Metafora v modernej a súčasnej poézii a možnosti jej interpretácie

Author(s): Zoltán Rédey / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 3/2018

The article is focused on the role of metaphor in 20th- and 21st-century poetry, its aesthetic,semantic as well as cognitive function, measure and way of its presence in the lyrical text– the share of metaphor in the creation of a general aesthetic value and sense of the poem.The author is interested in the possible interpretations of poetic metaphor not only within traditional descriptive-classifying poetological or rhetorical-stylistic interpretive models,but also in a methodologically wider context, e. g. also in the light of current conceptually and cognitively-based theories. In this sense, he concentrates on two main aims or problem areas: 1. an attempt to reinterpret the classically understood poetic metaphor and its traditional theoretical understanding on a synecdochically selected example from Slovak literarymodernism or post-symbolism, Novomeský’ s poem “The Thousand and One Nights” (“Tisíca jedna noc”); 2. in the background, the problem and specificities of metaphor in recent and most recent poetry via concrete illustrative textual extracts from a more widely-understood current author (Štrpka’ s text). The study also touches upon the questions of the pragmatics of metaphor, as a way of constituting the meaning of the poem.

Images of remote countries in the literatures of Central and Eastern Europe. On the theoretical starting points of intercultural comparative studies

Author(s): Miloš Zelenka,Anton Pokrivčák / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2019

In Central and Eastern Europe, the research into interliterary relations traditionally drew on national concerns emerging naturally from the proximity of a great number of neighbouring nation states with their distinct cultures, or national minorities living within a majority culture. Yet the contacts or relationships with structurally and typologically different cultures have remained outside of critical attention. Studying them requires not only some knowledge of the extraliterary context in which those cultures are situated, but a methodologically different approach as well, such as is used in postcolonial or decolonial theory, Orientalism, imagology, etc. The paper draws attention to the problems connected with comparisons using these approaches, especially imagology, as their main methodological tool. At the same time, it aims at finding out how such approaches contribute to the understanding of cultural, ethnic, biological or material “otherness” (especially through stereotyped imagotypical structures), and whether it is possible to transfer, for example, the imagological concepts historically created in a certain context to a cultural area of a different civilization, and use them to analyze the nature of the literary.

The economies of interlingual intercultural transfer: Towards a complex picture of translators and interpreters in Slovakia

Author(s): Martin Djovčoš,Ivana Hostová,Emília Perez,Pavol Šveda / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2020

The article focuses on agents facilitating translation and interpreting and provides a sociological probe into the particulars of interlingual intercultural transfer in Slovakia on the background of political and economic specifics of the region. The observed tendencies seem to point to the fact that in the past half century, despite the changes brought about by the Velvet Revolution, the social standing of translators and interpreters has been less determined by officially proclaimed ideologies than economic forces. From the legislative point of view, language policies have had a significant impact on the phenomena in question.

Socioštylistická analýza románu Dominika Dána „Noc temných klamstiev“ – náčrt metódy

Author(s): Daniela Slančová / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 2/2020

The study analyzes the linguistic means representing social phenomena, structures and processes in Dominik Dán’ s criminal novel Noc temných klamstiev (2009; Night of Dark Deceptions). Methodologically, it is based on the concept of interactive stylistics, specifically its socio-stylistic subsystem. The main aim of the analyzed linguistic means in the structure of the novel is (i) to characterize the setting, characters, situations and relations; (ii) to indicate the more complex stylistic qualities, mainly the contrast with the often humorous solution between textual tension and detension; and (iii) to be a part of irony as the main author’s attitude towards reality.

