Frontiers in Comparative Metrics 2,  
in memoriam Lucyllae Pszczołowskae 
(April 19–20, 2014, Tallinn University, Estonia)

Igor Pilshchikov

The second international conference on comparative prosody was organised by 
the Department of Cultural Theory of Tallinn University and the Department 
of Classical Philology of the University of Tartu and held in Tallinn in April 
2014. The first such conference took place in Estonia in 2008, and was devoted 
to the memory of the prominent Russian scholar Mikhail Gasparov (1935–
2005); the proceedings were published three years later (Lotman & Lotman 
2011). The present conference was devoted to the memory of another impor-
tant representative of international verse studies, the Polish scholar Lucylla 
Pszczołowska (1924–2010).

The main topics of the conference included verse theory and methods of 
verse analysis, frontiers in Indo-European and Fenno-Ugric prosody as well as 
non-European poetic systems, the poetics of written and oral texts, cognitive 
poetics, and the analysis of the verse structures of translated texts and their 
originals. The keynote speakers were Nigel Fabb (University of Strathclyde, 
U.K.), Tomas Riad (Stockholm University, Sweden), and Paul Kiparsky 
(Stanford University, USA). 

The conference was opened by Nigel Fabb’s talk, “Lines and other layers of 
the poetic text: their differentiated formal, aesthetic and psychological prop-
erties”. The speaker developed Roman Jakobson’s distinction between verse 
design (resp. verse instance) of the poet and delivery design (resp. delivery 
instance) of the reciter (Jakobson 1960: 366–367), and explored whether met-
rical verse in performance, when line boundaries are not cued auditorily, is 
experienced differently from prose in performance. According to Fabb, the 
surface forms are nevertheless heard relative to the distinct lines required 
for the formal processing of the metrical verse (a phenomenon sometimes 
described as “metrical tension”).

Tomas Riad delivered a talk on the prosodic metrics of Tashlhiyt Berber 
songs, in which he silently opposed Jakobson’s bold statement “that versifica-
tion cannot be deduced in its entirety from a given language” (Jakobson 1923: 
118), and analysed the prosody of Berber songs in line with the assumptions 
of “phonological” metrics, where metre is derived directly from language 

Studia Metrica et Poetica 1.2, 2014, 144–157

doi: dx.doi.org/10.12697/smp.2014.1.2.07

dx.doi.org/10.12697/smp.2014.1.2.07


145Frontiers in Comparative Metrics 2

(Golston & Riad 2000). Riad interpreted the five regularities in the pattern-
ing of metre in these songs (as established in previous scholarship) in terms 
of linguistic constraints, and reduced these regularities to linguistic unmark-
edness and linguistic rhythm. Moreover, the speaker demonstrated what he 
referred to as a close correspondence between the metre of the songs and the 
productive prosodic morphology of the derivational system in Tashlhiyt. 

The problem of poetic performance was again in the spotlight in the paper 
of Tina Høegh (“Metrical transcription of oral performances of poetry – a 
multimodal text”). Høegh used a microanalysis of videotaped recitations of 
poetry and prose to develop an interdisciplinary approach to the study of 
metrics and language rhythms in coordination with multimodal expressions 
of the performer (gestures, gazes, voice quality, tones, pauses and bodily beats). 

Several papers were devoted to sung poetry. Varun deCastro-Arrazola (“The 
impact of general cognitive biases on the metrical patterns of sung verse”) 
attempted to link the examination of sung poetry to cognitive linguistics 
and human brain studies. In his paper, metrical regularities found in sung 
verse were tentatively explained through the working of general cognitive 
mechanisms.

Kati Kallio (“Clumsy metrics, good songs?”) discussed how modern 
Finnish versification was born as a result of a competition between two oral 
traditions – the old folkloric Kalevala-metre songs and the new hymn-singing 
culture brought by the Reformation with its attempts to imitate the prosody 
of German and Scandinavian Lutheran hymns. 

Jacqueline Pattison Ekgren described “the accent patterns in Norwegian 
stev” – the songs that have survived many centuries through oral tradition 
though they defy both standard musical notation and metrical description. The 
kvedarar (stev singers) traditionally performed stev with foot-taps at irregular, 
but still predictable intervals. These foot-taps are grouped into asymmetrical 
“two-accent units” (“dipods”), which are documented by filmed performances 
and film frame counts. Each line of stev can be described as a 4-accent line 
consisting of two dipods. 

