K. G. Paustovsky
Russian writer Konstantin Georgievich Paustovsky rocks: "There are no such sounds, colors, images and thoughts for which there would not be an exact expression in our language." I fully agree with the writer's statement that in our richest Russian language there are many words and means to express one's thoughts. With the help of language, you can convey any feeling, express your emotions. To talk about the beauty of nature, this language was used by many famous writers and poets. Vocabulary helps to express your thoughts and feelings, vocabulary is called vocabulary. You can decorate your speech with lexical means. For example, the author of the text in sentence number seventeen uses the comparison "she sighed deeply and loudly, like a man." The author compares a dog with a human, emphasizing that its behavior resembled that of a human. Sentence number twenty-five uses the epithet "lion's walk." He emphasizes the efficiency, the importance of the dog's gait. The metaphor in sentence number fifty-two is "the fading sky pressed closer against the sleepy waves." It means that evening is already coming, the sun is hiding behind the clouds, the wind is dying down. Grammar allows you to convey the train of thought, correctly build sentences. There are many grammatical elements in the text. For example, in sentence number forty-one there is an introductory word "probably." It conveys uncertainty about what is happening. Sentence number three uses the adverbial phrase "waves ... crawled onto the sand ... rolled away, leaving a white border of foam on the sand." There is a compound sentence at number one "The city ended, and soon the sea appeared." It contains two simple equal sentences that are connected by the conjunction and. Paustovsky's statement is, of course, true, any thought can be expressed using the Russian language.
Content:
The Russian language is the richest of languages. It has been formed for more than one century, and not only the cultural, but also the spiritual life of the Russian people was laid at the basis of its formation. Thanks to the Russian language, over the course of many centuries, millions of people have been able to communicate with each other, expand their knowledge and experience, get acquainted with the most sublime life values, learn about themselves and the world. Therefore, we can say with confidence that the great Russian language can be called one of the dear shrines of the Russian people.
If we compare the Russian language, for example, with English, then it will immediately become clear which of them has true depth and allows you to most clearly express the most complex thoughts, the most intimate feelings. There are a huge number of words in the Russian language, the meaning of which changes not only depending on the pronunciation, but also on the circumstances in which these words are used. In other languages, this is most often not possible, and if the words in them have several meanings, then they are clearly defined and cannot change. No less deep in the Russian language can be expressions that are often incomprehensible to people who do not know the knowledge of our speech, since in a literal translation they have a completely different meaning, and there is no exact translation with the preservation of meaning at all.
The richness of the Russian language and its limitless possibilities are undeniable, since it provides many opportunities and ways to express and explain even the most inexplicable. The validity of such a statement can be confirmed by such vivid literary ...
metaphorical expressions, such as “divorce shimmered”, “rainbow collapsed” and many others. An equally striking example is the expression “yes, no, probably”, which is familiar to all of us, and which is understandable only to a Russian person.
It should be said that today the Russian language can be considered the language of international communication, since in any country of the world you can easily find people who speak Russian, not to mention our compatriots who live in the most remote corners of our planet. In addition, the Russian language serves as the basis for the cultural development of the Russian people and is one of the main means of its improvement. Thanks to him, people have the opportunity to improve their level of development, exchange information, make discoveries and create literary works of world significance.
The strength and richness of the Russian language is so great that one careless word can lead a person to trouble, and another word spoken in time can save a person from trouble. The Russian language is the basis of the existence of the people, an invaluable gift sent to us from above. And K. G. Paustovsky was right, who once said that “Miracles can be done with the Russian language. There is nothing in life and in our minds that could not be conveyed by the Russian word. The sound of music, the spectral brilliance of colors, the play of light, the noise and shadow of gardens, the vagueness of sleep, the heavy rumble of thunder, the whisper of children and the rustle of sea gravel. There are no such sounds, colors, images and thoughts - complex and simple - for which there would not be an exact expression in our language.
