Prethodno priopćenje
https://doi.org/10.15176/vol54no203
Descriptions of Feminine Beauty in the Poetic Tradition of European Ballads and Petrarchist Poems
Simona Delić
; Institut za etnologiju i folkloristiku, Zagreb
Sažetak
This article presents an account of lyrical descriptions of the motif of feminine beauty in Spanish and Croatian oral tradition, paying special attention to Petrarchist poems with the carpe diem motif. Feminine beauty, taken literally and symbolically as natural beauty that permeates our ecological niche, is treated here as having ecological power to explain the unexplainable (unsayable) in Nature and in Humankind. Thanks to its cultural and artistic manifestations, it stands in opposition to a purely scientific approach to Nature, taken as a Machine. The paper presents a comparison of symbols of beauty in oral and written Croatian and Spanish literature, paying special attention to the thematic level as well as the discursive and metadiscursive level. The thematic and discursive aspect of poetry is based on the theory of the “formulaic nature” of the literary phenomenon, proposed by Paul Zumthor. Some poems in both the oral and the written tradition adopt contemporary esthetic ideals, laying emphasis on the ideal of artificial (made-up) beauty. The presence of the motif of artificial beauty may be explained by the fact that oral and written literature underwent fruitful encounters and are inextricably intertwined. Examples from Croatian and Hispanic oral tradition are provided; specifically from the coastal region around Dubrovnik (Luka on the island of Šipan) and from the Castilian, Sephardic tradition of the ballad “La bella en misa”. The argumentation is accompanied by a general and more specific interpretation of Petrarchist poetry compared for the first time in the context of the two oral poetry traditions. Many examples from the Hispanic tradition as reflected in the ballad “La bella en misa” find its counterpart in a single example of poetic discourse of the famous epic song and ballad singer, Ms. Kate Murat from the Dubrovnik region. Similar dual structures in both the traditional and artistic natural description of feminine beauty are recognized, according to Paul Zumthor’s terminology. We highlight the formulaic nature of the description of feminine beauty in Petrarchist and in traditional poetry, which gave it a mythical status of representativeness, disregarding for the moment the individuality of each individual poet as well as the individual impact of the epic and ballad singer. It is obvious why the motif of feminine beauty has attracted the attention of “everyday life philosophers”, i.e. of traditional singers, who, in these cases, come from urban, bourgeois surroundings. The fragility of the world we live in, which is echoed in floral and mineral or climatic metaphors in traditional and in Petrarchist poetry, may have its origin in the interdependence of the Humankind and landscape and traditional poems, and warrants laying stress on the (multicultural) esthetic qualities of the analyzed poetic texts.
Ključne riječi
Hrčak ID:
191263
URI
Datum izdavanja:
21.12.2017.
Posjeta: 5.974 *