Megan E. Hartman presented a paper on “The structure and rhetorical 
purpose of Old Norse málaháttr”. Málaháttr is a hypermetric form of the more 
common eddic metre fornyrðislag: it consistently has one additional metrical 
position per verse. Hartman analysed the structure of málaháttr in the con-
text of other hypermetric metres (particularly the hypermetric patterns of 
Old English) and demonstrated that, on one hand, the “irregularities” of the 
málaháttr are relatively uniform but, on the other hand, this metre gives the 
poet more freedom and facilitates the telling of a dynamic narrative.



146 Igor Pilshchikov

In his paper, “Degrees of well-formedness: the Formula Principle in the 
analysis of oral-poetic metres”, Frog argued that well-formedness in oral poet-
ries functions practically according to a hierarchy of preferences (i. e. some 
verses may be more metrical well-formed than others). Relative degrees of 
metrical well-formedness allow flexibility for stylistic and strategic variation 
in compositional practice. The author develops the Oral-Formulaic Theory 
of Parry-Lord-Foley (see, in particular, Foley 1995) and advances a Formula 
Principle, according to which, metrically entangled and metrically bound 
formulaic sequences provide qualitatively more dependable data on metrical 
well-formedness than non-formulaic composition or expression. The paper 
discussed this principle in relation to the diachronic conditioning of formulae 
in Old Norse and Finnic poetries.

Kristin Hanson (“Individual and collective lyrical styles: a generative per-
spective on textsetting in Bach’s St. Matthew Passion”) contributed to the recent 
developments in generative metrics that take an interest in the principles gov-
erning alignment of rhythmic elements of language with those of music. The 
guiding assumption is that intuitions about metrics and textsetting draw on a 
common rhythmic competence and so overlap to a significant extent. But the 
differences between metrics and textsetting are significant too, especially in 
any quest to understand these art forms in their specificity. The paper analysed 
some of these differences between metrics and rhythmic aspects of textsetting 
using the examples from J. S. Bach’s Matthäus-Passion.

The first day of the conference also featured a panel on classical prosody 
and other varieties of quantitative metrics. Jean-Louis Aroui’s paper, “A typol-
ogy of quantitative metres”, proposed a new approach to the problem posed 
in its title. According to Aroui, all quantitative metres (Vedic, Ancient Greek, 
Latin, Arabic etc.) are governed by a set of four ranked and violable metrical 
constraints: the count of morae, the count of syllables, the count of metri-
cal positions, and the constraint specifying the way morae and syllables are 
associated to form a particular metre. The presenter identified four types of 
quantitative metres depending on which constraint is ranked first: 1) the 
number of morae for a metrical position (and, consequently, for the line) is 
constant; 2) the number of syllables in the line is constant; 3) the number of 
morae and the number of syllables in the line is constant; and, 4) the number 
of metrical positions is constant. 

Andrew Becker posed a question: “What is Latin about Latin metre? 
(or Why Asclepiads are not boring)”. The answer, he suggested, is that, in 
Latin metre, nearly everything is Latin, but for the bare pattern of heavy and 
light syllables adopted from the Greek (contrary to the viewpoint of some 
of contemporary scholarship on Latin versification). Becker took Horatian 



147Frontiers in Comparative Metrics 2

Asclepiads as a case study in Latin lyric versification, and argued that atten-
tion to the relationship between the latent schematic ictus and the performed 
word accent discloses an acoustic liveliness that belies a more cursory reac-
tion to the bare metrical pattern. Useful here are ancient Roman scansions 
and descriptions of Asclepiads. Examples from Odes IV.3 and III.13 allowed 
the audience to see (hear) the variety of rhythmic patterns that enliven the 
predictable sequence of heavy and light syllables.

