Of Poets and Barbarians: Challenging Linguistic Hierarchies in Cervantes’s Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda
Is style an ornamental feature of writing separate from the content or can it be a vehicle of political and ethical expression? This essay takes as point of departure the incipit of Miguel de Cervantes’s posthumously published epic novel, Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda (1617) to argue for a richer understanding of style. More specifically, it shows how through the use of a high epic style in the Persiles Cervantes questions central humanist tenets and assumptions about the relation of language to humanity, of individual speakers and linguistic communities, as well as the expectations of a linguistic chain of being that would unflinchingly equate clarity of speech with civilization. By focusing on the representation of barbarian speech, this essay examines the ways in which Cervantes’s work offers a more ethical alternative to classical and Renaissance epic models that would either deny speech to barbarians or limit barbarian speech to the enabling curse that will get the heroic adventures going. By making the barbarian’s words intelligible through translation and more daringly, by making that very act of translation effect a change in the very texture of the receiving language itself, barbarolalia in Persiles emerges as poetry’s twin.
A Latin Dictionary Founded on Andrews' Edition of Freund's Latin Dictionary
This comprehensive dictionary is a popular and reliable reference work for Classics and Latin scholars; it includes citations from ancient literature, etymological information, and an orthographical index of words with variant spellings.
The Tsadik and His Soul’s Sparks: From Kabbalah to Hasidism
The present study shows the continuity between the Safedian Kabbalistic view of the relations between the sparks of a certain soul, and the Hasidic theory, that was conceived of as innovated by and characteristic of 18th century Hasidism, as to the responsibility of the Tsadik for the sparks that belongs to his soul. In the two literatures, the rescue of a spark of one's soul is related to the beautiful captive woman that is conceived of as an externalization of an inner dimension of the righteous person, immersed in a shell.