Meridian Critic

Eminescu considered that “Shakespeare must not be read, he should be studied” (1870) [Eminescu, 1870], for, in order to comprehend the complexity of his plays’ messages, one should perceive ‘the trembling of deep feelings within words’. In his lectures on Shakespeare, S.T. Coleridge repeatedly highlighted the playwright’s poetic art “of representing, in words, external nature and human thoughts and affections…” and of knowing how to communicate them in “systems of harmony” made of parts that “fit into a whole” (“The Second Lecture”, 205-206).
This paper is an attempt at showing the power and function of the poetic word(s) in William Shakespeare’s texts, with reference to The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. If, in his sonnets, the three quatrains metaphorically develop the ideatic universe which is conveyed by the words of the couplet, the five acts of his plays are “constructed” – to use Coleridge’s words –, in such a way “as to produce” a representation of the Renaissance being’s existence starting from a paradigm or a syntagm placed in scene 1, act I, of all his plays. Hamlet and Hamlet (both text and protagonist) are created and disclosed through the metamorphosis of the syntagm unfold yourself (I, 1, 2) from a denotative linguistic unit into a connotative system.

Thomas Mann praised Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare as great heroes of world literature und honoured them in his work. Instead of a planned political statement against the National Socialists, he combined a partly fictional diary of his first cruise to America with essayistic comments on Cervantes’ Don Quijote. The retelling of the episode of the Morisco Ricote and the use of the term “eradication” (Ausmerzung) - not found in the highly praised translation by Tieck – allows us to think at the Holocaust of the Jews. Thus, Voyage with Don Quijote can be read as an early protest against the inhuman policies of the National Socialists in Germany.
In the novel Doctor Faustus we find Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost in the form of an opera composed by Adrian Leverkühn, Thomas Mann’s creative, but demonically inspired hero. The novel does not only represent here the tragic fate of the German nation, but italso reads Shakespeare’s work from a gender perspective, exploiting a “proto-history offeminist Shakespeare reception” (Elsaghe; Bronfen) and offering a clarification for Mann’s statement that “the Shakespeare-play lies at the “core”.” (Mann, 2002, 428)

This paper focuses on the importance of the Don Quixote edition sponsored byLord Carteret in London in 1738. It has been stressed frequently that this edition includedthe first biography of Cervantes ever written, by the Spanish scholar Gregorio Mayans y Siscar. For the first time also, Cervantes’ work was edited with all the honors of a classic.The aim of this paper is to show how the Lord Carteret edition contributed to a fundamental change in the perception of Cervantes: from being a writer of popularliterature, Cervantes became the paradigm of criticism in the way that criticism was understood by the Enlightenment.

Nous proposons d’examiner la réception des grands chefs d’oeuvre européens de l’époque baroque que sont le théâtre de Shakespeare et le Quichotte de Cervantès dans les romans hispano-américains du dictateur. En effet, Yo el Supremo d’Augusto Roa Bastos, El otoño del patriarca de Gabriel García Márquez, El recurso del método d’Alejo Carpentier, nourrissent une filiation singulière avec ces oeuvres européennes, filiation relativement méconnue de la critique. Quel est le sens de cet intertexte ? Que nous dit-il du pouvoir et en quoi nous livre-t-il une profonde réflexion philosophique sur la folie de l’omnipotence ? Dans quelle mesure cette confrontation des imaginaires, par-delà les siècles et les continents, influence-t-elle la lecture de ces romans hispano-américains contemporains ?

This paper attempts to read William Shakespeare’s works Othello and Hamlet. It is mainly concerned with the tragic situations that William Shakespeare dwelt on with a particular interest in both tragedies. From the thematic standpoint, these tragedies depend most intimately on the strength of emotional and passionate love, and the involvement of multiple deaths, culminating in the tragic fall of the hero, or catastrophe. William Shakespeare’s amazing capacity of making his characters react incredibly to the situations they are entangled triggers the tragedy of human wrong doing and suffering and the struggle of man to organize himself into the social order. Terror and pity have been the hallmark of Shakespeare throughout the tragic writings of his literary achievements. The main concern in the present essay will center on the theme of love in its various incarnations and implications in Othello and Hamlet.

If Avellaneda had not published the apocryphal second part of Don Quijote de la Mancha, Cervantes, in all likelihood, would not have written the authentic one or this one would have been radically different. In the introduction to the Second Part, which records the third expedition of Don Quixote, the author is railing against a false author who has published a false sequel to the First Part of Don Quixote. It is precisely this false book and its consequent play of mirrors, in which true and false characters will move, that gives the second part of the immortal work its actual meaning.