Andreas Keränen discussed “The development of the choliamb metre in 
Greek and Latin”. The choliamb can be described as an iambic trimeter with a 
spondee or a trochee substituted for the last iambic foot: xlwl | xlwl | xllu. In 
Greek, the last foot had a strong tendency to be spondaic (ll), rather than tro-
chaic (lw). In Latin, a spondee or a trochee were equally possible. At the same 
time the Roman metricians regulated the fifth foot to be a pure iamb (wllu, 
rather than xllu), and the Latin poets never violated this rule, whereas such a 
regulation was neither mentioned by the Greek grammarians nor respected by 
the Greek poets. Keränen attempted to explain the difference between the two 
traditions by the specificity of accent placement in ancient Greek and Latin, 
but admitted that the reason for which the anceps in the fifth foot of the Latin 
choliamb was disambiguated remains unclear.

At the afternoon session two authors presented their papers in absentia. 
Anastasia Belousova talked by Skype from Bogotà. Her paper, “Dissimilarity 
of the similar”, was devoted to “a comparative study of strophic forms and 
the problems of poetic syntax”. She used the statistical methods developed 
for a description of verse syntax by twentieth century Russian scholars (Boris 
Jarcho, Grigorii Vinokur, Boris Tomashevsky and others) to examine the syn-
tax of similar stanzaic and regular forms (ottava rima, terza rima, and the 
sonnet) in different languages (Italian, English, German, French and Russian). 
The aim of the paper was to investigate how the poet’s native language and his 
or her individual poetic design interact and influence each other in the forma-
tion of the national variations of international strophic pattern.

Marina Tarlinskaja’s paper, “Double Falsehood: did an 18th century author 
rewrite a 17th century Shakespearean play?”, was delivered by the Panel Chair, 
Maria-Kristiina Lotman. Tarlinskaja analysed the 18th century play, Double 
Falsehood (1727), whose author, Lewis Theobald, claimed that that he had 
based his text on a play “Written Originally by W. Shakespeare”. It is known 
that, in 1613, Shakespeare’s theatre company King’s Men performed a play 
with the same plot as Double Falsehood called The History of Cardenio, “by 
Mr Fletcher & Mr Shakespeare” (the play was never printed, and the manu-
script was eventually lost). The versification particulars in Double Falsehood 
(positions where schematic stresses are predominantly skipped, the ratio of 



148 Igor Pilshchikov

enclitics and proclitics, the structures of masculine and feminine line endings, 
positions of strong syntactic breaks, etc.) reveal some unmistakable traces of 
Fletcher’s rhythmical style (from Act 3, scene 3 to the end of the play). At the 
same time, not so many traces of Shakespeare or Shakespeare and Fletcher’s 
collaboration have been found.

A section devoted to Romance prosody featured papers on Occitan, 
Portuguese, and Romansh poetry.

Gianluca Valenti revised the established interpretation of the prosodic 
structures of Medieval Occitan poetry in his paper: “Towards a new clas-
sification of the troubadours’ metrical schemes”. István Frank’s catalogue of 
the metrical repertoire of troubadour lyrics (1966) accounts for 885 different 
patterns, which is a clear case of excessive detalisation. Valenti proposed some 
ways to generalise these descriptions.

Patricio Ferrari (“Fernando Pessoa’s Versecraft”) presented a case study of 
one of the most significant poets of the twentieth century. Fernando Pessoa 
(1888–1935) wrote poetry in three languages: Portuguese, French, and English, 
and published under different names (he called his various literary personali-
ties heteronyms instead of pseudonyms). Ferrari studied the role that different 
types of metres and verse systems played in the shaping of the literary styles 
of Pessoa and his heteronyms. In particular, Pessoa’s heteronym Álvaro de 
Campos experimented with syllabo-tonic verse (unusual for Portuguese which 
normally exploits a syllabic verse system). Another point of Ferrari’s paper was 
the relevance of metrics in textual criticism. (A scholar of Russian verse may 
recall here Mikhail Gasparov’s similar study of the leading poet of the Russian 
avant-garde, entitled “Twenty versification-based textual amendments to the 
texts of Mayakovsky” [Gasparov 1991]).

