Review

(in English): The topic of this thesis is poetic work of the premier sardinian poet Sebastiano Satta, in particular thematic constants and reflection of Sardinia in his work. The first chapter is dedicated to the brief overview of historic, social and political context of Sardinia from the unification of Italy until the first world war. Following chapters ale focused on the personal life and work of writor and his integration to the basic context of italian literature at the turn of the 19th and 20th century and their influence to his poetry. After that is thoroughly analyzed poetic work of Sebastiano Satta. There are also chapters regarding the questions of the language and thematic constants in the poetry of the writor. Follows analysis of minor poetry and collections of poems in chronologic way, as Nella Terra dei Nuraghes, Versi ribelli, Canti barbaricini and Canti del Salto e della Tanca. After that follows chapter regarding reception of the writor's poetry. In the final chapter, based on these analysis are evaluated thematic constants and their progress in the course of collections of poems.

The aim of this thesis is to analyse methods used in translation of the Arabic poetry written in a quantitative metre based on the syllable length to Czech, regarding its form and preserving, substitution or elimination of the classical Arabis metre, and to try to propose a new, alternative method of translation that would corresponded with demands of the Czech prosody but also would preserve - at least partially - some typical elements of the Arabic poetry. In the first part of this thesis the basic character of the Arabic prosody is explained and the two basic formal components of the Arabic metric poetry are introduced: the quantitative metre and the continuous rhyme scheme. Then, a comparison of the Arabic verse to several European systems is provided. In the second part, the existing Czech translations of the Arabic poetry are summarized, especially regarding the metric poetry, and the attention is also paid to the way in which the translators deal with the formal components of the translated verses. The crucial parts of this thesis are the third part and the forth part. The third part includes the overview of the possible ways to translate the Arabic metric poetry with regard to the metre and the rhyme scheme. It presents four individual ways: complete preservation of the metre, its complete...

Review

Kithaka wa Mberia (b.1956) is one of the most innovative Kenyan poets. Until now he has published four collections of poems and three plays. His poems contain a strong political and social criticism, sometimes in the form of animal allegories. He condemns various acts of violence done to women, like rapes of schoolgirls or prostitution caused by poverty. Some compositions seem life-stories of real persons, others are overtly didactic and moralizing, but in all the theme of social justice is almost obsessive. Another group of poems highlights the author’s concern with his surroundings and with the “health conditions” of the Earth in general; thus, for instance, he denounces the devastation of Kenyan soil in order to get foreign currency. His love of nature makes him address affectionate verses to animals, insects and plants. Formally the poems have little in common with the poetic tradition of the Swahili coast as they are in free verse. Kithaka exhibits a rich vocabulary of botanical and zoological terms and is fond of various forms of word-playing like chiming and punning; an important role in his poetry is played by parallelism. Moreover, he introduces into Kiswahili visual poems where typography is relied upon to perform expressive effects. Kithaka wa Mberia, together with other East African contemporary poets, proves that Swahili poetry is able to express universal themes and can reach a high artistic value even without repeating traditional models.

In contrast to the \''classical Islamic tendi\'' where the action as well as the setting is commonly detached from the environmental context of the Swahili coast, the Liyongo poems show an abundance of detailed descriptions and enumerative reviews of material items crucial and characteristic of the particular East African shares of Swahili culture. Frequently reference is also made to the natural environment as plants and their fruits play a prominent role as requisits of both the Swahili natural and cultural setting. Apart from being exploited as central requisite and being referred to as material source in the poems, plants are also extensively used for similes. The Liyongo poems are full of culturally metaphors which are context-dependent and sometimes render the text rather obscure. Without denying that there is, of course, also contemporary poetry employing plants as subject matter or metaphors, in this article I focus on two thematically close poems which we vaguely have to classify as \"old\" while not being able to give exact dates. Although the article suggests to be a thematic view on Swahili poetry, it is primarily a text edition of two poems, the \"Song of the Mjemje\" and the \"Shairi la Mtambuu\", which are both presented together with a critical apparatus.

Some time ago I came across a tiny collection of poems called Chungu tamu by Theobald Mvungi. The author was born in Mwanga province (Kilimanjaro) probably in the Fifties, as he graduated from the University of Dar es Salaam in 1975 and gained his M.Ed. degree in Nigeria (Ibadan) in 1978. He published his first collection of poems, Raha karaha, in 1982 and his third one, Mashairiya Chekacheka, in 1995. All Mwangi`s poems deal with social problems, but only those of the second collection are formally innovative. Five of the twenty poems of this collection tell a story and I am going to investigate three of them. It is striking and quite unusual in Swahili poetry to present the narration itself as another story. However, it is not the first time that it occurs in modern Swahili poetry. In fact, for instance Kezilahabi´s poem Hadithiya kitoto (from the collection Kichomi, 1974) opens with the scene of the narrator - the grandfather - sitting close to a fire with his grandchildren who want to be told a story, while roasting birds and potatoes. The last two strophes contain grandfather´s comment, i.e. a moral message. Thus the narrative act itself is represented, as it often happens in prose fiction. But whereas in Kezilahabi it only opens or frames the main story, in Mvungi the narrator´s interferences are intermingled with the main story to such an extent that in fact two parallel stories are narrated. I will call them the frame story and the main story.

In old Swahili tendi and homiletic poems about 50% of vocabulary is of Arabic origin (Bertoncini 1973), and besides single words, they include noun phrases or even whole Arabic sentences. In order to prove my point, I will discuss some verses taken from the Utendi wa Shujaka by one Hasan bin Ali from Lamu. The only extant manuscript of this epic poem in 295 stanzas was brought to Germany in 1854 by Ludwig Krapf and is kept in the Library of the Orientalistic Society in Halle. The poem is written in the Lamu dialect with many archaic features, like the incomplete palatalization of KI, the demonstratives in S- and others. But what is striking is the great amount of Arabic phrases and whole sentences, to the extent that we may perhaps speak of a case of code-switching. In fact, several verses of the poem cannot be understood properly without some knowledge of the main features of Arabic grammar, such as verb conjugation (both perfective and imperfective), verb forms (or classes), active and passive participles, noun inflection (masculine and feminine, broken plurals, construct state), personal, relative and possessive pronouns, prepositions and their combination with enclitic pronouns, numerals, conjunctions and particles, as well as word order.

This article is based upon the following concept: Poetry is a chain of representation of the sub-conscience that is the creative source. We can read the poetic text in many ways, but if we imagine the text as the stage of images, we can understand the fundamental abstraction of the conscience. In this sense, oneiric images in some of Euphrase Kezilahabi’s poems will be analysed by using insights from psychoanalytic theory.

The Burda (or `mantle´), an Arabic poem in praise of the prophet Muhammad (s. a.u.), was composed in Egypt by the 7th /13th century poet al-Busiri. Over the centuries the Burda of al-Busiri has become familiar in many parts of the Islamic world, including Swahili-land -where it is known as Burdai. Although it has already been translated into Swahili verse, this seems to be the first occasion that the Burdai has been translated into Swahili prose (into kiMvita, the speech of Swahili Mambasa). The translation which follows employs a new system of orthography which now appears in print for the very first time.