch) printed in Amsterdam during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This sub-collection within Sonne’s wider library, second in number only his copies of Venetian editions, confirms Sonne’s particular interest in Jewish printing in Amsterdam ‐ an interest that runs through his published scholarship and through these books, in the form of Sonne’s marginalia. By connecting his interest as a book collector to his scholarship on Amsterdam Jewry in the early modern era, this article intends to give a first presentation of the Amsterdam editions from the Sonne collection and reflect on the circulation of his particular copies throughout time and space on the basis of material evidence.

The numerous documents associated with the controversy launched in 1600 by the Bolognese music theorist Giovanni Maria Artusi (1546–1613) against the madrigals of Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643) have been well studied by scholars. But no one has yet engaged with the encomia included in the front and back matter of the printed books lying at the heart of the dispute: three sonnets (two by Vicenzo Maria Sandri and one by Mutio Manfredi) and a Latin carmen (by Erycius Puteanus) in the treatise L’Artusi, overo Delle imperfettioni della moderna musica (1600), and two madrigals by the poet and theologian Cherubino Ferrari in Monteverdi’s Il quinto libro de madrigali a cinque voci (1605). Although one might dismiss them as mere “occasional” poetry flattering Artusi, on the one hand, and Monteverdi, on the other, as well as their respective patrons, close reading suggests that these encomia represent attempts to claim the high ground not just on musical but also on philosophical and even religious terms. Ferrari’s praise of the composer finds a clear echo in Alessandro Striggio the Younger’s libretto for Monteverdi’s opera Orfeo (1607). All this provides an intriguing footnote, and perhaps something more, both to the controversy over the seconda pratica madrigal and to Orfeo in their broader Ferrarese and Mantuan contexts.

Testimonio is a new genre that emerged in the 1960s in Latin America and came to be used by liberation and social movements of women, black, Adivasis, and other oppressed people. As the oppressed reasserted themselves publicly, their voices became more audible, and they began to vigorously develop their strategies for effective communication. When the oppressed find the existing genre is not appropriate to express their feelings, they start to introduce new forms of literature; it is because of the existing genre’s inadequacy of representing the oppressed in early literary forms like novels, short stories, essays, picaresque novels, lyrics, sonnets, autobiographies, and secular theatres. This paper is an attempt to engage with the ongoing debate of the testimonio literature in post-colonial Writings. Taking some works written in Indian Regional Literature, we pose the question that the marginalized and indigenous people start to reflect on their lives through literature and a new type of genre called ‘Testimonio Literature’ is slowly emerging from the margin. To extend the scope of the question, we take a few autobiographical anecdotes and narratives on such marginalized lives. We argue that marginalized lives have never been represented as they deserve, and their identity is always hidden in the wider genre of literature.

RESUMEN: En este trabajo volvemos al soneto de Quevedo “Oh fallezcan…”, que parte de unos versos de la sátira segunda del poeta latino Persio. Insistimos en la defensa de nuestra conjetura “tíos” frente al término “años”, que se lee en el endecasílabo segundo del soneto. Se responde a las objeciones de las que ha sido objeto esta propuesta. Se comenta y explica todo el soneto con una detenida comparación entre los textos de los poetas Persio y Quevedo, y se deja claro que Quevedo en este obscuro soneto recrea, con la libertad que les es propia a los poetas, unos versos de la sátira segunda de Persio. ABSTRACT: In this work we return to Quevedo's sonnet "Oh fallezcan...", which starts from some verses of the second satire of the Latin poet Persio. We insist on the defense of my conjecture "tíos" against the term "años", which is read in the second hendecasyllable of the sonnet. The objections to which this proposal has been subject are answered. The entire sonnet is commented on and explained with a detailed comparison between the texts of the poets Persio and Quevedo, and it is made clear that Quevedo in this obscure sonnet recreates, with the freedom that is proper to poets, some verses of the second satire of Persio.

AbstractIn this article, I provide a detailed analysis of the poems on the Lord's Supper by the Dutch statesman and man of letters, Constantijn Huygens (1596–1687). Between 1642 and 1684, he wrote eighteen poems on this subject, sixteen in Dutch and two in Latin. The type of poem varies from pithy epigrams to sonnets, through to longer poems over fifty lines in length, replete with well-conceived poetic tropes. To date, these poems have received little scholarly attention. Huygens was a lifelong member of the Reformed church and his poetry considers themes which are central to Reformed theology, such as human sin, divine grace and human gratitude. In his poetry, he recognises that he is a sinner and that it is not sufficient merely to ask for divine forgiveness, and then sin again. He acknowledges the need to intend to change his ways, but also recognises that he can only do this with divine assistance. Huygens published most of these poems and although such a public acknowledgement of sin may seem strange to us, there is a sense in which he was performing a public act of confession, to make common cause with his fellow believers, and also perhaps to encourage them to do the same. Much of the poetry considers the ontology and efficacy of the Lord's Supper. As well as exploring familiar tropes such as the sacrament as a feast and a pledge for God's promises, Huygens also asks about the very nature of the bread and wine of the sacrament. We might expect him to ascribe little or no value to the elements themselves, beyond, to use Brian Gerrish's phrase, ‘presenting what they represent’. poetry. However, at some points, the language Huygens uses to refer to the elements, such as ‘holy bread’ and ‘healing dew’, suggests something more is at stake. Some may dismiss such phrases as mere lyrical flourish, but I argue that they point to a central tension inherent within Reformed eucharistic theology between sign and signified and, furthermore, that this poetry offers us the opportunity to explore that tension. Huygens’ poems bear comparison with the best English-language religious poetry of the seventeenth century, and remind us that poetry as well as prose can offer us valuable theological insight.