Renzo Caduff’s paper, “Influences on the versification of the Romansh poet 
Andri Peer (1921–1985): the example of the heptasyllabic and endecasyllabic 
verse”, investigated into the two most frequent metres in the work of the 
author who is sometimes called the first “modern” poet of Romansh literature 
(Vallader dialect). In addition to pure “settenari” and “endecasyllabi”, these 
rhythmical patterns are discernible in Peer’s free verse, either as “sublinear” 
sections or as “translinear” combinations. In Italian metrics, such divergences 
between rhythmic and graphic structures have been called a phenomenon of 
“shadow verses” [versi ombra] (Menichetti 1993: 151).

The discussion of free verse in the framework of metrical intertextual-
ity continued in Satu Grünthal’s paper, “Metrical intertextuality: forms and 
functions”, which was focused on the “reader’s response” aspects of metrical 
and rhythmical relations between earlier and later texts. It is known that the 
reader’s former experience and knowledge of metrical repertoire influences 



149Frontiers in Comparative Metrics 2

his/her later readings of poetry. Grünthal introduced the notion of “metri-
cal competence” (comparable to Culler’s concept of “reader’s competence” 
resp. Chomsky’s “linguistic competence”) and discussed such questions as 
“What about young readers with limited reading background and imperfect 
familiarity with literary conventions?” or “What is the function of metrical 
competence in cultures where contemporary poetry is almost exclusively writ-
ten in free verse?”

Free verse was also discussed in Aile Tooming’s paper, “Estonian free verse 
in the beginning of the 20th century”. The presenter attempted to describe 
the vers libre of the “Golden Age” of Estonian literature (1900–1940) from 
two complementary points of view: i) free verse as one versification system 
among others, and ii) free verse as a form which demonstrates its “freedom” 
against the background of more conventional verse form (Miroslav Červenka 
[2002: 367] called this kind of relationship a “parasitic” rhythmical structure 
of vers libre).

The second day of the conference featured more papers on Fenno-Ugric 
prosody. 

Paul Kiparsky opened the morning session with the keynote speaker’s 
presentation, “Kalevala and Mordvin metre”. At first glance the quantitative/
accentual Kalevala and pure syllabic Mordvin metrical systems have little in 
common. The classic Kalevala verse is a trochaic tetrameter, whose rhythmic 
variety comes from the syncopated effects achieved by the frequent “broken” 
lines and the option of a trisyllabic initial foot. Instead, Mordvin versification 
relies on a repertoire of no less than twenty distinct metres and on complex 
prosodic rules that license systematic mismatches between the strict abstract 
syllable count and the actually articulated text, as well as alignment of the text 
to melodies with shifting musical measures. The length of Mordvin metres 
ranges from seven to seventeen syllables, and stress placement plays no role. 
A historical connection between the two metrical systems remains disputable 
but, according to Kiparsky, a re-examination of the Mordvin system might 
rehabilitate its plausibility (although by no means proves it). Each Mordvin 
metre consists of a fixed arrangement of two, three, or four cola. There are 
five short metres (a two-colon line), two couplet metres (two full lines), and 
thirteen long metres (one line plus a colon). Depending on the metre, a colon 
may have four or five syllables, a terminal colon may also have three. Kiparsky 
proposed a stochastic Optimality Theory system that generates the Mordvin 
metrical inventory and explains the relative frequencies of the metres. His 
argument was that Mordvin metres can be seen as a natural restructuring of a 
Kalevala-type metre after the loss of quantitative oppositions and stress. The 
process of restructuring may have been guided by what he referred to as the 



150 Igor Pilshchikov

intrinsic principles of metrical organisation that are widely attested across the 
world (e.g. in English folk quatrains, as described in Kiparsky 2006).

