The Bashkir anthology “Century after cnetury” from a verse study perspective

Abstract

The article deals with the verse of the bilingual anthology “Century after century”  (2008), which presents the Bashkir poetic canon. The bilingual nature of this poetry collection provides  particular conditions for introducing a foreign-language reader to the original poetic text. The research  tasks opened up by this collection are to clarify the degree to which the contents of the corpus,  reflecting real poetic practices, correlate with the poetic canon. The main method of analysis is to  compare the quantitative indicators of various aspects of the Bashkir verse system, presented in the book, with the analogous indicators for the Bashkir poetic corpus, described in the monograph “Bashkir  Verse in the 20th century. A Corpus Study.” Material from the multilingual anthology “Contemporary  Literature of the Peoples of Russia” is occasionally used as support material. This comparison made  it clear that the forms of uzun-kyuy (the alternation of 10- and 9-syllable verses) and generally 10-syllable  verses are found in the Anthology much more often than in the real history of Bashkir poetry. On the  contrary, less often than expected one may observe kyska-kyuy (alternation of 8- and 7-syllable lines)  and isosyllabic poems, consisting of 7- and 9-syllable lines. The general tendency, which can be noted as  a result of this comparison, is an attitude towards increasing the line length, which, thanks to this  appearance of the canon, can also have an impact on the future practice of Bashkir poetry.