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Includes translations of a number of Bâbâ Afdal's works that stress the importance of engaging in the philosophical quest for the sake of perfecting one's soul, actualizing the intellect, achieving a sound moral character, and attaining salvation. Included are six essays, 60 quatrains and other poems, and six letters addressed to disciples. The letters represent rare instances in Islamic philosophical literature in which a philosopher demonstrates his concern for training his disciples in extremely personal terms.

This chapter tracks Eliot's poetic development from his arrival in London in August 1914 until the publication of The Waste Land in 1922. The initial difficulties he experienced in composing poems are attributed to the oppressive hegemony of Liberal rationalist language in the capital, which Eliot records in letters and reviews. The poet breaks the blockage by writing verse exercises in French, indulging the sheer acoustic of the foreign language, and manipulating the sense-making gestures of French in creative play. This breakthrough initiative is developed in the pseudo-logical prosody of the major quatrain poems of 1917-1919, “Sweeney among the Nightingales”, “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar”, and “A Cooking Egg”, while the monologue of “Gerontion” exercises the new poetics in a vivid evocation of its founding historical context. The draft manuscripts and revisions of The Waste Land are discussed in relation to the same poetic principles.

Amichai sees the work of translation as a model for the poet's own in-between-ness, as well as for the translator/poet's inescapable secondariness. That the poet, like the translator, plays an immanently mediational position is a source of comfort rather than anxiety. This view of the poet's role sheds new light on contemporary theories of translation as cultural negotiation and their focus on asymmetrical power relations between source and target language. Amichai's poems about translation are read as celebrating the imperfect “recycling of words,” describing translation as the epitome of all intertextuality, and ultimately of the creative process itself. Through Amichai's ecology of language, the chapter interrogates the ideological blind spots behind the numerous mistranslations that Amichai has been subjected to, not in order to advocate some correct rendition, but rather to suggest the ways in which they express what Gayatri Spivak has termed “the politics of translation.”

This chapter discusses literary structure and focuses on two story rungs. The diagram of the sons of Jacob standing around the tabernacle records the historical effect of his curses, reflected in their positions. One should notice that though the curses of their father were effective and though the descendants of the cursed sons were destroyed, the curses were implemented by the military power of enemies, not by Jacob's other sons. This interpretation is strengthened by the exploits of the sons of Jacob in the story rungs. As the law rungs formed a structural unit, so the four story rungs can be taken as a quatrain, with four themes. The two parts of the first rung are connected by the theme of gifts to the Lord and from the Lord. The promise about the cloud for their guidance for all their settings out has been fulfilled, as have all the other promises.

This chapter discusses British composer Kenneth Hesketh’s Chronicles of the Time (Lamentations from ‘Macbeth’) (2012). This work, showing Hesketh’s understanding of the voice, is an exciting and rewarding vehicle for a baritone with dramatic gifts, one able to achieve a rich palette of moods, colours, and gestures without resorting to extremes of range. Hesketh has assembled a mosaic of texts from Macbeth for his purpose, not ordering them consecutively according to their positions in the play, but constructing a cohesive pattern, with a violent outburst and shorter pithy declamations framed by more prolonged musings on impending death. The piano writing is full of contrast, pungent and volatile; the two performers are very much equal partners, but balance and audibility of text should be no problem, since the composer adopts the ‘classic’ mode of keeping the most volatile pianistic activity to moments when the singer is either sustaining a note or absent altogether. It has to be admitted that, with such free atonality, the singer’s musicianship will be tested and pitching is not easy, but many notes recur so often that ‘muscle memory’ should come into play, and there are many cues in the piano part.

This chapter notes that early critics expressed distaste for Vaughan’s use of metaphysical conceits, disjointed rhythms and imperfect rhymes; and it explores the more nuanced approaches to these features of his style that were developed during the twentieth century. Examples from his secular and his religious poetry are analysed to demonstrate his mastery of iambic metres in both couplets and quatrains; the significance for his rhymes of Welsh pronunciation and of the bardic system of consonantal echo known as proest is explained; his use of the Welsh poetic form of dyfalu is illustrated; and his virtuoso management of complex stanzas is discussed. Detailed analyses confirm his ability to sustain poems in regular forms and attention is drawn to his experiments with irregular ‘organic form’.

The principles of metrics are static constraints rather than derivational rules, an idea supported by Paul Kiparsky. Optimality Theory (OT), an important approach to constraint-based grammars, finds it difficult to accommodate metrics due to issues related to metricality and complexity, “marked winners” and Markedness constraints, and the problem of the “missing remedy.” In phonology, marked winners can occur because they obey Faithfulness constraints that are violated by all of their less-marked rivals. This chapter deals with Faithfulness and componentiality in metrics and explains how the problems outlined above can be solved by drawing from several sources, including the principle of the “Richness of the Base” and metrical “Faithfulness constraints.” To test these proposals, it considers two problems: Free variation in quatrains and the distribution of mismatched lexical stress in sung verse. The chapter also discusses inventories with OT grammars, metricality in a componential inventory grammar, unmetricality in 4343 quatrains, and lexical inversion.

This chapter evaluates the originality of the Carmen Saeculare as a hymn. It examines the challenges Horace had set for himself in this poem compared to his earlier lyric prayers and its influence on his later odes. It compares Carmen Saeculare with several complete, partial, or parodic hymns in Horace's first three books and highlights its special qualities, including the uniqueness of its final sextet of quatrains.

Lesson 7 focuses on the Adagio from Mozart’s Piano and Violin Sonata K. 481. The relationship between form (including rondo form and “quatrain form”) and voice leading remains a central concern. Additional examples are drawn from works by Beethoven and Scarlatti. Questions of interpretation and performance arise throughout.

During the religious wars in France (1562-1629), concerns over violence and spirituality increased, and chansons fell out of favor, particularly those setting lascivious poetry. This era ushered in new repertoires of chansons spirituelles, vernacular translations of the psalms, and a fad, in the 1580s, for settings of a new primer: the Quatrains of Guy du Faur de Pibrac. This chapter examines these trends in music publishing and the role of printers in directing them, concentrating in particular on Guillaume Boni’s Les Quatrains du Sieur de Pybrac (Paris: Le Roy & Ballard, 1582). Boni’s modally-ordered collection stands out as a pedagogical text, particularly given its light-handed textures, the popularity of Pibrac’s Quatrains among teachers, and the didactic potential of its modal exempla, but it also provokes questions about mode and its relevance to polyphony in the sixteenth century.