Multilingual and innovative poetic landscape 1920–1924
Five Estonian poets
Keywords: Estonian poetry, literary multilingualism, language innovation, poetics
This article focuses on manifestations of multilingualism in Estonian poetry between 1920 and 1924. The Estonian language reform that reached its peak during this period and drew on influences from South Estonian has been studied extensively by Tiit Hennoste. One of the questions that remains to be explored is whether multilingualism and language innovation are interconnected. To delimit the material, a substantial proportion of the Estonian-language poetry collections published during the period was examined, and the works of five poets were selected for analysis: Gustav Suits, August Alle, Valmar Adams, Johannes Barbarus, and Henrik Visnapuu. The first four made the most frequent use of multilingualism in poetry during this period, while Visnapuu used foreign languages less frequently but was one of the key figures in language innovation. A database was compiled covering the poetry collections of all five authors, allowing the findings to be quantified to some extent.
The analysis revealed that in Barbarus’s poetry, and to some extent also in Alle’s, multilingualism can be regarded as part of their innovative aims. These aims involved not only linguistic innovation but also an avant-garde artistic stance, particularly in Barbarus’s case. Visnapuu likewise adopted an avant-garde stance, but multilingualism was not an integral part of his artistic and linguistic aims; rather, he used foreign languages primarily to achieve a comic effect.
Direct instances of multilingualism occur most frequently in Suits’s and Adams’s poetry, but in neither case are they directly associated with language innovation. Suits appears to have sought to represent the linguistic diversity of the world, whereas Adams seems to have used foreign languages primarily as a means of foregrounding his authorial persona.
Among the instances of multilingualism analyzed, Latin and French are the most frequent, despite German and Russian being more widely known in Estonia.
Eva Velsker (b. 1969), PhD, Uppsala University, Department of Modern Languages, Senior Lecturer (Engelska parken, Thunbergsvägen 3 L, 75126 Uppsala), eva.velsker@moderna.uu.se
Mart Velsker (b. 1966), PhD, University of Tartu, Institute of Cultural Research, Associate Professor of Estonian Literature (Ülikooli 16, 51003 Tartu), mart.velsker@ut.ee
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