This paper tries to elucidate the significance of Latin schooling for the production of poetry by lining up five typical cases of recycling Roman texts, from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. The French poet Baudri de Bourgueil (ca 1050–1130) rewrote Ovid’s Heroides 16–17 within a cultural context, characteristic of the incipient “Ovidian age,” aetas ovidiana, based on classroom practices such as paraphrase, accessus and glosses, presupposing a sense of historical continuity – or translatio studii et imperii – from Antiquity down to the twelfth century. In his great work, The Comedy, the Florentine Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) reused Ovid in a quite different way, representative of the allegorizing tendencies noticeable in Italy and France towards the end of the Ovidian age. The Early Modern motto ad fontes, on the other hand, presupposed a breach between ancient and present times, none the less possible (and surely commendable) to bridge by means of imitation within the framework of studia humanitatis and a new philological culture, made possible by the printing press. This cultural paradigm shift is illustrated by a look at a famous sonnet by the Spanish Golden Age poet Francisco de Quevedo (1580–1645). Finally, our modern and postmodern era, characterized by an ambivalent attitude to the classical heritage, is represented by the Anglo-American poet T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) and his Swedish successor Hjalmar Gullberg (1898–1961), both of whom remembered their Latin classes in their mature poetry, marked by irony, distance and, probably, nostalgia.

Refracted Modern Greek reception of Ancient Greek poetry and George Seferis’ poem ‘Upon a Line of Foreign Verse’The term ‘refracted’ describes instances where Modern Greek reception of Ancient Greek poetry is mediated through one or more intertexts, like Italian-Latin or French-Latin. After treating briefly Dionysios Solomos’ poem ‘The Shade of Homer’ (1821-1822) the paper focuses on George Seferis’ ‘Reflections on a Foreign Line of Verse’ (1931). Each of the two poets claims the Homeric heritage for himself as a Greek poet through a poem that constitutes a refracted reception of Homer. The former opens a chain of three literary windows one after the other: first the appearance of Homer to the character Ennius in Petrarch’s Latin epic Africa; next Cicero’s ‘Dream of Scipio’; and finally the appearance of Homer to the Latin poet Ennius, who in the proem of his Annals represented himself as a reincarnation of the Greek poet. In responding to Solomos about a hundred years later Seferis treated the subject of Homeric Odysseus’ sea wanderings by commenting on ‘Heureux qui, comme Ulysse, a fait un beau voyage’, the opening line of Joachim du Bellay’s famous sonnet XXXI of the collection Les regrets (1558). Most probably Bellay reached back to Homeric Odysseus through a passage of Ovid’s collection of elegies written in exile and entitled Ex ponto. Ovid conceived his banishment from Rome to a region of modern Romania as the analogue of Odysseus’ wanderings away from Ithaca and became a source of inspiration for Du Bellay and other poets.

Shigella sonnei is a gram-negative bacterium and is the primary cause of shigellosis in advanced countries. An exceptional rise in the prevalence of the disease has been reported in Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. To date, no preventive vaccine is available against S. sonnei infections. This pathogen has shown resistances towards both first- and second-line antibiotics. Therefore, an effective broad spectrum vaccine development against shigellosis is indispensable. In the present study, vaccinomics-aided immunoinformatics strategies were pursued to identify potential vaccine candidates from the S. sonnei whole proteome data. Pathogen essential proteins that are non-homologous to human and human gut microbiome proteome set, are feasible candidates for this purpose. Three antigenic outer membrane proteins were prioritized to predict lead epitopes based on reverse vaccinology approach. Multi-epitope-based chimeric vaccines was designed using lead B- and T-cell epitopes combined with suitable linker and adjuvant peptide sequences to enhance immune responses against the designed vaccine. The SS-MEVC construct was prioritized based on multiple physicochemical, immunological properties, and immune-receptors docking scores. Immune simulation analysis predicted strong immunogenic response capability of the designed vaccine construct. The Molecular dynamic simulations analysis ensured stable molecular interactions of lead vaccine construct with the host receptors. In silico restriction and cloning analysis predicted feasible cloning capability of the SS-MEVC construct within the E. coli expression system. The proposed vaccine construct is predicted to be more safe, effective and capable of inducing robust immune responses against S. sonnei infections and may be worthy of examination via in vitro/in vivo assays.

Summary Franciszek Pik Mirandola’s debut poetry volume, whose title Liber tristium (1898) was inspired by a book of elegies of the 16th-century Polish-Latin poet Ianicius, is a projection of the poet’s own psychological dilemmas in a tone of voice echoing the splenetic mode of Baudelaire and Kazimierz Przerwa-Tetmajer. His poems are uneven; their weaknesses are hard to overlook. Yet in spite of his all too obvious dependence on the fin de siècle (and Young Poland’s) poetics and mannerisms, he manages to rise above the run-of-the-mill laments and decadent clichés. Taken as a whole, the poetry of the idiosyncratic pharmacist from Krosno has the ring of an authentic inner struggle of an alienated individual looking for some metaphysical signs that would give meaning to his life. In his search he draws on Schopenhauer and the currently fashionable Hinduistic themes, but he does it with commendable good sense. He should also be praised for his ‘aquatic’ poems, especially the sonnet cycle Nieznajomi (Strangers).

