Parallelism in Karelian Laments

Abstract

Karelian lament poetry integrates a variety of forms of parallelism—different types of what Roman Jakobson (1981 [1966]:98) described as “recurrent returns”—that are both organizing principles for the poetic discourse and also rhetorical resources that a lamenter can draw on and manipulate in performance. Parallelism operates at the phonic level of sounds, both recurrent sounds in alliteration and recurrent melodic structures. It works in different ways at the level of individual words and formulaic expressions within a phrase. Parallelism is also prominent at the level of larger structural and thematic units. The types of parallelism in Karelian laments work complementarily with one another, and in several respects may also differ from their uses in other traditions. The integrated combination of all these types of parallelism produces Karelian lament as a distinctive form of verbal art. In this opening section of this essay, I introduce the Karelian lament tradition and features of lament performance and poetics. The second section offers an overview of the different types of parallelism at work in Karelian laments. This survey begins with the phonic parallelism of alliteration and parallelism at the level of words and formulae, continues with semantic parallelism of larger units in composition, and finally considers parallelism between the language of laments and the environment where laments are performed. The third section discusses the rhetorical functions of parallelism in laments. Forms of semantic parallelism are shown to be potentially meaningful in themselves. The potential for semantic parallelism between larger units of expression is shown to allow flexibility that makes it a resource for organizing extended sequences of lament poetry. The fourth section turns to the question of how parallelism as a structuring principle of lament can penetrate into a lamenter’s way of speaking about laments so that the metadiscourse becomes organized on the same principle. The conclusion considers how all the different levels of parallelism and their flexibility make Karelian lament a dynamic resource for personal expression.