Renáta Bojničanová – Tamara Šimončíková-Heribanová (eds.): Komplexnosť tvorivosti. Zborník príspevkov k jubileu Márie Bátorovej [The Complexity of Creativity. Proceedings for the jubilee of Mária Bátorová]

Author(s): Tatiana Sedová / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 1/2021

Medzi historickým faktom a fikciou: interdiskurzívne konštruovanie fikčných svetov v súčasnej slovenskej próze s historickou tematikou

Author(s): Ivan Jančovič / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 4/2021

This article pays attention to the relation between historical knowledge and historical prose. It describes the historical genre as an interdiscursive invariant of author and reader conventions. Its production and reception variants activate interdiscursive action, important for the proper functioning of the genre convention. The author focuses on thematic elements, which in historical knowledge represent a trace of the past – a proof of past events. The writer incorporates documents, photographs, facts found in archives, findings of archaeologists, etc. into the theme of the text. In examining different ways of incorporating these traces existing behind the text into fiction, the article treats Jozef Banáš’s Zastavte Dubčeka! (Stop Dubček!, 2009), Jaro Rihák’s Pentcho (2015), Pavol Rankov’s Matky (Mothers, 2011) and Silvester Lavrík’s Nedeľné šachy s Tisom (Sunday chess with Tiso, 2016) and Posledná barónka (The last Baroness, 2019). In historical prose, the rules of text reception include recognizing the correlation between the thematic elements and historical knowledge, as well as observing the creative transfer these elements undergo to co-create new horizons of meaning

Od diskurzívneho konštruovania literárneho realizmu k realistickému interdiskurzívnemu konštruovaniu reality

Author(s): Milan Kendra / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 4/2021

This study examines the internal complexity of Slovak literary realist discourse, which is explained in Slovak studies as the result of diverse relations to the heterogeneous artistic, cultural and ideological discourses of the last third of the 19th century. However, since realistic fiction forms a subsystem of art as a social system (Niklas Luhmann), attention is focused on communications with other social systems and corresponding stimuli, and on the specific (self-referential) literary operations (with their inevitable contingency) involved in the constructionof a view of reality. In order to illustrate these communicative exchanges, the final section uses two short interpretations to give examples of different modes of the (literary-) realist interdiscursive construction of reality – voluntaristic (in the fiction of Svetozár HurbanVajanský) and deterministic (in the context of the short stories of Ladislav Nádaši).

Zvieratá v literatúre: metafora, etika, ekológia

Author(s): Ivana Hostová / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 2/2023

The essay introduces the topic of the study of the animal in literature with a special focus on Slovak poetry. After briefly outlining the field in which research of literature meets research of nature, animals, plants, and the environment of human and non-human animals, it discusses a few examples from Slovak literature. Animal studies, posthumanism, and other fields of critical research which abolish the boundary between culture and nature, redefine the identity of the human element and see it as part of a network in which agency is a feature shared by various entities. Removing the human from the top of the hierarchy calls for a revision of such notions as consciousness or free will and a more intense focus on the “non-human” actors – i.e. agential entities which share with the human some of their features, but differ in others. The essay provides an overview of the types of literary texts which have inspired interdisciplinary research of literature and nature in the past few decades environmental and ecoliterate texts, cli-fi), outlines the research field and its aims and provides a brief overview of some of the relevant theoretical approaches and recent publications.

Vzťahy Pavla Jozefa Šafárika a Leškovcov v dolnozemskom kontexte

Author(s): Martin Braxatoris / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 6/2023

This study focuses on the relationships of Pavel Jozef Šafárik with Štefan Leška senior and Štefan Leška junior. It observes diverse testimonies and consequences of their mutual connections, closely related to their family ties and interactions in Vojvodina (Malý Kereš, Dunaegyháza, Novi Sad, and Stara Pazova). The study examines insights relevant to poetry, attitudes toward prosodic matters, philological research, publishing activities, and more. It particularly explores Šafárik’s relationship with Štefan Leška senior during the years 1815 – 1818 and his contact with Štefan Leška junior during his time in Novi Sad. By offering a comprehensive view of their relationships, it aims to shed light on certain less clear circumstances of their lives and work, while also correcting stereotypical assessments of Šafárik’s interactions with Slovaks in Vojvodina, which have led to an underestimation of their literary and cultural significance.

