zaum, zaoum The Russian futurists Aleksei Kruchenykh (1886–1968) and Velimir Khlebnikov (1885–1922) were exponents of zaum, a coined word that means something like “trans-rational” or “beyond-sense.” Trans-rational language (zaumnyj jazyk, or zaum) refers to a kind of sound poetry, a disruptive poetic language focused on the materiality of words. “It was a language of new words based on Slavic roots and the sounds indicated by individual letters of the alphabet,” the translator Paul Schmidt explains. Khlebnikov especially loved puns and palindromes, neologisms, obsessive wordplay, and the magical language of shamans. He found eerie wisdom in separate linguistic sounds, such as “sh,” “m,” and “v.” He believed that universal truths are secreted in “the self-same word” (samovitoe slovo), and he sought to access them through spells and incantations, magic words, folk etymologies, archaic sounds. The impulse was to test the relationship between sound and sense, to wrench words from their habitual meanings.
The Russian futurists wanted to create an extreme poetic language that could transcend common sense and the restrictive features of rational intellect. “If we think of the soul as split between the government of intellect and a stormy population of feelings,” Khlebnikov wrote in his essay “On Poetry” (1919), “then incantations and beyonsense language are appeals over the head of the government straight to the population of feelings, a direct cry to the predawn of the soul.”
The Russian formalists, especially the literary scholar Viktor Shklovsky and the linguist Roman Jakobson, wondered whether or not all poetry aspired to become “trans-sense poetry.” In “The New Russian Poetry” (1919), Jakobson explains that “poetic language strives, as to its limit, toward the phonetic word, or more exactly, inasmuch as the corresponding set is present, toward the euphonic word, toward trans-sense speech.”
SEE ALSO chant, palindrome, pun, shaman, sound poetry, spells.
zéjel A Spanish poetic form, which is called zajal in Arabic and zadjal in French. The zéjel begins with an introductory stanza, a brief initial estribillo (refrain) that presents the theme of the poem. This is followed by a tercet, which is called a mudanza (i.e., a changing verse, from mudar, “to move or change”) with a single rhyme (monorrimo). The mudanza, which at times also had internal rhymes, is followed by the repetition of one or more lines, a vuelta—the word means “turn” or “return”—rhyming with the initial stanza. The final line of the estribillo and that of the vuelta were sometimes shorter than the other lines. It is typically written in eight-syllable lines. The simplest and most common rhyme scheme is aa, bbba, ccca, ddda, and so forth.
The zéjel most likely was invented by the Hispano-Muslim poet Mucaddam ben Muafa, who was born in Cabra (Córdoba) in the mid-ninth century and died around 902. No zéjels by Mucaddam survive, but the invention of the form was reported by Aben Bassám de Santarem in 1109 and Aben Jaldún de Túnez in the fourteenth century. The troubadours picked up the zéjel form in the eleventh and twelfth centuries after crossing into Spain, and it was adopted early on by Macabru (fl. 1129–1150) and his patron, William IX, Duke of Aquitaine (1071–1150). The form is several centuries older than the French virelay and the Italian lauda, which have similar traits, and it most likely served as a model for these quintessential European forms.
The zéjel is closely related to the Arabic form muwashshah. The major difference is that the zéjel is written in vernacular Spanish and the muwashshah is written in classical Arabic, though the secular muwashshah typically closes with an envoi, or closing couplet, which is usually written out in the Arabic or romance vernacular (kharja). Both forms are closely associated with music. The word zéjel means bailada, which comes from the word bailar, “to sway back and forth, to dance.”
Both the zéjel and the muwashshah were cultivated by Arabic and Jewish poets and musicians in medieval Andalusia. The zéjel especially thrived in the thirteenth century, but over the centuries, many poets among the Arabic peoples of the Mediterranean have continued to create zéjels. As Tomás Navarro reports in Métrica española (1956), “The writer Aben Said, who died in 1274, said that more zéjels [by Aben Guzmán] were remembered and sung in Baghdad than in the Andalusian cities. The tradition is still alive in the Arab countries; in Tunisia the name canto granadino reflects the Spanish origin of the zéjel.”
SEE ALSO muwashshah, octosyllabic verse, troubador, virelay.
Zen poetry Zen poetry tries to communicate the ineffable—the world of No-thing—through suggestion. The Japanese word Zen (Chan in Chinese) literally means “meditation,” which Zen Buddhists believe is the Way of satori (awakening), the path to enlightenment. Zen originated in India and spread to China in the sixth century and then to Japan in the eighth century. Chinese Zen monks began to write poetry as an extension of their meditative practices. Zen poetry has no single formal property, though the Chinese Zen poets wrote quatrains with lines of equal length, and the seventeenth-century master Matsuo Bashō turned haiku into the quintessential Zen art. Zen poetry can be written in any language, though no language is adequate to express its truths, since there is, in essence, no room in Zen for letters or words. There is something helpless in Zen poetry, which tries to express the inexpressible, the realm of the absolute, primordial nothingness that cannot be named. Yet no Zen master poet doubts that this nothingness is present.