K.G. Paustovsky: "There are no such sounds, colors, images and thoughts for which there would not be an exact expression in our language"
I understand the meaning of the statement of K. G. Paustovsky as follows: the Russian word can not only name all objects and phenomena of the surrounding world, but also express any thoughts and feelings of a person. The writer's point of view seems to me quite fair.
So, in sentence 1, the author uses words with diminutive suffixes "grandmother" and "Tanya". They not only name the heroines of the text (Anna Fedotovna and her granddaughter Tanya), but also convey the granddaughter's gentle and caring attitude towards her grandmother and the author's approval of the girl.
In addition, in sentence 2, the author uses the ambiguous word “huddle” in the meaning of “keep close to each other, crowd together.” It allows you to very accurately indicate the behavior of the children who came to Anna Fedotovna.
Thus, the statement of K. G. Paustovsky is quite true.
soundflower
"We see the sound"After the poetic successes of the computer, it would seem that nothing can surprise us anymore. But it turns out it can.
The sounds of speech are not only endowed with meaningfulness according to the indicative scales of the evaluation type. They are also painted in our perception in different colors. If the phonosemantic halo is the atmosphere, then the coloring of the sounds is a rainbow. These are the same sounds of speech, but revealed to us by a different - bright and striking side.
The property of sounds to evoke color images was noticed long ago. Much has been written about the color hearing of A. Scriabin, who saw musical sounds in color. A whole trend in art - color music - is based on this property of the sounds of music.
There is evidence that speech sounds, especially vowels, can also be perceived in color. A. Rimbaud even wrote the sonnet "Vowels", in which he colored the sounds like this:
A - black; white - E; I - red; U - green; Oh - blue: I will tell their secret in my turn ...
But the French linguist K. Nirop attributed completely different colors to vowels: he considered I - blue, U - bright yellow, A - red. The German linguist A. Schlegel wrote that for him I is sky blue, A is red, O is purple. But the Russian poet A. Bely claimed that A seems to him white, E - yellow-green, I - blue, U - black, O - bright orange. If we continue to name individual judgments about the color of vowels, then each sound will be painted in all the colors of the rainbow.
So, in this case, are there any specific sound-color correspondences at all? Isn't it fantasy? Or, perhaps, randomly arising unstable associations between sound and color? Is it possible that sound-color connections are the result of extremely finely arranged mechanisms of perception in individuals?
Different answers were given to these questions, but most often opinions agreed that the “speech sound-color” connection is a rare and purely individual phenomenon.
Modern science recognizes a phenomenon as existing only when it is either directly observed, or reproducibly manifests itself in experiments, or is strictly calculated. Moreover, in any case, the last word remains with practice: it is necessary that the phenomenon function observably or that traces of its action be detected.
But when it comes to the human psyche, everything looks different. In this area, science, as in the zone of a "picnic on the roadside", penetrates so far rarely and with difficulty, and having penetrated, it stumbles upon incomprehensible "full dummies" that it cannot open with its tools. Psychic phenomena are most often not directly observed; sometimes they appear in experiments, sometimes they don’t.
they are difficult to calculate, and the traces of their functioning are indefinite, unsteady, irregular. Especially in the area of the subconscious. Let's say intuition. Everyone can recall cases when, as it seems to us, the right decision or deed was prompted to us by intuition. Moreover, as it turned out in the process of working on artificial intelligence, a person in difficult situations makes a decision not by sorting through all possible options, but heuristically, subconsciously, intuitively finds the right path. But on the other hand, intuition often fails. How can we understand when intuition whispers the right solution to us, and when it cunningly pushes us into a dead end?
So it is with sound-color correspondences. If they exist, then who is right - A. Rimbaud or A. Bely? Whose intuition is correct?
In measuring the content of sounds, we have already seen that subconscious, intuitive connections and associations can be made explicit with the help of psychometric experiments. True, in the case of sound-color connections, antonymous measuring scales are not suitable: what antonym should be found, say, for the signs “red”, “blue” or “yellow”? But it is not necessary to build scales at all. There are few primary colors, vowels too. This means that other experimental schemes can be developed.
