English Rhythms in Russian Verse: On the Experiment of Joseph Brodsky
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Nila Friedberg
About this book
Readers of poetry make aesthetic judgements about verse. It is quite common to hear intuitive statements about poets' rhythms. It is said, for example, that Joseph Brodsky, the Russian poet and 1987 Nobel Prize laureate, "sounds English" when he writes in Russian.
Yet, it is far from clear what this statement means from a linguistic point of view. What is English about Brodsky's Russian poetry? And in what way are his "English" rhythms different from the verse of his Russian predecessors?
The book provides an analysis of Brodsky's experiment bringing evidence from an unusually wide variety of disciplines and theories rarely combined in a single study, including the generative approach to meter; the Russian quantitative approach, analysis of readers' intuitions about poetic rhythm, analysis of the poet's source readings, as well as acoustic phonetics, statistics, and archival research. The distinct analytic approaches applied in this book to the same phenomenon complement one another each providing insight alternate approaches do not, and showing that only a combination of theories and methods allows us to fully appreciate what Brodsky's "English accent" really was, and what any poetic innovation means.
Author / Editor information
Nila Friedberg, Portland State University, Oregon, USA.
Topics
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Frontmatter
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Acknowledgements
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A note on copyright and transliteration
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Table of contents
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Introduction
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1. Brodsky’s predecessors: Rules, violations, semantics
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2. Redundant syllables: Elision in Brodsky’s verse
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3. Brodsky’s anti-RD rhythm: semantics and sources
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Conclusion
122 - Appendices
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Appendix I. Changes from Brodsky’s drafts to final versions
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Appendix II. 100 randomly-selected words with the shape -Xxx- in the prose of Brodsky, Slutsky, and Donne
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Appendix III. Words with the shape -Xxx- in elision positions in the verse of Donne, Brodsky, and Slutsky
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Appendix IV. Statistical tests of words with the shape -Xxx- in poetry and prose
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Appendix V. Anti-RD rhythm in Brodsky’s iambic poems
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Appendix VI. Anti-RD rhythm in Tsvetaeva’s iambic poems
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Appendix VII. Anti-RD rhythm in Brodsky, Tsvetaeva, and Donne
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References
183 -
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Author index
206 -
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Subject index
209
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