A notre collègue Remi Jolivet, sagace explorateur des langues vivantes, nous adressons un cordial salut de la part des langues anciennes! Les deux chapitres que nous proposons ici représentent la somme – présentée d'une manière plutôt personnelle – d'au moins 200 ans de recherches sur l'histoire étendue de deux langues "classiques" – le latin et le grec –, de leur développement, en partie commun, et de leurs variations dans l'espace et dans le temps. Or, pour établir une prononciation qui puisse être recommandée et considérée comme cohérente et correcte, il a fallu opérer un choix chronologique et géographique. Nous avons ainsi choisi de recommander le grec pratiqué par les Athéniens autour de 400 av. J.-C. et le latin pratiqué par les Romains au Ier siècle av. J.-C. Nous sommes certes conscients qu'Homère ou Saint Jérôme, par exemple, y eussent trouvé à redire, l'un parce qu'il eût perçu ce grec comme phonétiquement trop moderne, voire vulgaire, l'autre, parce qu'il eût trouvé ce grec presque incompréhensible et ce latin maniéré et bizarre. De plus, nous devons avouer d'emblée que, dans la reconstruction de la prononciation d'une langue "morte" nous ne pouvons que nous approcher des phonèmes réellement utilisés et de la mélodie de la phrase. Mais en dépit de cette restriction d'ordre pratique et méthodologique, nous espérons convaincre nos lecteurs que ces deux riches langues jadis vivantes et florissantes retrouvent une belle jouvence lorsqu'on les fait sonner d'une manière convaincante!

Ms. B2470 of the Hispanic Society of America transmits a poetry contest held in Barcelona at the end of 1584, whose 34 compositions are all focused on a single theme: the difference between love and desire. The choice of a profane subject is a singular element, because most of the contests of the late sixteenth century are religious. It is a practically unknown contest containing poems mainly written in Spanish, but also some in Catalan, one in Latin and one in Italian. Among the participants, there are outstanding figures as Francesc Calça, Esteve de Corbera, Dionís Jeroni Jorba and four members of the family March of Montcortès, but there are also several poets hitherto unknown. Another remarkable aspect is an elegy on the death of the Valencian poet Gaspar Gil Polo inserted in the text, just before the judgment. This elegy brings new light on the date of death of the Diana enamorada’s author, who had to die before December 31, 1584. It also makes us consider the possibility that the author of the sonnet presented to this contest was not him but his son, also called Gaspar Gil Polo.

sur la piste cyclable, papa regarde-moi !, chuter en bmx, essuyer mes mains incrustées de pierres pointues. ici, dans les souvenirs de mon premier quartier d’enfance, les édifices côtoient des bidonvilles en carton. j’emprunte des trajets interminables vers le centre-ville de montevideo, et je hume l’odeur des aliments que personne ne peut m’offrir. nous sommes pauvres en garrapiñadas, bizcochos, merengues et panchos. mon ventre fait de l’écho. la musique des machines à sous résonne sur le comptoir du dépanneur. j’entends les cris de la mère de ma mère battue par son amant alcoolique, les coups de poings sur le mur mitoyen de ma chambre, les rats qui se promènent sur mon oreiller. je me réveille souvent en sursaut, les vidanges brûlées devant la porte, le plafond en plastique. je souffre de problèmes respiratoires portant le nom de la nature qui foisonne. j’ai appris à lire la nuit, égarée dans l’encyclopédie des fleurs. **** montevideo, años 90, villa española, calles de pedregullo, casa sin árboles. vecinas tóxicas, gritos y murmullos. las venas abiertas de mi tía enferma, la basura acumulada, el humo, las ratas, la hija milica de la loca de al lado, la vieja yazira, sus amantes violentos, los llantos, las piñas y las puertas agujereadas de los roperos, el cielorraso de plástico recubriendo el techo de mi cuarto, los libros con flores ilustradas, los abrazos, las lecturas, las vegetaciones, los accidentes de tránsito, las muertes sin crónicas anunciadas, los rostros transformados por el cansancio y el silencio. y dos o tres cosas más que no desvelaré. **** voisinage hanté. soir d’automne, je marche dehors. je m’arrête là où je vois de la lumière. je sonne. un homme ouvre sa porte et me dévisage avec mépris : tu diras à ta mère que c’est interdit de faire travailler des enfants et que c’est insalubre de vendre des parts de gâteau en faisant du porte-à-porte. il n’avait qu’à rien m’acheter. il n’avait qu’à garder le silence. la nuit, les voleurs craignent les coups de feu du calibre 38 de mon père, revolver argenté, froid et lourd que j’ai déjà serré entre mes mains. **** ombú, barrio con nombre de árbol, la casa de mi padre cuando aún era un niño. la mía, también, veinte años más tarde. la vecina italiana que nos ofreció pan duro el día de nuestra mudanza, la vecina rica que le dio trabajo a mi madre. sus lágrimas de señora amargada, su marido bandido con amante joven, el arma apuntando una garganta temblorosa. las metáforas. las mentiras encubriendo imperios de pacotilla. las apariencias no engañan a las niñas enfermas. tres meses en cama con el hígado cansado. probé todas las galletitas de agua y los dulces de membrillo del almacén de don carmelo. la enfermera entraba a mi cuarto una vez por semana para sacarme sangre. ahora de grande, no le temo a las agujas. conozco el dolor que procuran y sé que puedo resistirlo. **** camino maldonado, avenue aux voitures inquiètes. j’emprunte, chaque matin, le parcours à obstacles séparant ma maison de mon école secondaire. mes chaussures aux semelles fatiguées évitent les petites roches et les flaques d’eau. mon amour malade au cœur agité. sa tuberculose de fin de siècle, les premières lectures des contes de garcía márquez. ma boulimie pauvre. mes jambes poilues. mes traumas d’adolescente. l’infestation de coquerelles dans ma chambre. les journées humides d’automne, les limaces se tortillent dans du sel de mer. pour rendre visite aux parents de mon père, nous traversons une zone piégée, je me recroqueville sous le siège de la voiture, évite les projectiles lancés par des voyous qui tentent de nous voler. **** camino maldonado, avenida con automóviles alborotados. en el trayecto que separa mi casa de mi colegio evito los charcos y las piedras. cuido mis zapatos de gamuza con suela cansada. disimulo la tristeza. de un primer amor enfermo. tuberculosis de fin de siglo. garcía márquez y la lectura de sus primeros cuentos. escondo una bulimia pobre. acumulo traumas, bigote, uniceja y piernas peludas. miles de cucarachas invaden mi cuarto. los días de lluvia, las babosas se retuercen en sal gruesa. pero no me quejo. vivo en una casa con hermoso patio y jardín. **** montréal en plein été. la plaza st-hubert brille avec ses commerces protégés par des toits en tôle verte. ma voisine salvadorienne achète une robe de bal à 650$. tissu noir, tulles transparentes aux broderies argentées et aux motifs abstraits incrustés de cristaux. maquillage et coiffure dans un salon de beauté latino. elle transitionne de jeune fille de 16 ans en femme mûre en un clin d’œil. moi, grosse aux cheveux courts, je la regarde partir en limousine et je pense : je n’ai pas beaucoup de temps pour avoir l’air d’autre chose d’ici un an. thérapie alimentaire. anxiété contrôlée. robe satinée bleue achetée dans une boutique seconde main. coiffure ostentatoire, esthétique années soixante-dix, sprinette dans mes cheveux. si je ferme les yeux, je ressens le parfum artificiel de mon bal de finissants. **** montréal, años 2000, la plaza st-hubert brilla con sus comercios protegidos por techos de lona verde. mi vecina salvadoreña se compra un vestido de 650$. tules bordados con flores plateadas e incrustaciones de cristales. delante del espejo, pasa de ser una joven de 16 años a señora adulta en un abrir y cerrar de ojos. yo, gorda y con pelo corto, la miro irse en limusina y pienso: no me queda tiempo para parecerme a otra cosa de aquí a un año. terapia alimenticia. ansiedad controlada. vestido celeste satinado comprado en una tienda de segunda mano. peinado sesentoso improvisado con exceso de fijador en aerosol. veinte años más tarde, cierro los ojos y vuelvo a sentir el perfume artificial de mi baile de egresados. y no me invade ninguna nostalgia. ****