The idea of the experiments is simple: the reactions of many subjects to a certain stimulus are recorded, and then the statistical processing of the obtained material follows in order to identify the main trends in the reactions. The technique for registering reactions is varied: the subjects are either presented with speech sounds - you need to choose colors for them, or you are presented with various color cards - you need to write sounds on them, or you are given the task to line up the sounds by color, say, from "redest" to "least red" , from "most blue" to "least blue", etc.
Many such experiments with thousands of informants have shown that the vast majority of subjects color the vowels at least quite definitely. Opinions are especially unanimous regarding the three vowels - A, E, I. The sound and the letter (sound letter) A are quite consistently called “red”, E is clearly “green”, and I is definitely “blue”. Everyone considers the sound letter O to be light and bright, but although most of the subjects call it “yellow”, the answers are still quite common: “white”. It turns out that it is sunny.
Note that linguists consider the vowels A, O, E, and I to be the main, basic for the human speech apparatus and the main ones in all languages. And physicists consider the colors corresponding to these vowels to be the main ones, because their combinations give all other colors and shades. This is what color photography and color television use. Isn't it surprising that in the language the correspondences to the main colors turned out to be the most clear?
Apparently, the "collective intuition" of people is manifested here: the color arrangement of the world is reflected in the color arrangement of the language. The names of the main colors occur most often in speech, and the sounds O, A, E, I are the most frequent of the vowels. And between the names of the primary colors and these vowels, in turn, there is a connection: the name of a certain color contains a correspondingly “colored” sound, and it occupies the most important position in the word - the shock position: red, blue.
The remaining vowels have a tint coloration, as well as the colors with which they are associated, moreover, this connection can be traced less clearly - there is more variation in the opinions of the subjects. So, U - is associated with dark shades of blue: dark blue, dark blue, dark blue-green, dark purple. The sound letter Yu is also associated with shades of blue, but with light ones: blue, light lilac.
The sound letter Yo behaves interestingly. It is similar in spelling to E, and in sound to O. And in terms of color, it is quite definitely located between yellow O and green E: about half of the subjects call it yellow, and half call it green. So Yo is a light yellow-green.
But I almost does not differ in color from A, except that it is perceived as lighter and brighter.
As for b/, here one should speak not about the color, but rather about the light characteristic. If O is the sound letter of light, then Y is the sound letter of darkness, darkness. It is the darkest of all vowels, and the subjects unanimously give it the darkest characteristics - dark brown, black.
It is curious that the perception, strictly speaking, of the consonant sound J was clearly influenced by the graphic form of the letter Y, which conveys this sound. The similarity of Y with Y led to similar color assessments - Y is perceived as a blue sound letter, although with less certainty than Y.
The letter E had to be excluded from the analysis. Although it transmits almost the same sound that in most cases is transmitted by the letter E, the green sound letter E does not turn out according to the answers of the subjects: the letter form is different. And in general, no specific color is associated with E. And since E is extremely rare in texts (much less often than all other vowels), it was decided not to take it into account in further analysis of the texts.
That's what's interesting. If, before the experiment, the subjects are asked whether the sounds of speech are colored for them, then the vast majority confidently gives a negative answer. Yes, if you do not ask such a question, then many themselves say that they do not associate sounds with any colors and therefore do not know how to complete the task. But when, at the request of the experimenter, they assign colors at random to the sounds, then in the end a high agreement is found in these "guessings". This is the language intuition of the subjects, and then they themselves are surprised when they look at the results of the survey.
Of course, not all sound-color correspondences are equally firmly fixed in the subconscious. There are subjects who in all experiments show clear and uniform results that coincide with the "collective opinion" of all respondents, and there are also those whose answers in different experiments are contradictory, unstable, and according to their answers no definite color can be traced in sounds. Well, because color-blind people do not see the color of objects, but this does not mean that the color of objects does not exist. It is important that the majority of the subjects, on the whole, establish quite definite connections between sound and color in a consistent and fairly uniform way, although almost no one is aware of this.
