Atanas Slavov More about the rhythmic structure of Bulgarian verse (Regarding M. Yanakiev's book "Bulgarian Poetry Studies")
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Summary/Abstract
SummaryIt is so young that its name is still being debated. But it strives to keep pace with every other science. On the desks of the people who deal with it are manuals and reference books on differential calculus, higher mathematics, information theory, psychology, and physiology; their file cabinets are full of statistical data from mass tests, their sound libraries are teeming with recordings, in their laboratories the tape recorder is being replaced by the complex equipment of wide-ranging sound spectrograms. In just a few years, these people have done a tremendous job of clearing away the metaphoricalism in the terms and concepts that have dominated our knowledge of verse so far: today it has been experimentally established that the objectively stressed vowel does not carry any stress and that usually the sound that we feel stressed is not pronounced the most stressed; that the sound flow is objectively indivisible and is not separated into syllables or words, that the Sound itself is not uniform, but represents a whole bouquet of sounds, in which no one can yet establish exactly how our ear manages to recognize what it needs. As you can see 150 - complete chaos reigns even in our ideas about the physical nature of the verse. Yanakiev boldly puts an end to everything that has been done so far and proposes to start from A and B: a complete break with the current metaphorical use of terms, the application of exclusively scientific methods, relying solely on logic, precise formulations and dealing only with material and clearly distinguishable for everyone components of the verse composition - these are Yanakiev's principles. As a true man of science, he believes that the first step must be absolutely accurate, though small and far behind what the intuitive glimpses of aesthetes and critics have so far given us on the path to penetrating the depths of poetic Mysteries. His first step is to study - if one may so say - the anatomy of verse; to make a purely structural examination of the structure of the poem, to study the different forms of rhythm and to specify the terms by which these forms will henceforth have to be named.Keywords: ритмичната, структура, българския, стих, повод, книгата, Янакиев, българско, стихознание