Enjambement
An enjambement ( pronunciation : [ ãʒãb (ə) 'mãː ]; from French enjamber ,' exceed ',' skip '), line jump or skip occurs in a sequence of verses when a sentence or sense unit extends beyond the end of a verse extends to the following verse.
Enjambements can be distinguished according to whether the verse boundary coincides with the boundary of a syntactic unit ( syntagma ) or whether the enjambement separates all syntactic units. For example in Goethe's verses
He who misunderstands the heavenly, who
thinks they are bloodthirsty
“Believes bloodthirsty” is a syntagma, so it is a smooth enjambement . By contrast with Celans
Easter smoke, flowing, with
the letter-like
keel trace in the middle
there is a hard enjambement , since all syntactic groupings are separated here. An enjambement that even cuts words is called a morphological enjambement . If the separated word is a rhyming word, it is called broken rhyme . The continuation of a sentence across the stanza boundary is known as stanza jambement or stanza jump.
The part of the syntagma following the verse border is called rejet ( rə.ʒɛ ) (in the Goethean example “believes bloodthirsty”), the part before the verse border is called contre-rejet (in the example “the she”).
A series of enjambements, in which the verses seem to be hooked up through the overlapping sentence arcs, is also known as a hook style , whereby the term in the narrower sense refers to the Germanic long line. As a modern example of such an accumulation of enjambements, the following verses by Rilke :
How am I supposed to hold my soul so that it doesn't
touch yours ? How am I supposed they ↲
↳ hinheben about you to other things?
Oh I'd like it at something ↲
↳ lost objects in the dark place
at a strange silent place, the ↲
↳ remains motionless when your depths vibrate.
The line jump is marked by the characters ↲ and ↳, the relevant syntactic unit is highlighted in italics.
The enjambement serves as a lyrical stylistic device : With the sentence, the context of meaning is continued across the line of verse; the monotony of meter , which otherwise combines sentence and verse in the line style , is broken through. The intonation becomes rounder, smoother and more fluid through the connection of the lines across the border of the verse and can thus approximate the prose. Since the transmission in the lecture is usually represented by a short pause, the enjambement can also reflect a hesitation or it can create stresses of individual words.
The enjambement already appears in ancient times with Greek, especially Alexandrian, and Roman poets, then regularly in Germanic poetry as a syntactic bracketing of abvers and anvers of the following long line ( Beowulf , Heliand , Hildebrandslied ), then in Middle High German, for example in Walther von der Vogelweide ( "I saw the Megede at the stráže the bal / throw , sô would us the vogele stale.").
In the French Alexandrians , the enjambement was considered inadmissible ( François de Malherbe , Nicolas Boileau ) and only reappeared there in the Romantic period ( André Chénier ), but often in Pierre de Ronsard . The enjambement is also often used in Elizabethan drama and Milton , as in the following example, where Shakespeare uses a series of enjambements to create the impression of speech approaching prose, which gropes for words:
I am not prone to weeping, as our sex ↲
↳ Commonly are ; the want of which vain dew ↲
↳ Perchance shall dry your pities ; but I have ↲
↳ That honorable grief lodg'd here, which burns ↲
↳ Worse than tears drown [...]
The following sonnet by Andreas Gryphius shows several line leaps in the first two stanzas, which reinforce the impression of fatigue and tiredness:
I don't know how / I sigh for vndt for.
I cry day and night / I sit in a thousand aches;
Vndt a thousand I'm still afraid / the strengthens in my heart ↲
↳ disappears / the spirit fades / my hands sink .
The cheeks become pale / the beautiful eyes adorn ↲
↳ Passes / as the snow of the already burned candles
The soul is stormed like the sea in Mertzen.
What is this life! what are we / I and you?
In German classical music, the enjambement appears frequently in Lessing ( Nathan the Wise ), Klopstock , Goethe, Schiller ( Don Carlos ), Hölderlin and in the odes by Nikolaus Lenau . In modern poetry, beginning with the French symbolists , then with TS Eliot , Rilke and Celan, the enjambement is so common that it is already the norm in the present and the preservation of the unity of verse and syntagm can be noted as something special.
By shifting the natural emphasis, enjambement can also have a comical effect. The broken rhyme is particularly popular in comic poetry. In the two verses from Wilhelm Busch's Max and Moritz , the word cockchafer is divided by a morphological enjambement:
Everyone knows what such a May- ↲
↳ beetle for a bird is.
In the last stanza of The Development of Mankind by Erich Kästner , the enjambement also works in the service of rhyming comedy, as the line jump brings the normally rather unstressed conjunction "and" into the emphasized rhyming position:
This is how they
created the progress of mankind with their head and mouth .
But apart from that and ↲
↳ considered in the light they are in the ground
still the old monkeys.
literature
- Dieter Burdorf, Christoph Fasbender, Burkhard Moennighoff (Hrsg.): Metzler Lexicon literature. Terms and definitions. 3. Edition. Metzler, Stuttgart 2007, ISBN 978-3-476-01612-6 , pp. 190 f.
- Harai Golomb: Enjambment in Poetry. Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 1979.
- Hubert P. Heinen: The Significance of Enjambment for Recent German Verse. In: Lee B. Jennings, George Schulz-Behrend (eds.): Vistas and vectors. Essays honoring the memory of Helmut Rehder. University of Texas, Department of Germanic Languages, Austin 1979.
- Dietz-Rüdiger Moser: Enjambement in the folk song. In: Yearbook for Folk Song Research . 14: 27-52 (1969).
- Thomas Schneider: Law of lawlessness: the enjambement in the sonnet. Giessen work on recent German literature and literary studies. Lang, Frankfurt am Main et al. 1992, ISBN 3-631-42856-1 .
- Friedrich Wahnschaffe: The Syntactic Meaning of the Middle High German Enjambement. Berlin 1919. Reprint: Johnson, New York 1967.
- Gero von Wilpert : Subject dictionary of literature. 8th edition. Kröner, Stuttgart 2013, ISBN 978-3-520-84601-3 , p. 213 f.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Johann Wolfgang Goethe: Iphigenia on Tauris. V. 523 f.
- ↑ Paul Celan: Easter smoke, flutend . In: (ders.): Collected works in seven volumes. Frankfurt a. M. 2000, Vol. 2, p. 85.
- ↑ Rainer Maria Rilke: love song. v. 1-7. In: (ders.): Complete works. Volume 1. Wiesbaden and Frankfurt a. M. 1955-1966, p. 482.
- ↑ Walther von der Vogelweide L 39.4 f.
- ↑ William Shakespeare The Winter's Tale II, 1
- ^ Andreas Gryphius: Threnen in Schwerer Kranckheitt (1640). In: (ders.): Complete edition of the German-language works. Volume 1, Tübingen 1963, p. 59.
- ^ Wilhelm Busch: Max and Moritz. Fifth strike (1865) In: (ders.): Werke. Historical-critical complete edition. Volume 1, Hamburg 1959, p. 367.
- ↑ Erich Kästner: The Development of Mankind (1932)