For clarity, the results are summarized in the table:
If there are correspondences of speech sounds to certain colors, even if in the subconscious, then they must manifest themselves somewhere, the sound color must somehow function in speech. And perhaps, first of all, it is necessary to look for the manifestation of sound-color halos in poetry: where the sound side is especially important. The sound color effect can play its role in the case when a certain color picture is created in the poem, and the vowel pattern of the verse should support, “illuminate” this picture with the sounds of the corresponding color.
If this is so, then it is natural to expect that when describing, for example, red objects and phenomena, the role of red A and Z will be emphasized in the text; they will occur more often than usual, especially in the most important, most visible positions (say, drums). The description of something blue will be accompanied by the injection of blue I, Yu, U; green - by injecting E, E, etc.
As soon as this hypothesis was tested, a lively game of sound-color halos of poetic language began to appear in dry statistical calculations, striking in its unexpectedness, its diversity and exact correspondence with the conceptual meaning and the general expressive-figurative structure of the works. Judge for yourself.
A. Blok has a poem that he wrote under the impression of V. Vasnetsov's painting "Gamayun, the prophetic bird." The poem about formidable prophecies conveys the tragic coloring of the picture - the dark purple color of executions, fires, blood.
On the endless waters
Clothed in purple by sunset...
***
The yoke of evil Tatars broadcasts,
Broadcasts a series of bloody executions
And a coward, and hunger, and a fire,
The villains force, the death of the right...
***
And things sound true
Mouths covered in blood!
If the initial hypothesis is correct, then in the sound-letter fabric of the poem, red A, Z and dark, gloomy Y, Y should occur more often than it should be according to the norm. Is not it?
Since both the problem of sound color itself and the analysis of poems from this point of view are very unusual, then the mere assertion that this is indeed the case will certainly not be enough. The usual reaction of anyone who hears about soundcolor in poetry for the first time is, "That can't be!" And most often they look at machine calculations with a secret confidence in a dirty trick. Therefore, we will describe at least briefly the method of computer analysis of this and other poems, which will be discussed here.
Do not skip formulas and calculations (they are, by the way, elementary), because it is in them that the work of the poet’s artistic intuition materializes, it is they that allow you to model, simulate on a computer this subtle, almost unconscious, elusive, it would seem, side of the human intellect.
In the text of the poem (including the title), the number of each of the 10 sound letters listed in the table is counted. To take into account the special role of stressed vowels, they are doubled when counting. Since Yo, I, Yu, Y are associated only with shades of primary colors, and also because they are relatively rare, they do not have an independent meaning in the sound-color picture of the verse. Therefore, they are added to the main vowels. Since the sound letter Y turned out to be two-color, its number is divided equally between O and E. The blue Y is weakly expressed, so the number of Y is reduced by half and only then added to I. The number of all letters with doubling of the shock is also counted (value N).
Then the share (frequency) of each vowel in the text of the poem (Pk) and the units of the range of fluctuations of these frequencies for the given text are determined:
The resulting frequencies are compared with the normal ones (statistically average for the language), and the normalized differences of these frequencies are calculated in order to establish whether or not the frequencies observed in the poem differ from the normal ones by chance and how they differ:
It is convenient to observe the stages of computer processing of A. Blok's poem on the tablet.
Sound color in the poem "Gamayun, the prophetic bird"
Total sound letters in the poem 315
As you can see, the sounds A and I in ordinary speech should have met 116 per thousand, and in a poem there are much more of them (Pk ~ 0.159). With su \u003d 0.018, such a frequency deviation (0.159 - 0.116 \u003d 0.044 exceeds the random one by 2.39 times, that is, it can hardly be random. This means that the poet intuitively forced red A and Z, more often providing them with shock positions bloody). The second in excess of the norm is Ы, giving the red tone a gloomy, tragic sound. Finally, U (also with an excess of frequency above the norm) adds dark blue-green and lilac shades to the sound-color picture. The frequency of all other vowels is below the norm.