Romány slovenských vojvodinských spisovateľov v 21. storočí

Author(s): Adam Svetlík / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 6/2023

Since the beginning of the 21st century, older-generation writers in Slovak Vojvodina literature have published novels: Viera Benková (* 1939): Stred sveta ([The centre of the world], 2006), Tri ženy, dvaja muži a ja... ([Three women, two men, and me], 2017); Víťazoslav Hronec (* 1944): Dynastia Beňovských ([The Benyovszky dynasty], 2020); Zlatko Benka (* 1951): Deväť prsteňov ([Nine rings], 2005); Martin Prebudila (* 1960): No tak, usmej sa... ([Come on, smile...], 2012). In these novels, they largely synthesized their previous prose and overall literary work. A common feature in all the mentioned novels is the use of (neo)modernist, postmodern, and (neo)realistic narrative techniques and strategies in their composition, the influence of the author’s own poetry on their prose, and bilingualism in the case of two authors (V. Hronec, Z. Benka), where the work was written in Serbian and subsequently translated into Slovak. The aim of the contribution is to demonstrate how and to what extent the novelistic work of selected Slovak Vojvodina writers engages with current trends in literary transformations in Slovak, Serbian, and global literature.

Recepcia novšej slovenskej literárnej vedy v srbskom kontexte so zameraním na knižné preklady a vybranú kritickú reflexiu

Author(s): Marina Speváková Šimáková / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 6/2023

This contribution focuses on the reception of Slovak literary theory in the Serbian context since the 1980s. Against the backdrop of reception theory, literary communication, and dialogism, it provides an overview of book and selected journal translations into the Serbian language, considering individual components of the (meta)communication-dialogic process: the author, the structure of the source text, actors involved in the selection of texts, translators into Serbian, and broader cultural connections such as publishers and selected critical Serbian reception responses. In this context, the names of founders of modern Slovak literary theory (Mikuláš Bakoš, the Nitra school, Anton Popovič, František Miko, Dionýz Ďurišin, Peter Zajac) and younger theorists resonate. From the Serbian context perspective, attention is paid to the involvement of bilingual and biliterate authors and translators in communication processes (literary scholar Michal Harpáň, linguist Miroslav Dudok), as well as other translators of Slovak literary theory. Another area under scrutiny is the updating of available Slovak literary studies works in selected critical reflections, along with an indication of the criteria for reception in the Serbian context.

Repetícia a variácia v strojopisnej konkrétnej poézii Milana Adamčiaka

Author(s): Jaroslav Šrank / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 1/2024

The contribution deals with the typewritten concrete poetry of the intermedia artist Milan Adamčiak (1946 – 2017), which was created in the second half of the 1960s. It focuses on two characteristic forms of concrete poetry: verbal and sentence constellations. It observes how the principle of seriality is applied to these text-image compositions. Seriality, as a key compositional and meaning-generating principle, is particularly associated with repetition and variation. In the context of verbal constellations, the article emphasizes the function of visual composition in dealing with a word extracted from linguistic syntax. In sentence constellations, it concentrates on the metacritical function of these forms, specified in the form of a critique of language as a means of communication and an instrument of power. Adamčiak’s repetitive-variation manipulation of linguistic material represents the application of visual techniques to literary creation. The contribution also points out the intermedia character of Adamčiak’s concrete poetry, highlights its parallels and connections with Czech experimental poetry, and selectively considers the socio-political circumstances of the time.

Telo, materstvo, trauma, príroda – o poézii Márie Jančovej

Author(s): Andrea Bokníková / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 3/2024

Mária Jančová (1908 – 2003) has been primarily known as the author of children’s books. This paper, however, aims to focus on her – largely overlooked – poetry. After an initial mapping of the theme of motherhood in Slovak women poets from the late 19th to the mid-20th century, the article takes a look at the phase of Jančová’s writing career when she authored poems. Some of these were published in her only collection of poetry, Blahoslavení ([Blessed] 1940, 1968). The article provides a close reading of several poems and comments on the flowing of energy between the movements of the body (external movements and internal processes) and nature, with reference to the notion of “lyrical gestures” as defined by the French literary scholar Dominique Rabaté. It also discusses the image of the bodily connection between the mother and her sick little son and the transmigration of the human element into meteorological phenomena and flowers. The poet’s inclination towards the country life connected to the elements and rhythms of life (in this collection) or her confessional-referential poetry of sentiment (present in other poems) may resonate with contemporary readers or inspire theory of the lyric. The essay’s theoretical framework is based on the conceptualisation of motherhood in literary studies, philosophy, and art theory, and on theories that connect aesthetics with bodily processes.