The figure of Diana is very important in Shakespeare’s and Cervantes’ works. They both rewrite Ovidian myth, but they also take inspiration from Montemayor’s Seven Books of Diana. According to the myth, Diana is both the goddess of chastity and a figure of the “unspeakable”, but Shakespeare and Cervantes also present her as the actress par excellence. They offer a self-reflexive reinvestment of the myth: Diana is an allegory of the inaccessible Poetry.

Interpolated in the first part of Don Quixote, the episode narrating the interrelated love stories of Cardenio, Luscinda, Don Fernando and Dorotea has been the subject of various stage adaptations throughout the centuries. This paper provides an analysis of two rewritings of the story performed on British lands in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries: Thomas D’Urfey’s The Comical History of Don Quixote I (1694) and Double Falsehood (1728), presumably adapted by Lewis Theobald from a Shakespeare / Fletcher collaboration. The analysis of the texts is aimed at determining how these playwrights harness the subversive potential of Cervantes’s original.

The cultural evolution of the literary phenomenon went through a few steps that should be related to the way in which social structures were transformed, from totem to religious extremism and then to the illusion of freedom. Yet, in all historical periods, there has been a constant need of an artwork to raise the individual to a different level of experience, named by Aristotle, catharsis. The principle of moralizing art has become, in time, somewhat outdated and increasingly inappropriate to a type of an apparently specialised consumer, but actually, superficial and with less time for receiving a complex message.

This essay aims to provide a definition of the characters/readers of the Cervantine novel through the analysis of the material aspects of books’ circulation and through the study of the editorial products in Cervantes’ time. In order to understand the social structure and the interpretive strategies of the readers in Golden Age Spain, we have to start from the description of the cultural network related to the invention of the mobile press. This technological revolution and its uncountable consequences are indeed the very starting point of Cervantes’ novel, and its influence concerns not only the practical aspects of reading, but also the mental structures involved in the interpretive act. The theoretical and methodological premises of this work are the following: the role of the reader in the signification process of a text or a message and the historical and contingent nature of the interpretive act.

The article argues that one important aspect of Shakespeare’s modernity is his manifest concern with the relevance and possibilities of his own art, as highlighted in the analysis of the metadramatic dimension of Hamlet and of the paradoxes at the core of the theatrical experience.

The article deals with one of the Romanian versions of the play Macbeth, published in the first half of the 20^th century, in the translation of Mihail Dragomirescu, literary theorist and critic. Although he was indebted to the theoretical foundation of the Junimea society, the translator stands out in the Romanian history and criticism for his original theoretical system of integrated aesthetics that rejected any type of determinism in the analysis of literary works. In spite of applying the same theoretical frame to literary works in translation, Dragomirescu’s version of Macbeth clearly shows a considerable breach between his theoretical assumptions and the translated text as a product.

This paper is meant to underline Cervantes’s gleeful view of existence, explicitly condemning or underlying the deviations of a century of spiritual cruelties, debunking the foolish mediaeval literary tradition. Making use of a character referred to as “crazy”, one of parody and derision, Cervantes managed to pass down a masterpiece of literature that showed to be not simply comic or tragic, or historical, but a bit of everything at the same time, transmitting an amalgam of emotions and pathos.

This paper is not a sui generis project of identifying the Cervantine echoes in the history of Romanian literary phenomenon as such an investigation would overlap the boundaries of an article. Our goals consist in browsing the early signs of the Romanian writers’ interest in Cervantes and in offering data about the period in which the Spanish writer came to be known in the Romanian culture. It appears that one may present the interest of the Romanian literates for the Cervantine work from at least three different perspectives: 1. presenting influences of Don Quixote in Romanian literature; 2. making an inventory of the novel’s translations, of the abundance and competition of Don Quixote’s lyrics, and 3. making another inventory, that of the articles and critical studies on Cervantes. With no analytical intentions and no aim to draw some firm conclusions, our endeavor has two precise purposes: 1. proving that Cervantes was an early presence in the history of Romanian literature and 2. creating an inventory of data that could incite further investigation.