If we now depict in color the play of the vowels dominant in the poem, then we get a picture in red-purple and black-blue tones, in some places with dark greenery, And this is the color scheme of V. Vasnetsov's painting.
One can only be amazed at how accurately the poet's talent prompted him to choose and proportion the dominant sound letters.
In this way, many poems are "calculated" on the computer. For some of them, the total values (z) are given in the general table, so that you can make sure that the detected sound-color correspondences are not a paradox of statistics, not a random coincidence of numbers. Significant excess frequencies are marked in bold in the table. In the last, eighth column, the color interpretation of the results obtained is given.
It is clearly seen how accurately S. Yesenin uses the pictorial possibilities of sound-color halos. When comparing the very first lines of his poems with the colors of the dominant vowels, a clear correspondence between the verbal and sound-color pictures is immediately revealed. "The golden grove dissuaded ..." - the dominant color is yellow, slightly greenish. “The scarlet light of dawn wove itself on the lake...” - the sounds create a deep red and dark blue range. "The air is transparent and blue..." - the sound color is blue, slightly pinkish. "Green hairstyle, girlish breasts..." - green and dark green with blue gamut of sound-color correspondences. As they say, comments are superfluous. Yes, poets could say about themselves in the words of A. Voznesensky: "We see the sound." They really see him with the inner eye of talent, feel his iridescent halo and light this rainbow in their poems.
Well, the computer reveals the color pictures hidden in the text, thereby showing that it is able to catch this amazing feature of poetic speech.
colored sheets
In one of the poems, A. Tarkovsky wrote about the purpose of his poetic work:
And drop a single leaf into the well,
Green, rusty, rye, gold.
Indeed, in his poems, the sound-color correspondences are especially complete and varied.
The sound-color effect is only one of the expressive means of the language and, of course, not the most important. Therefore, sound-color poems are not often found, and each such find every time delights and amazes. But the most amazing phenomenon of poetic sound color is A. Tarkovsky's poem "Before the Fall of the Leaves".
Everyone dispersed. Stayed goodbye
Take aback yellow foliage outside the window.
That left me with the smallest
The rustle of autumn in my house.
Summer fell like a cold needle
From the numb hand of silence
And disappeared in the dark behind a shelf,
Behind the plaster of the mouse wall.
If we start to count, I have no right
Even to this fire outside the window.
That's right, the gravel is still crumbling
Under her careful heel.
There, in the out of the window disturbing peace,
Outside of my being and dwelling,
In yellow, and blue, and red - what does she need
My memory? What is my memory to her?
The computer described the general color scheme of the poem in autumn colors: “something yellow-red”. The table shows that this characteristic is given by the dominant O ("yellow") and A ("red").
But you probably noticed the logically strange line in the last stanza: In yellow, and blue, and red? It is not clear what these colors represent. Perhaps this line summarizes the color impressions from the images of the entire poem?
Indeed, in the first stanza, the color yellow is directly named. In the second stanza there is something dark (in the darkness behind the shelf), gray (a mouse wall), some kind of bluish-steel reflection of a cold needle. And in the third - a fire, which means something red or red-yellow, the color of flaming autumn foliage.
Now let's turn to the computer. What will he say, analyzing the vowels in these stanzas? Incredibly, the numbers are in front of you: the first stanza is “yellow” (O dominates), the second is “dark blue” (S and I dominate), the third is “red” (A dominates)!
These absolutely unimaginable correspondences, this mathematically exact following of the frequencies of vowels after the change of color pictures, were so stunned that I had to turn to the poet for clarification. Sound-color connections seemed to be so obvious for him that he specially builds sound-painting taking them into account and even tells the reader about it. But the poet was also surprised by the statistical calculations: as it turned out, he does not connect any colors with sounds and never specifically thought about such connections.
And what is "in yellow, and blue, and red"?