Jeseň života alebo nová jar? Poznámky k fenoménu starnutia v tvorbe vybraných slovenských poetiek

Author(s): Veronika Rácová / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 3/2024

The essay links a broader sociological and literary studies approach to the issue of old age, ageing, and ageism. On the basis of research in the field of sociology and gerontology, it outlines dominant tendencies that point to the social and individual reception of older age. The article then looks in the ways ageing-related processes are portrayed in Slovak poetry written by women over the age of sixty-five. The essay captures the basic thematic and motivic frameworks used by selected women poets to depict ageing and looks at how the transformations of the body are mirrored in the inner psychological experience of the lyrical subjects and focuses on the quality of such interpersonal relationships in the establishment or cultivation of which age can play an important role. The article also wishes to ask whether this period of life can be thought of as the so-called autumn of life, which has rather negative associations attached to it, or whether the period in question can, on the contrary, be understood as a source of new opportunities, the so-called new spring.

Podoby tela a telesnosti v dramatickej tvorbe Jany Bodnárovej

Author(s): Nora Nagyová / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 3/2024

Motifs of the body and physicality figure in the literary work of writer Jana Bodnárová (b. 1950) as thematic starting points and strategic analytical tools. The essay analyses Bodnárová’s plays Staroba en noir ([Old age en noir] 2022) and Kolísky ([Cradles] 2012) which accentuate the issues of the body and corporeality from the perspective of women’s personal empirical experiences of motherhood, abortion, and old age in line with feminist tendencies. In these plays, Bodnárová portrays the human body as lived and consciously experienced in relation to its surroundings, but also as finite and changeable. She presents the female body as a social and political object through which she draws attention to the negative influence of patriarchal power and its structures. The theoretical framework of the essay is based on a combination of phenomenology, anthropology, and feminist theory. Another line of interpretation the article follows is the depiction of thematic shifts between the two plays and the author’s previous work (especially the play Dievča z morského dna [The girl from the bottom of the sea] 2008), also concentrating on the questioning of the stereotype of women’s innate desire for motherhood.

Človek, zviera, Boh, stroj. Subverzia tela a telesnosti vo Válkovom Milovaní v husej koži

Author(s): Ján Gavura / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 3/2024

In the context of Slovak poetry, Miroslav Válek’s collection Milovanie v husej koži ([Love making in a goose skin] 1965) represents an example of an extreme confrontation of man with the pressing questions of his own mortality. The author derives his doubts about the meaning of the world and of man from strictly material and rational observations, from which he excludes the presence and action of a transcendent force or being (God), and instead presents the world as a confluence of coincidences, a mechanical action at the level of physical objects and bodies, whose movement is machine-like and whose life, often reduced to the level of animals, remains enclosed in an impoverishing animal finality. The publication of the book was followed by a literary polemic which largely influenced the perception and evaluation of Válek’s human attitude and the applied philosophical concepts. However, the thematisation of the negation of the immanent transcendent principle and its replacement by a fatalistic materialistic structure of the world does not in itself degrade the artistic achievement, and in retrospect, Válek’s radical and absolute gesture expressed in the book can be understood as part of his autonomous lyric journey.

Telá a subjekty v mestskej verejnej doprave. Dopravná erotika v slovenskej lyrike tretej tretiny 20. storočia

Author(s): Jaroslav Šrank / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 3/2024

The article examines Slovak poems by a wide range of authors published in the last third of the 20th century and linked by taking as its theme erotic social interactions in urban public transport. The analysis is conceptually related to Bakhtin’s chronotope of the journey and the topos of the encounter and to existing research on poetry with the motifs of accidental male-female encounters in the urban environment and especially in the context of public transport (Walter Benjamin, Alejandro Hermida de Blas, Josef Hrdlička, Pavol Minár). The essay also makes connections with related topoi and paradigmatic texts. The core of the paper focuses on encounters that are motivated erotically on the part of the subject and notices their various forms and distinctive features. It explores both the sensual side of the erotic theme and its reflexive overlaps that are typical of these poems. The encounter at the place of transit acts in the poetry as an opportunity for the subject to observe and gain knowledge and self-knowledge.

