Join SEELC for the 2022 Oulanoff Memorial Lecture: "The National, the International, and the Supranational in Russian Poetry". This year's talk will be given by Dr. Michael Wachtel (Princeton University).
We will provide a dinner at 6:00PM before the talk begins at 6:30PM.
Abstract:
The greatest challenge for all poets is to transcend the limitations of their native language. Using examples from Batiushkov, Pushkin, Blok, Mandel’shtam, Gumilev and the Futurists, the talk will focus on a very precise means by which this has been accomplished in Russian: through hiatus. Hiatus is a linguistic term that designates two or more consecutive vowels. It rarely occurs in Russian, which means that if poets find a way to use it repeatedly, they create a distinctive sound texture that resembles a foreign or even, as the Futurists insisted, a universal language.