I don't know, - he answered, - that's how it was written... it was a long time ago. Maybe the dress was...
It is difficult to say what real color images brought this line to life, but one thing is certain - here the poet's intuition breaks out of the subconscious, appears directly to the reader and tries to materialize, raise the reader's sound-color intuition to a conscious level.
In general, the poems of A. Tarkovsky are fertile material: you can take any work where any color is named, and almost certainly this color will be supported by the color accompaniment of vowels.
There was a case: in the poem "Tits" the frequency of the gloomy Y suddenly turned out to be sharply overestimated. But the verses are bright blue:
In the snow, under the blue sky,
And between the branches - green ...
***
A sea blue is coming
On the white stone of the pier ...
Why is Y here? Doubts were taken - A. Tarkovsky is unlikely to have such a thing. And what? An oil stain was found on the punched tape, the photo input mistook it for perforation, and the machine made a mistake. The correct calculation showed that it is the blue I that clearly dominates. Moreover, there is also a green glimpse: look at the table - E is a little more than the norm!
In this poem, impressions from words, images, sounds, colors are intricately intertwined and associatively merged:
In the snow, under the blue sky,
and between the branches - green,
We stood and waited
gifts along the way.
The tits flew
with an inexplicable sound
Like a Greek coffee shop
silver spoons.
It might seem
what is there from nowhere
A sea blue is coming
on a white stone pier,
And suddenly from the hands of a maid
dishes fly under the table,
And picks up spoons
scolding, the owner from the floor.
There is no eventful outline here: a flock of tits flew by - that's all the events. And then - only associations caused by birds, their flight and chirping. Sound association - the ringing of silver spoons, color - blue sea water near the white pier. But what is interesting is that the titmouse is not at all blue, but rather a yellow bird. However, her name is blue both in terms of meaning and sound. And the chirping of tits, high, gentle and pure, is also associated with the “blue” sound I. Therefore, the flight of tits over the snow evoked in the poet the memory of a sea wave running towards a white pier. So the sound impressions turned out to be stronger than the objective ones. A computer helped to visually depict, reveal the hidden sound-color picture of associations.
The sound color in the poem "You are lilacs, lilacs ..." was made by A. Tarkovsky in muted, blue-green, purple and green tones: this is a slight excess of the norm for the frequencies U + Yu and E + Y. The same color scheme was created by color images poems - blue-gray clusters of lilacs, grass, purple buzz of bees.
Lilacs you, lilacs,
And how hard it is for you
Frozen in a difficult roll
Alto hubbub of bees?
***
The chill will go down
Grass in the knees to bend,
And rain on gray clusters
Roll like mercury.
***
In the evening - a bucket again,
And yes, that's the point,
So that at least forcibly bowed
Lilac gud return.
In the poem "Rain" and words and sounds, a green cast of a thunderous rumble is really molded. The main tone of the picture is created by dark blue-green Y with gloomy spots of Y, blue gaps of Y, green highlights of E (grass elusive movement) and even a yellow stroke of percussive O (dry sand).
How I want to breathe into a poem
This whole world that changes its appearance:
Herbs elusive movement,
Momentary and vague greatness
Trees, irritated and winged
Dry sand, chirping like a bird, -
This whole world, beautiful and humpbacked,
Like a tree on the banks of the Ingul.
There I heard the first peals
Thunderstorms. She bent into a ram's horn
Stubborn trunk, and I saw the crown -
A green cast of a thunderstorm.
By means of language - the meanings of words and the content of sounds - A. Tarkovsky creates literally visible color pictures with a rich and meaningful play of colors. The poet subtly feels the color in painting and in his work establishes a deep inner connection between the two types of art, which is felt by the reader intuitively and can be identified using computer calculations when processing poems inspired by paintings.
