The paper is dedicated to recognising Sarmatian motifs in poetic collections of Jerzy Harasymowicz. The analysis of selected works proves that the poet had an excellent preparation for interpreting ...old literature. Poems written by Harasymowicz are the evidence of both his familiarity with aesthetic conventions of the Baroque period and his knowledge of historical themes of the 17th century. Historism was treated by the writer as a reservoir of motifs and characters, which were a point of reference for the diagnosis of the current political situation in the 70s of the last century.
The present article is focused on the notion of dāna and its use in Śivrājbhūṣaṇ, a late 17th-century rītigranth composed by Bhūṣaṇ in the court of Śivājī Bhoṃsle, shortly before the coronation. The ...ruler had it composed in Braj, a vernacular that had already risen to the status of a transregional language. The poem, which used to be reduced by literary historians to a simple panegyric, belongs to South Asian early modern court literature, the authors of which were explicitly manifesting their fixture in Sanskrit literary tradition and simultaneously fulfilled complex political agendas. The royal patronage infused the poetry with political essence, but the literary conventions dictated the ways in which the political substance should be weaved into the poems. Basing on the textual analysis of Bhūṣaṇ’s work, I draw attention to the high frequency and various ways of use of the notion of dāna by the poet. This aims to prove that poetical representation of royal generosity embodied in various practices of dāna—liberally put to display—was one of the major tools of validating, vitalizing and bolstering royal authority.
The article is devoted to the 17th-century poet Bhushan, author of Śivarājabhūṣaṇa, a rītigranth most probably commissioned by the emerging Maratha ruler Shivaji Bhonsle. The existing histories of ...Hindi literature provide multiple accounts on the life of the poet, often calling them the hearsay tradition. Although many of them are drawn from a Maratha chronicle (bakhar), a proper study on the source of such accounts is still lacking. One more source that gives a chance to retrieve the curricula of Bhushan is Śivarājabhūṣaṇa, the only homogenic text that is attributed to the poet. The manuscripts and the editions of this text, especially the stanzas referring to the poet himself, do not show significant changes or interpolations. It allows us to treat it as a relatively reliable source, and therefore the treatise can serve as a basis for the reconstruction of the poet’s life and the circumstances of its composition. All portions of the text which refer to his biography are presented in order to provide complete data that can be drawn out of the internal evidence.
The paper examines two mid-18th century poems, Sujān vilās and Dīrghnagarvarṇan, composed in Brajbhasha (Braj Bhasha) by Somnāth, at the then recently established court of the Jat rulers. It focuses ...on the description of the city, i.e. nagaravarṇana convention rooted in Sanskrit poetics and common in Sanskrit kāvya literature, further adopted by the authors belonging to the courtly ornate poetry of the Hindi literary tradition. In Somnāth’s works which offer three instances of the nagaravarṇana, this convention sees its transformation into a fully-fledged literary genre. The poetics of the Brajbhasha literary production have been by then enriched to a considerable extent by Persian literary practices, with both courtly literary cultures, the Persian and the Brajbhasha, enjoying patronage of the Mughal center of power leading thus to diffusion of its various cultural practices, including the literary, to many neighboring states and dominions. The present inquiry situates Somnāth’s works in this historico-literary settings with a view to define features of the nagaravarṇanas and thus trace the development of this literary genre and map its changing functions. Those functions, as argued here, point to disparate forms of patronage that underlie both compositions – probably a single, composite literary project.
Recenzja monografii: Maria Barłowska, Okruchy. Studia o wierszach odnalezionych w rękopisach XVII wieku, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, Katowice 2022, ss. 385, ISBN: 978-83-226-4243-6.
In the oeuvre of Szymon Szymonowic, an outstanding Polish poet of the late Renaissance, Latin works occupy a prominent place, which led to him being called the Polish Pindar. One of his works is the ...tragedy Penthesileia that continues the themes of the Trojan myth. Printed for the first time in Zamość (1618), the work was not fully translated until 1778. Parts of the work were translated later. The latest translation by Elwira Buszewicz combines a vocabulary understandable to modern readers with a desire to reproduce the poetic artistry of the Latin original and a solid philological commentary. The bilingual edition with parallel printing of the Latin and Polish texts, which makes it possible to follow the translation continuously, was preceded by an extensive scholarly introduction. Its author outlined the state of research on Penthesileia and pointed out the antecedents of the theme of the Amazons in Greek, Roman, medieval, and modern literary traditions.
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