Mihhail Lotman’s talk, “Estonian verse: rhythmic structure and literary 
movement”, was devoted to the fundamental problem: is verse rhythm (as 
a particular realisation of metre) a purely individual phenomenon, or could 
we discover some regularities pertaining to a particular chronological period 
or an aesthetic movement? Lotman’s point was that the answer is different as 
far as different verse traditions are concerned. Russian verse theorists, who 
developed Andrei Belyi’s (1910) insight on the differences between the rhythm 
of Russian 18th and 19th century iambic tetrameter, came close to a descrip-
tion of the entire history of Russian verse as a systematic evolution of many 
relevant parameters from one period to another. Similar investigations into 
English and Czech verse did not bring similar results: the picture is far more 
diversified. A multi-aspect study of Estonian iambic and trochaic tetrameter 
(Lotman & Lotman 2013, 2014), in which both the accentual and the quantita-
tive structures of verse have been examined, and a gradual scale has been used 
(five grades of accent and three grades of duration), has demonstrated that the 
Estonian poetic tradition may be described as placed somewhere in the mid-
dle between the opposite types of evolution. On the one hand, the generalised 
accentual profile of the two metres shows no differences between authors, 
movements or periods. But on the other hand, the evolution of heavier accents 
reveals a significant contrast between the earlier (“traditionalist”) and later 
(“modernist”) poets. It is worth noting that the abovementioned research is 
based on a corpus of Estonian poetry, Eesti värss [Estonian verse] developed 
by Mihhail Lotman, Maria-Kristiina Lotman, and Elin Sütiste (http://www.
ut.ee/verse/). 

Another corpus of national verse system was exposed in Robert Ibrahim 
and Petr Plecháč’s paper, “Database of Czech verse” (presented by Petr Plecháč). 
The Corpus of Czech verse (http://www.versologie.cz/en/kcv.html) is a lemma-
tised, and phonetically, morphologically, metrically and strophically annotated 
corpus. Each lexical unit is provided with information about its basic word 
form (lemma), phonetic transcription and grammatical categories; each line of 
verse is provided with information about its metre, foot length, clausula type, 
and metrical pattern (only the syllabo-tonic poems are currently annotated). 
The corpus is complemented by online research tools: the database of Czech 
metres, word frequency lists, and others. 

A corpus-based approach was also proposed in Boris Maslov and Tatiana 
Nikitina’s paper, “Pragmatics of 19th century Russian rhythmic verse types” 
(presented by Boris Maslov). The paper addressed the issue of the statistical 
distribution of finite verbs and pronominal case/gender forms (“pragmatic 



151Frontiers in Comparative Metrics 2

patterns”) in Russian iambic and trochaic metres (in partial incongruence with 
Russian terminological habit, the authors call them “rhythmic verse types”)1. 
The poetic corpus extracted from the Russian National Corpus (http://ruscor-
pora.ru/search-poetic.html) has a tool for creating various subcorpora using 
different chronological and prosodic parameters (http://ruscorpora.ru/mycor-
pora-poetic.html). Maslov and Nikitina demonstrated that, in a subcorpus of 
late 18th and 19th century Russian poetry, some lexical items manifest different 
distribution in trochees and iambs. In particular, first-person grammar is more 
at home in the iambic verse than in the trochees. The presenters attempted 
to explain this fact by typical generic and pragmatic differences between the 
two metres.

Several papers were focused on comparative aspects of syllabo-tonic 
(syllabic-accentual) verse. Evgeny Kazartsev’s topic was “The genesis of syllabo-
tonic verse in Northern Europe”. The process of syllabo-tonicisation took place 
over several hundred years, from the 16th century to the late 18th century, and 
embraced English, Flemish, Dutch, German, Danish, and Swedish poetries. A 
more strict metrical system, to which the presenter gave the name “continental 
syllabo-tonic prosody”, evolved in the Netherlands and Germany, and spread 
subsequently to Scandinavia and Russia. The development of the syllabo-tonic 
versification system in Russia in the 18th century influenced many neighbour-
ing Slavic cultures.

Tatyana Skulacheva (“System of versification unknown: how to analyse?”) 
discussed a not unusual situation when we need to identify the metre but do 
not know what versification system we are faced with (syllabic, syllabic-accen-
tual, tonic, quantitative etc.). This situation emerges when we deal with less 
studied languages and their verse structures (that is, the majority of world lan-
guages) or with the non-classical verse in the well-studied (mostly European) 
poetic traditions. Skulacheva suggested a few procedures applicable to most 
languages with known stress placement and vowel length, and then focused 
on Russian non-classical syllabic-accentual and tonic metres. Such metres can 
be recognised with a generalised algorithm: count the number of syllables; 
count the number of stressed syllables; calculate the interval scheme; find the 
strictest metre (from the given inventory), in which the line fits. However, this 
simple algorithm is not always easy to apply (in particular, because some syl-
lables can be stressed or non-stressed depending on the interval scheme of the 
verse; because anacruses and clausulae should be given special treatment; etc.).