Miercuri, 19 octombrie 2016, lingvistul german Johannes Kabatek a primit titlul de Doctor Honoris Causa al Universităţii „Ştefan cel Mare” din Suceava.
Discipol direct al lui Eugeniu Coşeriu, Johannes Kabatek este considerat astăzi unul dintre cei mai importanţi lingvişti ai lumii, în special în domeniul lingvisticii romanice

The present study aims not only to introduce in a synthetic manner Gheorghe Grigurcu’s poetry, but also to problematise the relationship between poetry and the author’s critical attitude. After his debut, in 1968, Grigurcu published several tens of volumes of poetry, criticism and literary history, to all these directions of his creative spirit adding in the last years the preoccupation for aphorism. A moralist, one that distinguished himself after 1989 through his outstanding involvement, in the first line of the attitude directed towards revisioning literary hierarchies, Grigurcu only apparently writes notation poetry, mainly visual and metaphorical, refined and manneristic. What I wish to demonstrate in this study is that the two hypostases – the inclement critic and the refined poet – do not reveal a rupture, but a complementarity, based on an ethical outlook on writing. Writing as biography (considering that Grigurcu doesn’t seem to have another life except for his ideas) and as ethics (the experience of wiriting becomes his only existence), this is the message implicitly conveyed through Gheorghe Grigurcu’s work.

The study shows a critical position against Tvetan Todorov’s books published in the last 25 years. The analysis focuses on negative thinking and humanism expressed by Todorov especially in two books with proven influence: Facing the extreme: moral life in the concentration camps (1991); Imperfect Garden: The Legacy of Humanism (1998). Todorov’s position is interpreted as representative for the current Western culture.

The paper examines I.G. Sbiera’s personality and works, as representative parts of the political and cultural context of Bukovina. The volume Familia Sbiera, după tradiţiune şi istorie şi Amintiri din viaţa autorului (1899) makes evident Bukovina’s complicated status and denotes I. G. Sbiera’s nationalism and his efforts to bring about and develop Romanians’ ethnic identity.

Las siguientes líneas constituyen una breve presentación de un estudio coseriano de lingüística del texto, Información y literatura, estudio que hace referencia a la delimitación texto informativo – texto literario. La presentación del texto mencionado se hace mediante las coordenadas básicas de la teoría general de la lingüística del texto.

Dans la plupart des interprétations, l’idéologie dominante d’une société semble s’insinuer dans la conscience des individus avec une certaine facilité. Dans notre étude, nous voudrions apprendre quelles sont les caractéristiques fondamentales du discours idéologique garantissant le succès du processus, traits que nous chercherons au niveau des fonctions du langage. Nous nous proposons d’illustrer la concrétisation des fonctions du langage idéologique dans l’espace politique roumain.

Taking as a point of departure Eugenio Coseriu’s distinction between common lexicon and terminology, on one hand, and that between folk terminology and scientific terminology, on the other hand, I tried to present in this article a few relevant moments and aspects regarding the (rigorous and objective) historical attempt to separate the botanical scientific terminology from the botanical folk terminology. For that reason, I took advantage, once again, of Coseriu’s linguistic theory, since it takes into account the botanical terminology, too.

Our article tries to compare the Spanish and Italian versions with the Romanian original, trying to observe the changes the female body goes through during the metamorphosis of a text in one language to another. Given the other review they have done to the translations into and from the Romance languages, the current concern of the authors was to individualize this particular text in general and especially Lizoanca insisting on recomposing the body character in one language to another.
Translating a novel like Lizoanca, Eliza in its Spanish version, it is a test of courage and a mystery of mastery as it is the case of any other text that uses the register of the taboo language: violence, language, socio-cultural. The book is actually one continuous violation of a girl of 11 by all the men of a whole village (a lost village in Moldova) and describes how the society and media reflects it. From the pathologically violent language to the exacerbation of a machismo by default not only at a lexical level, but in all narrative niches creates an intensity and terrible aggressive tension whose victim is the fragile body of an 11 years old girl. All this metamorphosis of a young body into a woman is almost impossible to move into a different language, a different mentality or a different culture without change, alter, or at its best loose the initial intensity the Romanian original has.
Female body caught in the tension of cruelty, the violated body, the invasion and continuous aggression, persistent and persevering, needs to install into a new language, as the bearer of a different socio-cultural code. This movement attracts a load of different cultural patterns, so that adaptation to another language requires great sacrifices of the context and character itself.
On one hand, our analysis demonstrates the complexities of translating the body process, and on another hand deconstructs the Spanish and Italian translations, reconsidering the context and translation panorama.
The article has been presented at the University of Lisbon, at the international conference on the Romanian Language in the World. The translations that guides us. The Romanian Language in Multiligualism (Limba română în lume. Traducerile care ne călăuzesc. Româna la intersecţia multilingvismului), in May 2015.