Talk:The Seasons (poem)

Lithuania Mid‑importance

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Quantitative hexameter or not?

The article currently describes the hexameter as quantitative but I've found this description which says it is not:

"Donelaitis' hexameters are modern in the sense that grammatical stress has been substituted for syllable length, on the same principle as German and Russian verse. In spite of the fact that Lithuanian has quantity as well as stress, there are no lines in Metai in which syllable length, rather than word stress, constitutes the measure of the hexameter." (from page 264 of Šilbajoris, R. (1982). Kristijonas Donelaitis, A Lithuanian Classic. Slavic Review, 41(02), 251–265. doi:10.2307/2496342 )

Is there just an error in the article or is there something more to the story? Haukur (talk) 11:59, 1 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Haukur: It looks like newest sources describe it as "metrotonic hexameter". Same is repeated in Visuotinė lietuvių enciklopedija [1]. Found this: "Recent research has shown that the Lithuanian poet combined not only accented and unaccented, but also long and short syllables. Such a sequence should be called a metrotonic hexameter because it combines the meter (long and short syllables) and the tone (accented and unaccented syllables)." (translated from here). Also: "The poem has features of both didactic and heroic epic and is composed in metrotonic hexameter, well-suited for the Lithuanian language (the synthesis of metric and tonic hexameter is Donelaitis' discovery)." from here. It looks like this "recent research" is by Aleksas Girdenis (his article „Naujesnis žvilgsnis į K. Donelaičio hegzametrą“, in: Pergalė, Vilnius, 1989, Nr. 1, pp. 100–122 which was later expanded and republished elsewhere but I don't have access to either of these publications so can't verify). Renata (talk) 00:31, 2 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Ah! So it's a belt-and-suspenders kind of situation. Very interesting, thanks for looking into it! Haukur (talk) 00:49, 2 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]