„Bo môj rap je tak tlstý, že má po bokoch strie...“ (Textové telá a telesné texty slovenského rapu)

Author(s): Martin Boszorád / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 3/2024

Hip hop as a “cultural complex” – as Richard Shusterman conceptualises it – can generally be seen as one of the most somatic and gestural cultural phenomena. The paper focuses on the verbal gesture as one of the forms of hip hop gestures. Its scope is the analysis and interpretation of a representative sample of Slovak rap lyrics and is methodologically anchored in Nitra School reception aesthetics and Richard Shusterman’s pragmatist aesthetics and somaesthetics (and in part by the phenomenologically oriented works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty) which are productive in the study of the body as a topic or iconic element in the text. The leitmotif of the article is, somatically speaking, “feeling up” – of the genre, conventional verbal gestures tied to the body and corporeality (e.g. masculinity, expressivity and explicitness, objectification of the female body) and, conversely, those that defy or rather challenge core-like genre conventions of hip hop (and, within it, rap) by such mechanisms as “embodying” self-irony or by making the tracks take on the character of motivational or socio-politically engaged statements.

Publishing poetry in translation in Slovakia 2013–2023

Author(s): Ján Gavura / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2024

Poetry’s peripheral position in translation affects the book market by leaving its production to small and non-profit presses that compensate for their economicloss with state and cultural subsidies. This has been the reality in Slovakia during the last decade (2013–2023), with most poetry translations published by small semi-professional presses headed by single managers who, in most cases, happen to be authors, poets, and poetry translators themselves. In the period under review,158 poetry translations were published by 24 presses, four of which published 88of the collections (55.7%). The most prolific publishers include three presses run by poets – FACE (run by Ján Gavura), Skalná ruža (Juraj Kuniak), and Modrý Peter(Peter Milčák) – while the fourth press is Vydavateľstvo Spolku slovenských spisovateľov (VSSS), the publishing house of the Slovak Writers’ Society. Each press has a specific policy of selection for publishing, with the diversity of poets being one of the main criteria, and translators’ input being another. Unlike other genres of translation, the English language is not as dominant in the portfolio of the four most prolific presses, followed by Serbian and Polish. A semi-peripheral language position is held by Spanish, German, Hungarian, Norwegian, and Slovenian, but there are also translations from other 13 languages. This work was supported by VEGA 1/0666/22 “Slovak Literary Culture After 1989 (Dictionary of Terms,Participants and Institutions)”.

Premenné faktory literárnokritického hodnotenia (na príkladoch vybraných literárnokritických polemík tridsiatych a štyridsiatych rokov 20. storočia)

Author(s): Martin Makara / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 1/2025

The article explores the relationship between the literary-critical aspiration for axiologically objective assessments of literary works and the variability of literary-critical evaluations in review practices. Based on research into literary criticism during the period between the two world wars, four variable factors in literary critical evaluation were identified as systematic components of evaluative literary reflection. These factors contribute to the inevitable evaluative differentiation within pluralistic critical practices. Within the fluctuating ontological framework of evaluation, the dispositive of the evaluating subject plays a significant role, since she co-creates the epistemological basis of evaluation (determining the text – understanding and interpreting it). This basis establishes the framework for selecting and applying axiological criteria – i.e., the relevant functions of a literary work and their corresponding norms. The influence of individual variable factors on the final evaluation of a literary work is demonstrated through period evaluative reflections on Slovak literary works from the 1930s and 1940s. These include Hmly na úsvite (Mists at dawn, 1930) by Milo Urban, Kus cukru (A lump of sugar, 1934) by Peter Jilemnický, Cesta zarúbaná (Blocked road, 1934) by Fraňo Kráľ, Kamarát Jašek (My friend Jašek, 1937) by Dobroslav Chrobák, and the poetry of Slovak Nadrealism.