In the 14th–18th centuries Petrarch’s most widely disseminated work was De remediis utriusque fortunae. Petrarch’s Latin works had been known in Hungary since the 15th century and in the 18th century a real cult of De remediis can be traced, proved by the correspondence of contemporary aristocrats, scholars and politicians (e. g. István Brodarics, Farkas Kovacsóczy). His sonnets and the lines of Triumfi were often read, quoted, translated (e. g. by Bálint Balassi, Miklós Zrínyi); the Griselda, Boccaccio’s novel, known mainly in Petrarch’s Latin translation, also got translated into Hungarian (by Pál Istvánfi). His letters written in verse, as well as the Sine nomine collection, the Secretum and the De vita solitaria were certainly being read in Hungary. During the 17th–18th centuries Hungarian readers could get acquainted at first-hand with the name and works of the Italian humanist through the foreign printed editions of Petrarch’s writings. Writers, scholars, ecclesiastical leaders and others read and used these texts for both private and public purposes. In the 18th century De remediis was reedited eight times and its only complete translation so far was prepared between 1760 and 1762. The reception of De remediis is thus a highly important chapter in Hungarian spiritual history.

Teesid: Tartu Ülikooli maailmakirjanduse professori, luuletaja, kirjandusteadlase ja hispaaniakeelse kirjanduse spetsialisti Jüri Talveti tõlketegevuse viljade hulka kuulub luulet ja proosat nii sajandeid vanast Hispaania klassikast kui ka 20. sajandil või tänapäeval romaani keeltes või inglise keeles loodud teostest. Käesolev artikkel keskendub sellele, kuidas professor Talvet on tõlgendanud luule ja poeetika, kuid ka kirjandusajaloo, iseäranis barokk-kirjanduse alaseid küsimusi oma kirjandusteaduslikes esseedes. Vaadeldakse ka tema tõlketegevuse mahtu ja tõlketöö põhimõtteid. Jüri Talvet (born in 1945) is a poet and a scholar of comparative literature, Chair Professor of World Literature at the University of Tartu. His numerous translations of poetry and poetical fiction from the Romance languages and, to a lesser extent, from English, reflect his views on world poetry. Those views are also expressed in his theoretical writings from the years of 1977 to 2015. Having studied English literature as the main subject at the University of Tartu, he early developed an interest in Spanish, in other Iberian languages, and in the Iberoamerican literatures. His translations from that area include works from medieval and early modern literature as well as notable literary achievements from the 20th century and the contemporary era. Talvet’s interpretations of Federico García Lorca and the “Latin American boom” authors are supported by profound insights into the philosophy, aesthetics, and poetics of the 17th century Spanish Baroque literature, known as the literary Golden Age of Spain. The influence which Talvet’s activities have exerted has widened the horizons of Estonia’s literary culture: while in the early 20th century, the previous German, Russian and Finnish leanings were supplemented by orientations to, and translations from, French and Italian literatures, Talvet has helped to enrich the Estonian literary landscape with the mentality and traditions of even more distant language areas, such as Castilian (Spanish), Catalan, Galician, Portuguese, and the Latin American countries. In the section “Quevedo and Góngora” of this article, Talvet’s interpretation of some of the key issues of dispute in the Baroque literature of Spain are studied, based both on his theoretical essays and on his translations of the poetry of Francisco de Quevedo. Talvet has attempted to use the terms of the Baroque philosopher and writer Baltasar Gracián, agudeza, concepto (definable approximately as “conceit” or “wit”) and conceptismo, for the analysis of the late 20th century Estonian poetry. On that background, defnitions of conceptismo and cultismo (the other main school in Spanish Baroque poetry) are offered in this article, with implications that those definitions may have for understanding different styles and methods of poetry in general, and the characteristics of Talvet’s own poems and poetry translations in particular. To escape diffusion in pure sensuality and verbal indulgence, poetry has to rely on concepts as well as images. Talvet’s interpretations of poetry and poetical thinking are found to be close to conceptismo, or with a considerable amount of conceptuality inherent to them. The juxtaposition of paradoxical ideas from different levels of reality, social and psychic, is seen as the essential poetical method that Talvet refers to as he defines, quoting Yuri Lotman, the structural-semantic code of poetry as being “paradigmatic”. In the final section of the article, Talvet’s 23 book-length published translations are listed, including translations from Spanish, Catalan, English and French. The list does not include numerous translations of single poems or cycles of poetry that have appeared in literary journals, nor his contributions to anthologies of poetry, nor the translations from his native Estonian into a foreign language, such as Spanish or English, in which he has participated. His translations encompass lyrical works as well as fiction and plays. Talvet has translated classical European poetry, such as the sonnets of Petrarch and Quevedo and Provençal poems, as well as the rhymed poems of American poets into Estonian with complete metrical correspondence and full rhymes. However, in the latest decades Talvet has expressed scepticism in the sense and feasibility of attempting to convey the rhyming complexities of the major European literatures into Estonian, a language with a considerably smaller potential for finding full rhymes. Accordingly, his three translations of Spanish Baroque drama (by Calderón and Tirso de Molina) employ a liberal method of versification. In all his versatile activities as a poet, a translator, and a theorist of poetry, Professor Talvet has shown great devotion to developing and cultivating aesthetic values. A lot of his colleagues and students have benefited from his friendly advice. Thinking of his contributions to Estonia’s literary tradition, one may repeat and paraphrase the sentence that he used for the conclusion of his essay on the Catalan poet Salvador Espriu in 1977: “to write (and to translate) poetry is to work for the benefit of the people.”

