Dancing Vowels

This article centers on Osip Mandelstam’s reading of his 1922 lyric «Я по лесенке приставной», which I consider in light of declamation studies of the time and the subsequent observations on vowels made by linguists who discounted those studies. I first provide a sketch of the work of Sergei Bernshtein and Sofia Vysheslavtseva, two declamation theorists who were personally acquainted with Mandelstam and whose work both informed and was, in turn, informed by his declamations. I then go on to reflect on what we can glean from the way Mandelstam reads his lyric. Taking my cue from Bernshtein’s and Vysheslavtseva’s emphasis on the motor experience of poetry and from Mandelstam’s own privileging of vowels in his reading, I chart the movement of the tongue that the articulation of these vowels demands. This reveals what might be called choreography in the mouth – gestural patterns that lead into a somatic experience of the poem and provide it with an additional layer of structure. I close by thinking about what is lost when the oral realization of a poem is disregarded

Acoustics · Aesthetics · Art · Articulation (sociology) · Choreography · Dance · Emphasis (telecommunications) · Linguistics · Literature · Movement (music) · Poetry · Reading (process) · Realization (probability) · Singing · Sketch · Computer Science · Discourse Analysis and Cultural Communication · Historical Linguistics and Language Studies · Linguistic research and analysis · Philosophy

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