1 The dichotomy of metre and rhythm is not so widespread in European verse studies as is 
in Russian tradition (for the latter see Pilshchikov 2012).

http://ruscorpora.ru/search-poetic.html
http://ruscorpora.ru/search-poetic.html
http://ruscorpora.ru/mycorpora-poetic.html
http://ruscorpora.ru/mycorpora-poetic.html


152 Igor Pilshchikov

Lev Blumenfeld presented “An investigation of prosodic typicality” – a new 
quantitative measure for prosodic structure, which estimates the extent to which 
the rhythm of a line of verse differs from prose. Russian verse theory studied the 
rhythmic structure of verse in comparison to the “baseline” rhythm of natural 
language, as supplied by prose corpora. Such is a metre-dependent calculation: 
scholars compare real iambs with “accidental” iambs in prose, real trochees 
with “accidental” trochees in prose, etc. Blumenfeld proposed a new twist on 
this approach. The prosodic pattern of each line of verse occurs in prose with a 
certain measurable frequency. More frequent patterns are prosodically “typical”, 
while rare patterns are “atypical”. This notion of “typicality” is independent of the 
metre in which a line is written. However, a count of the frequency of a prosodic 
structure in a prose corpus depends on the length of the line. The prosodic pat-
terns of long lines are less probable to encounter in prose than shorter patterns, 
and this probability decreases exponentially as the line grows. Thus, typicality 
must be normalised by line length. Also discussed was another question: Is 
typicality determined by stanza position? The advanced the specific methods 
of measuring typicality using a Perl program that is able to perform various 
quantitative tasks related to English and Russian syllabic-accentual metrics.

Two papers were devoted to rhyming poetry. Tatiana Nikitina and Boris 
Maslov’s “Rich and poor rhymes in the Onegin stanza” (also presented by 
Maslov) explored the correlations between the quality of rhyme and the 
rhyme’s placement in the stanza in Aleksandr Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. It is 
known that the Onegin stanza incorporates all three major structural types 
of rhyming (AbAb + CCdd + EffE + gg)2. A rhyme is defined as rich if the 
onset consonants of the rhyming syllables are identical; failing that, a rhyme 
is considered poor. Nikitina and Maslov’s data reveal that masculine rhymes 
are consistently richer than the feminine rhymes3, whereas the distribution 
of feminine rhymes depends on the rhyme’s position in the stanza: the rhyme 
is more likely to be poor in later positions of the verse. Moreover, there is no 
significant correlation between the richness of adjacent masculine and femi-
nine rhymes; there is, however, a relation of co-variation between the first two 
pairs of feminine rhymes (the c rhyme is more likely to be rich if the a rhyme is 
rich). Thus, acoustically, masculine rhymes form the stable rhyming “skeleton” 
of the Onegin stanza, while feminine rhymes tend to co-vary.

2 Capital letters denote feminine rhymes, and lower-case letters denote masculine rhymes.
3 It should be remembered that, unlike English and German poetries, and similarly to French 
classical poetry, Russian classical poetic canon prohibits non-coincident consonants in “open” 
(i.e. cv type) masculine rhymes.



153Frontiers in Comparative Metrics 2

Daniela Rossi (“Beyond rhyme: relevant pairings and sound networks”) 
argued that the established definitions of rhyme, however different they were, 
prove unable to give an account of the sound organisation of some works of 
poetry. The presenter suggested broadening the notion of rhyme by the novel 
concept of “relevant pairing”. She defined “relevant pairings” in relation to 
their length, their location in the line of verse (line ending vs. inside the line), 
their location in the poetic text (close vs. distant), and their density. These 
ideas were tested in a case study (Arthur Rimbaud’s “Sonnet”, “Jeunesse II”, 
from Illuminations).