If you cannot understand my argument, and declare “It’s Greek to me,” you are quoting Shakespeare.Bernard LevinPsoriatic arthritis, in its acute or “generalised” stage, is unbearably painful. Exacerbating the crippling of the joints, the entire surface of the skin is covered with lesions only moderately salved by anti-inflammatory ointment, the application of which is as painful as the ailment it seeks to relieve: NURSE MILLS: I’ll be as gentle as I can.Marlow’s face again fills the screen, intense concentration, comical strain, and a whispered urgency in the voice over—MARLOW: (Voice over) Think of something boring—For Christ’s sake think of something very very boring—Speech a speech by Ted Heath a sentence long sentence from Bernard Levin a quiz by Christopher Booker a—oh think think—! Really boring! A Welsh male-voice choir—Everything in Punch—Oh! Oh! — (Potter 17-18)Marlow’s collation of boring things as a frantic liturgy is an attempt to distract himself from a tumescence that is both unwanted and out of place. Although bed-ridden and in constant pain, he is still sensitive to erogenous stimulation, even when it is incidental. The act of recollection, of garnering lists of things that bore him, distracts him from his immediate situation as he struggles with the mental anguish of the prospect of a humiliating orgasm. Literary lists do many things. They provide richness of detail, assemble and corroborate the materiality of the world of which they are a part and provide insight into the psyche and motivation of the collator. The sheer desperation of Dennis Potter’s Marlow attests to the arbitrariness of the list, the simple requirement that discrete and unrelated items can be assembled in linear order, without any obligation for topical concatenation. In its interrogative form, the list can serve a more urgent and distressing purpose than distraction:GOLDBERG: What do you use for pyjamas?STANLEY: Nothing.GOLDBERG: You verminate the sheet of your birth.MCCANN: What about the Albigensenist heresy?GOLDBERG: Who watered the wicket in Melbourne?MCCANN: What about the blessed Oliver Plunkett?(Pinter 51)The interrogative non sequitur is an established feature of the art of intimidation. It is designed to exert maximum stress in the subject through the use of obscure asides and the endowing of trivial detail with profundity. Harold Pinter’s use of it in The Birthday Party reveals how central it was to his “theatre of menace.” The other tactic, which also draws on the logic of the inventory to be both sequential and discontinuous, is to break the subject’s will through a machine-like barrage of rhetorical questions that leave no time for answers.Pinter learned from Samuel Beckett the pitiless, unforgiving logic of trivial detail pushed to extremes. Think of Molloy’s dilemma of the sucking stones. In order for all sixteen stones that he carries with him to be sucked at least once to assuage his hunger, a reliable system has to be hit upon:Taking a stone from the right pocket of my greatcoat, and putting it in my mouth, I replaced it in the right pocket of my greatcoat by a stone from the right pocket of my trousers, which I replaced with a stone from the left pocket of my trousers, which I replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my greatcoat, which I replaced with the stone that was in my mouth, as soon as I had finished sucking it. Thus there were still four stones in each of my four pockets, but not quite the same stones. And when the desire to suck took hold of me again, I drew again on the right pocket of my greatcoat, certain of not taking the same stone as the last time. And while I sucked it I rearranged the other stones in the way I have just described. And so on. (Beckett, Molloy 69)And so on for six pages. Exhaustive permutation within a finite lexical set is common in Beckett. In the novel Watt the eponymous central character is charged with serving his unseen master’s dinner as well as tidying up afterwards. A simple and bucolic enough task it would seem. But Beckett’s characters are not satisfied with conjecture, the simple assumption that someone must be responsible for Mr. Knott’s dining arrangements. Like Molloy’s solution to the sucking stone problem, all possible scenarios must be considered to explain the conundrum of how and why Watt never saw Knott at mealtime. Twelve possibilities are offered, among them that1. Mr. Knott was responsible for the arrangement, and knew that he was responsible for the arrangement, and knew that such an arrangement existed, and was content.2. Mr. Knott was not responsible for the arrangement, but knew who was responsible for the arrangement, and knew that such an arrangement existed, and was content.(Beckett, Watt 86)This stringent adherence to detail, absurd and exasperating as it is, is the work of fiction, the persistence of a viable, believable thing called Watt who exists as long as his thought is made manifest on a page. All writers face this pernicious prospect of having to confront and satisfy “fiction’s gargantuan appetite for fact, for detail, for documentation” (Kenner 70). A writer’s writer (Philip Marlow) Dennis Potter’s singing detective struggles with the acute consciousness that words eventually will fail him. His struggle to overcome verbal entropy is a spectre that haunts the entire literary imagination, for when the words stop the world stops.Beckett made this struggle the very stuff of his work, declaring famously that all he wanted to do as a writer was to leave “a stain upon the silence” (quoted in Bair 681). His characters deteriorate from recognisable people (Hamm in Endgame, Winnie in Happy Days) to mere ciphers of speech acts (the bodiless head Listener in That Time, Mouth in Not I). During this process they provide us with the vocabulary of entropy, a horror most eloquently expressed at the end of The Unnamable: I can’t go on, you must go on, I’ll go on, you must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strange pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps it’s done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on. (Beckett, Molloy 418)The importance Beckett accorded to pauses in his writing, from breaks in dialogue to