The poem "Peter's Executions" is, if I may say so, a linguistic representation of the color scheme of V. Surikov's painting "Morning of the Streltsy Execution". Its sound-color tone was dark and gloomy. In terms of color, this is the darkest of all the poems examined here, because b / dominates in its sound fabric, sharply exceeding the norm. The deaf background in some places acquires a dark blue and dark green color (U, Yu), sometimes dark crimson spots A and Z appear on it. A blurry gray-blue color I hardly shines through. But all colors are muted, darkened by the overwhelming dominance of Y .
When you are in the Tretyakov Gallery, compare the “calculated” painting with the painting by V. Surikov, and you will be convinced of the deep and harmonious correspondence of the two works.
The poet himself speaks of the inner relationship of his work with painting in the poem “Let Vincent van Gogh forgive me”, describing the impression of the painting “The Star and the Cypress”.
I stand to myself, but hung over me
Twisted like a flame, cypress.
Lemon crown and dark blue -
Without them, I wouldn't be myself
I would humiliate my own speech,
When someone else's burden dropped from his shoulders.
And this rudeness of an angel, with which
He makes his stroke related to my line ...
Sound-color instrumentation gives the same colors - lemon crown and dark blue: yellow O and dark blue Y dominate, and even in the same order as in this line - O (1.93) gives the highest excess of the norm, then Y (1. 25). But in The Star and the Cypress, the lemon-yellow light of an outlandish star and the dark blue-blue color of the sky also reign!
Well, is it possible to believe that the sound-color instrumentation is not specially, more precisely, not logically, not rationally built “to match the color of the picture”? And on the other hand, it is quite clear that it was not calculations, but inspiration that acted here - The poem was written when no one could have suspected of any such calculations of sound color, and the word computer was to appear in our language only almost a quarter of a century later.
Arseniy Alexandrovich, when he saw the computer results, laughed:
By God, it's not my fault.
But you wrote: Did I catch the correspondence of sound and color?
Well, what does it mean, caught. He just threw up his hands.
A. Tarkovsky really brought the multi-colored pages of his books into the fold of the language, caught the sound-color correspondences not by an intentional selection of sounds, but by an incomprehensible poetic intuition, this superconsciousness, which is called talent.
Sound stained glass
If A. Tarkovsky's sound color is pastel tones, subtle shades and harmonious scales, like watercolors or old paintings, then A. Voznesensky here is really a "stained glass master" - his sound color is intense, bright, contrasting. Compare according to the table: A. Tarkovsky's pressure of vowels of the desired color is restrained - it remains within 2?, in A. Voznesensky it is much more energetic and can reach almost 5?. Not only the general character is peculiar, but also the technique of A. Voznesensky's sound-color writing. It not only greatly exceeds the frequency of vowels of the corresponding color throughout the poem, but also unexpectedly accumulates contrasting sounds in some places of the verse. And although their frequency in the entire text does not exceed the norm or even does not reach it, clusters create bright and contrasting color splashes.
Here is one of the most expressive stained-glass windows - Chagall's Cornflowers. This is a holiday of the blue color - the crown color of Chagall (“But his blue knows no rivals,” the poet writes), and the blue Yi reigns supreme among vowels: the excess of the norm is more than 4?. But in this work there is a tragic clash of two themes: the motherland and the artist who has broken away from it. The symbol of the Motherland is cornflowers, and, accordingly, the powerful sound of this theme is dominated by blue I and much less noticeably green E. Cornflower blue vowels are especially thickened (besides, almost all stress positions are occupied by them) in the lines about the Motherland:
Honey, that's what you really love!
From Vitebsk we are vulnerable and loved by them.
Wild weed tubes...
***
Who kissed your field, Russia,
Until the cornflowers come out?
Your weeds are world wide beautiful
At least export them, weeds.
And in the lines leading the theme of the artist, crimson clusters of A and Z blaze against a blue background:
Your face is silver, like a halberd.
***
How did you braid the wreath on the crown of your head
Grand Opera, Grand Opera!
***
Ah, Mark Zakharovich, draw...
Even extreme condensation, when only A, no other vowels:
Marc Chagall, Chagall's enigma...