The rest of the day was devoted to comparative prosody sensu stricto.
Sergei Liapin delivered a talk “On an understudied mechanism of forma-

tion of the Russian dolnik (against the background of German and English 
poetic traditions)”. “Dolnik” is the Russian term for strict stress-metre. Unlike 
the classical syllabo-accentual metres, the length of the inter-ictus intervals in 
a dolnik line is not constant. However, unlike accentual verse (stress-metre) 
it is not arbitrary, but oscillates between one and two syllables. At the same 
time, “‘dolnik’ is a metre in its own right, not just a looser variant of iamb, or a 
stricter variant of accentual verse” (Tarlinskaja 1992: 3; cf. 1993). Descriptions 
of a synchronic (systematic) derivation of the Russian dolnik usually include 
the following algorithm: an extra syllable is added to an iambic or trochaic 
line. Thus the syllabic basis of the metre is undermined, and the tonic factor 
acquires greater significance. The other mechanism of generation of the dolnik 
from the iambus or trochee is often unnoticed or thrown into the background: 
namely, the stress shift at the beginning of the line (supported by a tendency 
towards isosyllabism) reveals the syllabic component in the generation of the 
dolnik. Liapin discussed the working of the latter mechanism in Russian dol-
nik in comparison with German and English verse.

A comparison of Russian and German dolniks continued in Sergei Liapin 
and Igor Pilshchikov’s paper, “Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam... and the typology 
of the Russian dolnik” (presented by Pilshchikov). This paper developed some 
of the ideas that were expressed at the meeting of the Translators’ Section of the 
Soviet Writer’s Union (28 December 1934) where the ex-formalist leftist critic 
Osip Brik’s talk on new Russian translations of Heinrich Heine’s Germany was 
presented and discussed. The meeting was presided over by prominent literary 
theorist Boris Jarcho (Yarkho) and featured leading Russian translators – in 
particular, Dmitrii Usov and Lev Penkovsky. Brik argued for equirhythmical 
translations of Heine’s dolniks and maintained that equimetrical translations 
are impossible due to the differences between the Russian and the German 
systems of verse. Usov and Penkovsky, on the contrary, argued for equimetrical 
translations and maintained that equirhythmical translations are impossible 



154 Igor Pilshchikov

due to the differences between the accentual systems of the Russian and the 
German languages. Jarcho developed a theory, according to which every ver-
sification system is characterised by primary and secondary features. The 
primary features represent a determinist norm and should be reproduced in 
translation to the full extent, while the secondary features represent a statisti-
cal norm: they may be reproduced in a proportion that the language and the 
poetic tradition can afford and that is at the same time similar to the propor-
tion found in the original text. Liapin and Pilshchikov discussed three Russian 
poetic translations of Heine’s celebrated “Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam…”4 
from the point of view of their equimetricity/equirhythmicity, and compared 
their metrical and rhythmical structure with various rhythmic types of the 
Russian dolnik.

The problem of equimetricity was also discussed in Maria-Kristiina 
Lotman’s paper, “Translating systems of versification: the case of syllabic verse 
in Estonian”. Although the equimetrical and equiprosodic methods of translat-
ing poetry prevail in Estonian tradition5, a poetic translation into Estonian 
normally involves a choice between, or a combination of the syllabic, accen-
tual, and/or quantitative principles. For example, French alexandrines are 
usually translated as (accentual-)syllabic verse (following the French model) 
or syllabic-accentual verse (in accordance with the German model), and the 
Italian endecasillabo is usually rendered as a syllabic-accentual line, although 
there are occasional examples of syllabic translation. Other foreign traditions 
may create other challenges. Thus, Japanese poetic structures (which are based 
on a moraic rather than a syllabic count) are conventionally translated in 
Estonian as syllabic forms. At the same time, to convey the form of haiku, 
some translators use an Estonian functional equivalent, in which the first line 
contains four syllables (a trochaic dimeter), the second line contains six syl-
lables, and the third line has four syllables too, as an allusion to the Estonian 
folk metre, regivärss.

During the afternoon sessions, more papers on the prosody of poetic trans-
lations were delivered.

Juliette Lormier’s “How to land on (other) one’s feet?” questioned 
“Hephæstion’s influence on Baïf ’s Étrénes (1574), a French ‘translation’ of 
Greek meters”. Many French humanists in the 1570s aimed at translating the 

4 Produced by Dmitrii Usov in the early 1940s, Maksim Shapir in 1994, and the authors of 
the paper themselves in 2013.
5 The concept of equiprosodic translation is different from both equimetrical and equirhyth-
mical translations: it describes a poetic translation, “which conveys the versification system of 
the source text” (Lotman 2012: 447).