punctuation, stresses the pacing of utterance that is in sync with the rhythm of human breath. This is acutely underlined in Jack MacGowran’s extraordinary gramophone recording of the above passage from The Unnamable. There is exhaustion in his voice, but it is inflected by an urgent push for the next words to forestall the last gasp. And what might appear to be parsimony is in fact the very commerce of writing itself. It is an economy of necessity, when any words will suffice to sustain presence in the face of imminent silence.Hugh Kenner has written eloquently on the relationship between writing and entropy, drawing on field and number theory to demonstrate how the business of fiction is forever in the process of generating variation within a finite set. The “stoic comedian,” as he figures the writer facing the blank page, self-consciously practices their art in the full cognisance that they select “elements from a closed set, and then (arrange) them inside a closed field” (Kenner 94). The nouveau roman (a genre conceived and practiced in Beckett’s lean shadow) is remembered in literary history as a rather austere, po-faced formalism that foregrounded things at the expense of human psychology or social interaction. But it is emblematic of Kenner’s portrait of stoicism as an attitude to writing that confronts the nature of fiction itself, on its own terms, as a practice “which is endlessly arranging things” (13):The bulge of the bank also begins to take effect starting from the fifth row: this row, as a matter of fact, also possesses only twenty-one trees, whereas it should have twenty-two for a true trapezoid and twenty-three for a rectangle (uneven row). (Robbe-Grillet 21)As a matter of fact. The nouveau roman made a fine if myopic art of isolating detail for detail’s sake. However, it shares with both Beckett’s minimalism and Joyce’s maximalism the obligation of fiction to fill its world with stuff (“maximalism” is a term coined by Michel Delville and Andrew Norris in relation to the musical scores of Frank Zappa that opposes the minimalism of John Cage’s work). Kenner asks, in The Stoic Comedians, where do the “thousands on thousands of things come from, that clutter Ulysses?” His answer is simple, from “a convention” and this prosaic response takes us to the heart of the matter with respect to the impact on writing of Isaac Newton’s unforgiving Second Law of Thermodynamics. In the law’s strictest physical sense of the dissipation of heat, of the loss of energy within any closed system that moves, the stipulation of the Second Law predicts that words will, of necessity, stop in any form governed by convention (be it of horror, comedy, tragedy, the Bildungsroman, etc.). Building upon and at the same time refining the early work on motion and mass theorised by Aristotle, Kepler, and Galileo, inter alia, Newton refined both the laws and language of classical mechanics. It was from Wiener’s literary reading of Newton that Kenner segued from the loss of energy within any closed system (entropy) to the running silent out of words within fiction.In the wake of Norbert Wiener’s cybernetic turn in thinking in the 1940s, which was highly influenced by Newton’s Second Law, fiction would never again be considered in the same way (metafiction was a term coined in part to recognise this shift; the nouveau roman another). Far from delivering a reassured and reassuring present-ness, an integrated and ongoing cosmos, fiction is an isometric exercise in the struggle against entropy, of a world in imminent danger of running out of energy, of not-being:“His hand took his hat from the peg over his initialled heavy overcoat…” Four nouns, and the book’s world is heavier by four things. One, the hat, “Plasto’s high grade,” will remain in play to the end. The hand we shall continue to take for granted: it is Bloom’s; it goes with his body, which we are not to stop imagining. The peg and the overcoat will fade. “On the doorstep he felt in his hip pocket for the latchkey. Not there. In the trousers I left off.” Four more things. (Kenner 87)This passage from The Stoic Comedians is a tour de force of the conjuror’s art, slowing down the subliminal process of the illusion for us to see the fragility of fiction’s precarious grip on the verge of silence, heroically “filling four hundred empty pages with combinations of twenty-six different letters” (xiii). Kenner situates Joyce in a comic tradition, preceded by Gustave Flaubert and followed by Beckett, of exhaustive fictive possibility. The stoic, he tells us, “is one who considers, with neither panic nor indifference, that the field of possibilities available to him is large perhaps, or small perhaps, but closed” (he is prompt in reminding us that among novelists, gamblers and ethical theorists, the stoic is also a proponent of the Second Law of Thermodynamics) (xiii). If Joyce is the comedian of the inventory, then it is Flaubert, comedian of the Enlightenment, who is his immediate ancestor. Bouvard and Pécuchet (1881) is an unfinished novel written in the shadow of the Encyclopaedia, an apparatus of the literate mind that sought complete knowledge. But like the Encyclopaedia particularly and the Enlightenment more generally, it is fragmentation that determines its approach to and categorisation of detail as information about the world. Bouvard and Pécuchet ends, appropriately, in a frayed list of details, pronouncements and ephemera.In the face of an unassailable impasse, all that is left Flaubert is the list. For more than thirty years he constructed the Dictionary of Received Ideas in the shadow of the truncated Bouvard and Pécuchet. And in doing so he created for the nineteenth century mind “a handbook for novelists” (Kenner 19), a breakdown of all we know “into little pieces so arranged that they can be found one at a time” (3): ACADEMY, FRENCH: Run it down but try to belong to it if you can.GREEK: Whatever one cannot understand is Greek.KORAN: Book about Mohammed, which is all about women.MACHIAVELLIAN: Word only to be spoken with a shudder.PHILOSOPHY: Always snigger at it.WAGNER: Snigger when you hear his name and joke about the music of the future. (Flaubert, Dictionary 293-330)This is a sample of the exhaustion