Katja Podbevsek

Glasno interpretativno branje Kettejeve pesmi Na trgu
Oral Interpretation of Kette's Poem Na Trgu (In The Town Square)


Slovenski sinopsis
English synopsis
English summary

The preparation begins by identifying oral elements in the linguistic structure of the selected text. Oral presentation has to reflect the content and message of the text, so the teacher first has to make sure (s)he fully understands those.

In Kette's poem Na trgu (In the Town Square) we first identified those means of linguistic expression which are vital for the oral impact of the poem. Bearing in mind that the basis of any reading-aloud is comprehensibility, we first focussed on pronunciation, loudness and reading speed. We identified pronunciation-sensitive points in the text (sound clusters that are more difficult to pronounce, sound alternations, sounds in word-final positions, clitics), and checked the words for stress, vowel quantity and quality, and especially for stylistic accents (narrow vowels) that Kette had marked in his text and that create a special auditory effect. It became apparent that Kette had selected and combined sounds very carefully, so that on the one hand he imitated natural sounds (sprinkling of water drops), and on the other hand, using repetition (of sounds, lines, iambic and amphibrach metres) and rhymes he wove up the sound network of his impressionist poem. Careless reading, low (or excessively loud) voice and either too fast or too slow tempo can completely destroy the sound setting created by the poet, and with it also the poem's message.

Punctuation, distribution (symmetry) and length of lines (alternation of short and long lines) and enjambements helped us to determine pauses in reading and the poem's intonation patterns. In Kette's poetry, the use of punctuation marks follows the ideational and sound structure of poems. This type of analysis brings out also the poem's sense units.

The poem's rhythm (monotony) is also considered and, related to it, the function of changes in reading speed and voice intensity (sentence stress, agogics in the third stanza). In terms of text phonetics (intonation, pauses, sentence stresses, tempo), several different realizations are possible in reading-aloud. It will be the teacher's understanding of the poem's message that will determine the actual manner of his/ her interpretative reading of the poem.