AATSEEL 2007

[Daniel Rancour-Laferriere]

4 April 07

Dear colleagues,
This call for papers on a very interesting topic reminded me of lectures 
Roman Jakobson gave at Brown University (this would have been in 1968 or 
1969, if memory serves). Professor Jakobson expressed admiration for 
Tiutchev's translation of Heine's poem "Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam," 
where the gender opposition of "Ein Fichtenbaum" (masculine) to "Die 
Palme" (feminine) is maintained by use of "kedr" vs. "pal'ma" in the 
translation (it somehow would not have been appropriate for a 
grammatically feminine "el'" or "sosna" to be longing for a 
grammatically feminine "pal'ma," he said, even though "el'" or "sosna" 
would have been literally more accurate). Looking into the matter 
further, I found that this example goes back to the work of philologist 
Aleksandr (Oleksandr) Potebnia (IZ ZAPISOK PO TEORII SLOVESNOSTI, 
Khar'kov: 1905, p. 69), and that there is a long tradition of citing 
Russian translations of Heine's poem to illustrate the semantic 
importance of grammatical gender in poetry (Veselovskii, Grigor'ev, 
Shcherba, and others). See my "Potebnja, Shklovskij, and the 
Familiarity/Strangeness Paradox," RUSSIAN LITERATURE 4 (1976, 175-198).

And what IF a "sosna" should long for a "pal'ma?" Nowadays that is 
something we can talk about openly.

Regards to the list,

Daniel Rancour-Laferriere
UC Davis


mrojavi1 at SWARTHMORE.EDU wrote:

>Dear ALL,
>
>I'm organizing a panel for AATSEEL 2007 in Chicago (Dec. 27-
>30) entitled  “Grammatical gender as a source of
>metaphorical thinking.”
>
>
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