that issues from the tireless pursuit of categorisation, classification, and the mania for ordered information. The Dictionary manifests the Enlightenment’s insatiable hunger for received ideas, an unwieldy background noise of popular opinion, general knowledge, expertise, and hearsay. In both Bouvard and Pécuchet and the Dictionary, exhaustion was the foundation of a comic art as it was for both Joyce and Beckett after him, for the simple reason that it includes everything and neglects nothing. It is comedy born of overwhelming competence, a sublime impertinence, though not of manners or social etiquette, but rather, with a nod to Oscar Wilde, the impertinence of being definitive (a droll epithet that, not surprisingly, was the title of Kenner’s 1982 Times Literary Supplement review of Richard Ellmann’s revised and augmented biography of Joyce).The inventory, then, is the underlining physio-semiotics of fictional mechanics, an elegiac resistance to the thread of fiction fraying into nothingness. The motif of thermodynamics is no mere literary conceit here. Consider the opening sentence in Borges:Of the many problems which exercised the reckless discernment of Lönnrot, none was so strange—so rigorously strange, shall we say—as the periodic series of bloody events which culminated at the villa of Triste-le-Roy, amid the ceaseless aroma of the eucalypti. (Borges 76)The subordinate clause, as a means of adjectival and adverbial augmentation, implies a potentially infinite sentence through the sheer force of grammatical convention, a machine-like resistance to running out of puff:Under the notable influence of Chesterton (contriver and embellisher of elegant mysteries) and the palace counsellor Leibniz (inventor of the pre-established harmony), in my idle afternoons I have imagined this story plot which I shall perhaps write someday and which already justifies me somehow. (72)In “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” a single adjective charmed with emphasis will do to imply an unseen network:The visible work left by this novelist is easily and briefly enumerated. (Borges 36)The annotation of this network is the inexorable issue of the inflection: “I have said that Menard’s work can be easily enumerated. Having examined with care his personal files, I find that they contain the following items.” (37) This is a sample selection from nineteen entries:a) A Symbolist sonnet which appeared twice (with variants) in the review La conque (issues of March and October 1899).o) A transposition into alexandrines of Paul Valéry’s Le cimitière marin (N.R.F., January 1928).p) An invective against Paul Valéry, in the Papers for the Suppression of Reality of Jacques Reboul. (37-38)Lists, when we encounter them in Jorge Luis Borges, are always contextual, supplying necessary detail to expand upon character and situation. And they are always intertextual, anchoring this specific fictional world to others (imaginary, real, fabulatory or yet to come). The collation and annotation of the literary works of an imagined author (Pierre Menard) of an invented author (Edmond Teste) of an actual author (Paul Valéry) creates a recursive, yet generative, feedback loop of reference and literary progeny. As long as one of these authors continues to write, or write of the work of at least one of the others, a persistent fictional present tense is ensured.Consider Hillel Schwartz’s use of the list in his Making Noise (2011). It not only lists what can and is inevitably heard, in this instance the European 1700s, but what it, or local aural colour, is heard over:Earthy: criers of artichokes, asparagus, baskets, beans, beer, bells, biscuits, brooms, buttermilk, candles, six-pence-a-pound fair cherries, chickens, clothesline, cockles, combs, coal, crabs, cucumbers, death lists, door mats, eels, fresh eggs, firewood, flowers, garlic, hake, herring, ink, ivy, jokebooks, lace, lanterns, lemons, lettuce, mackeral, matches […]. (Schwartz 143)The extended list and the catalogue, when encountered as formalist set pieces in fiction or, as in Schwartz’s case, non-fiction, are the expansive equivalent of le mot juste, the self-conscious, painstaking selection of the right word, the specific detail. Of Ulysses, Kenner observes that it was perfectly natural that it “should have attracted the attention of a group of scholars who wanted practice in compiling a word-index to some extensive piece of prose (Miles Hanley, Word Index to Ulysses, 1937). More than any other work of fiction, it suggests by its texture, often by the very look of its pages, that it has been painstakingly assembled out of single words…” (31-32). In a book already crammed with detail, with persistent reference to itself, to other texts, other media, such formalist set pieces as the following from the oneiric “Circe” episode self-consciously perform for our scrutiny fiction’s insatiable hunger for more words, for invention, the Latin root of which also gives us the word inventory:The van of the procession appears headed by John Howard Parnell, city marshal, in a chessboard tabard, the Athlone Poursuivant and Ulster King of Arms. They are followed by the Right Honourable Joseph Hutchinson, lord mayor Dublin, the lord mayor of Cork, their worships the mayors of Limerick, Galway, Sligo and Waterford, twentyeight Irish representative peers, sirdars, grandees and maharajahs bearing the cloth of estate, the Dublin Metropolitan Fire Brigade, the chapter of the saints of finance in their plutocratic order of precedence, the bishop of Down and Connor, His Eminence Michael cardinal Logue archbishop of Armagh, primate of all Ireland, His Grace, the most reverend Dr William Alexander, archbishop of Armagh, primate of all Ireland, the chief rabbi, the Presbyterian moderator, the heads of the Baptist, Anabaptist, Methodist and Moravian chapels and the honorary secretary of the society of friends. (Joyce, Ulysses 602-604)Such examples demonstrate how Joycean inventories break from narrative as architectonic, stand-alone assemblages of information. They are Rabelaisian irruptions, like Philip Marlow’s lesions, that erupt in swollen bas-relief. The exaggerated, at times hysterical, quality of such lists, perform the