155Frontiers in Comparative Metrics 2

rules of classical metrics into their own language, following the example of 
the Italian poets who had started on this goal at the end of the 15th century. In 
particular, Jean-Antoine de Baïf published his Étrénes de poézie fransoèze an 
vèrs mezurés, in which he used a new alphabet (a mix of Latin characters with 
diacritics and Greek characters, allowing for an exact reproduction of French 
pronunciation) and French equivalents of various Greek metres (dactylic hex-
ameters, iambic trimeters, Phalaecians, Sapphic stanzas, minor Asclepiads, and 
many more). Mathieu Augé-Chiquet (1909) claimed that Baïf had used the 
Enchiridion of Hephæstion (2nd century AD) to construct his own “measured 
verse”. However, no proof of this claim has been provided since 1909. Lormier 
checked Baïf ’s French hexameters, trimeters, Phalecians and antispasts with 
Hephæstion’s metrical rules, as they are presented in Adrien Turnèbe’s edi-
tion of the Enchiridion (1553), and revealed that the French poet, instead of 
straightforwardly transposing Ancient Greek metres into his mother tongue, 
created a fascinating metrical hybrid, conforming to both Greek and French 
prosodic rules.

Annika Kuuse described “the syllabic structure of the hexameters of aca-
demic occasional poetry in Tartu in the 17th century”. The presenter examined 
the neo-Latin hexameters composed by the students of Academia Gustaviana 
(Dorpatensis) from the viewpoint of three parameters: quantity, number of 
syllables, and accent variations. The main aim of the paper was to find out 
how much different the neo-Latin metre was from its ancient sources. Another 
point of interest was the peculiarities of the texts composed by the authors 
whose native tongue was not Latin and who had no possibility of consulting 
the native speakers of Latin.

Yuri Orlitsky’s talk, “Maksim Amelin: a modern versifier for modern verso-
logists”, was devoted to the work of an important contemporary Russian poet 
(b. 1970) who has also come into the public eye as a translator of Catullus and 
Homer. Orlitsky started with a brief description of Amelin’s lexically and met-
rically faithful translations of Catullus’ Carmina from the Latin and Nikoloz 
Baratashvili’s “Merani” from the Georgian, and then focused on the poet’s 
experiments with the genre of the ode in his recent book Гнутая речь [Curved 
Speech] (2011). Amelin draws on rich Russian and European pre-19th-century 
tradition and exploits various stanzaic forms, from the 10-line iambic stanzas 
of the solemn ode to the short trochaic stanzas of the anacreontic odes, and 
even to the baroque calligram used in his ode to the monument of Catherine 
the Great (written, moreover, in free verse). Orlitsky found parallels to Amelin’s 
experiments in the work of the Russian poets of the older generation: Oleg 
Okhapkin (1944–2008), Sergei Stratanovsky (b. 1944), Viktor Poleshchuk (b. 
1957), Sergei Zavyalov (b. 1958) and some others.



156 Igor Pilshchikov

Vera Polilova discussed the problem of “the metrical structure of Spanish 
Golden Age drama in translation”. The polymetrical and polystanzaic struc-
ture of dramatic verse is sometimes referred to as the main driving force in 
the comedies of Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, and Calderón de la Barca. It 
is no surprise then the sophisticated metrical organisation of Spanish classi-
cal drama: different types of stanzas have different functions in the dramatic 
text. Therefore, we are faced with the challenge of reproducing these metri-
cal peculiarities in translation. It is evident, however, that the semantic halos 
of different metres in Spanish (source) literature may not coincide with the 
semantic halos of these metres in other (target) literatures. Polilova observed 
the solutions suggested by the Russian translators – first and foremost, the 
translations of Calderón produced by the symbolist poet Konstantin Balmont 
between 1900 and 1919. The paper demonstrated that the Russian poet’s atten-
tion to the metrical and stanzaic diversity of the originals increased from year 
to year. This tendency is in resonance with the evolution of the principles of 
the poetic translation in Russia in the modernist and early Soviet periods.

There is an intention to publish some of the presented papers in the next 
issues of Studia Metrica et Poetica.

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http://formesth.com/download.php?idf=127