hallucinatory work of displacement and condensation (the Homeric parallel here is the transformation of Odysseus’s men into swine by the witch Circe). Freudian, not to mention Stindberg-ian dream-work brings together and juxtaposes images and details that only make sense as non-sense (realistic but not real), such as the extraordinary explosive gathering of civic, commercial, political, chivalric representatives of Dublin in this foreshortened excerpt of Bloom’s regal campaign for his “new Bloomusalem” (606).The text’s formidable echolalia, whereby motifs recur and recapitulate into leitmotifs, ensures that the act of reading Ulysses is always cross-referential, suggesting the persistence of a conjured world that is always already still coming into being through reading. And it is of course this forestalling of Newton’s Second Law that Joyce brazenly conducts, in both the textual and physical sense, in Finnegans Wake. The Wake is an impossible book in that it infinitely sustains the circulation of words within a closed system, creating a weird feedback loop of cyclical return. It is a text that can run indefinitely through the force of its own momentum without coming to a conclusion. In a text in which the author’s alter ego is described in terms of the technology of inscription (Shem the Penman) and his craft as being a “punsil shapner,” (Joyce, Finnegans 98) Norbert Wiener’s descriptive example of feedback as the forestalling of entropy in the conscious act of picking up a pencil is apt: One we have determined this, our motion proceeds in such a way that we may say roughly that the amount by which the pencil is not yet picked up is decreased at each stage. (Wiener 7) The Wake overcomes the book’s, and indeed writing’s, struggle with entropy through the constant return of energy into its closed system as a cycle of endless return. Its generative algorithm can be represented thus: “… a long the riverrun …” (628-3). The Wake’s sense of unending confounds and contradicts, in advance, Frank Kermode’s averring to Newton’s Second Law in his insistence that the progression of all narrative fiction is defined in terms of the “sense of an ending,” the expectation of a conclusion, whereby the termination of words makes “possible a satisfying consonance with the origins and with the middle” (Kermode 17). It is the realisation of the novel imagined by Silas Flannery, the fictitious author in Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveller, an incipit that “maintains for its whole duration the potentiality of the beginning” (Calvino 140). Finnegans Wake is unique in terms of the history of the novel (if that is indeed what it is) in that it is never read, but (as Joseph Frank observed of Joyce generally) “can only be re-read” (Frank 19). With Wiener’s allegory of feedback no doubt in mind, Jacques Derrida’s cybernetic account of the act of reading Joyce comes, like a form of echolalia, on the heels of Calvino’s incipit, his perpetual sustaining of the beginning: you stay on the edge of reading Joyce—for me this has been going on for twenty-five or thirty years—and the endless plunge throws you back onto the river-bank, on the brink of another possible immersion, ad infinitum … In any case, I have the feeling that I haven’t yet begun to read Joyce, and this “not having begun to read” is sometimes the most singular and active relationship I have with his work. (Derrida 148) Derrida wonders if this process of ongoing immersion in the text is typical of all works of literature and not just the Wake. The question is rhetorical and resonates into silence. And it is silence, ultimately, that hovers as a mute herald of the end when words will simply run out.Post(script)It is in the nature of all writing that it is read in the absence of its author. Perhaps the most typical form of writing, then, is the suicide note. In an extraordinary essay, “Goodbye, Cruel Words,” Mark Dery wonders why it has been “so neglected as a literary genre” and promptly sets about reviewing its decisive characteristics. Curiously, the list features amongst its many forms: I’m done with lifeI’m no goodI’m dead. (Dery 262)And references to lists of types of suicide notes are among Dery’s own notes to the essay. With its implicit generic capacity to intransitively add more detail, the list becomes in the light of the terminal letter a condition of writing itself. The irony of this is not lost on Dery as he ponders the impotent stoicism of the scribbler setting about the mordant task of writing for the last time. Writing at the last gasp, as Dery portrays it, is a form of dogged, radical will. But his concluding remarks are reflective of his melancholy attitude to this most desperate act of writing at degree zero: “The awful truth (unthinkable to a writer) is that eloquent suicide notes are rarer than rare because suicide is the moment when language fails—fails to hoist us out of the pit, fails even to express the unbearable weight” (264) of someone on the precipice of the very last word they will ever think, let alone write. Ihab Hassan (1967) and George Steiner (1967), it would seem, were latecomers as proselytisers of the language of silence. But there is a queer, uncanny optimism at work at the terminal moment of writing when, contra Dery, words prevail on the verge of “endless, silent night.” (264) Perhaps when Newton’s Second Law no longer has carriage over mortal life, words take on a weird half-life of their own. Writing, after Socrates, does indeed circulate indiscriminately among its readers. There is a dark irony associated with last words. When life ceases, words continue to have the final say as long as they are read, and in so doing they sustain an unlikely, and in their own way, stoical sense of unending.ReferencesBair, Deirdre. Samuel Beckett: A Biography. London: Jonathan Cape, 1978.Beckett, Samuel. Molloy Malone Dies. The Unnamable. London: John Calder, 1973.---. Watt. London: John Calder, 1976.Borges, Jorge Luis. Labyrinths. Selected Stories & Other Writings. Ed. Donald A. Yates & James E. Irby. New York: New Directions, 1964.Calvino, Italo. If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller. Trans. 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