And a sharp, transitionless clash of themes, sounds and colors:
Ah, Mark Zakharovich, Mark Zakharovich,
All cornflowers, all cornflowers...
Note, by the way, that the main themes and the vowels accompanying them are named and brought into collision already in the title: cornflowers SHAGALA - only the main words and main sounds!
And one more touch, emphasizing the striking correspondence of sound and meaning: blue and red in this poem are not joyful, light, but thick, darkened tone - the frequency of black Y slightly exceeds the norm.
Of course, more often than not, the vowels encountered in a verse evoke in the reader's subconscious not a specific range of colors, but only vague color associations, only the most general color impressions. A visible color picture is already built in the mind of the reader under the influence of the conceptual semantics of the text, its images, its integral content.
If it is, for example, "Fire in an architectural institute", then the image of the flame is created by the lexical means of the poem. And the fact that the frequency of red L and Z is sharply overestimated in the text only supports, emphasizes this picture, connects the sound-color subconsciousness to its formation. But in terms of content, this is an optimistic fire, and although red, as befits a flame, is accompanied by a slight excess of the norm for black-smoky Y, the much more noticeable dominance of blue Y and Y maintains that general tone when they say: “Burn it with a blue flame! »
Convinced of the accuracy of the poetic sound-color intuition and the effectiveness of the methodology for its detection, we already expected in advance to obtain in the poem "Lilac" Moscow - Warsaw "the correspondence of the sound-color instrumentation to the color content. But what happened could not even be imagined.
As already mentioned, in "Lilacs" by A. Tarkovsky, lilac-greenish U + Yu and E + Y dominate in equal shares, although with a slight excess of the norm. Imagine, in "Lilacs ..." by A. Voznesensky, exactly those the same sounds and almost in the same proportion! Only their excess of the norm, again in accordance with the "stained-glass" nature of sound-color writing, is significantly (6 times) higher.
But the works are so different. And in the figurative system, and in the manner of writing, and in its very spirit. It would seem that there is nothing in common, except for lilac, and even that of A. Voznesensky is completely different, obviously from the century of scientific and technological revolution: it blooms “artificially” - in early March (it is not modern to bloom in the garden), is described through deliberately modern comparisons.
... the lilac is blazing with acetylene!
...it blooms at the third speed!
Night clusters are buzzing terry,
Like microphones from cupronickel.
... whistles
tracer
lilac!
Ridiculous to her - soil, grass, rights ...
And such dissimilar poems of such different poets, as it turns out, are so similar in their sound-color organization! Is this not a confirmation of the experimentally obtained conclusion that the sound-color relationships among different speakers of the same language are quite consistent? And the artists of the word, for all their individuality, still rely on universal, collective patterns, otherwise the work of their intuition would not resonate with the work of the readers' intuition.
But within the framework of general tendencies, of course, various shades can also be found in sound-color halos. For example, O is the vowel of light. For Tarkovsky, the sun is the brightest, so O is clearly yellow for him. And for Voznesensky, snow is the lightest:
... white magic falls - "snow".
Everything is dull compared to him.
everything is boring,
and it seems yellow daylight.
Therefore, O for Voznesensky, perhaps, rather white. (As mentioned, many subjects believe O is white.)
In any case, in Voznesensky's poem "Purification", the struggle between snow and earth, the sublime and the low, light and darkness is accompanied by the struggle of the dominant vowels - light O and dark U:
I scrape you off the asphalt
all full of that minute,
when you fall holy
clog me with cleanliness.
***
I don't need someone else's God,
I celebrate the dark rebellion.
Black and spacious road
Free from heaven!
The exact choice of a contrasting dark vowel is interesting. If Y played this role, then the contrast would be too sharp, and the general tone would become gloomy, tragic. But in this struggle, the last word still remains with the light:
My way is freer and uglier.
Stubbornly my craft...
I will come - I will be dumbfounded -
everything is white for you again.
It is curious that the victory of light is also accompanied by the “victory” of the vowel O. If the first lines of this final stanza are saturated with the sound U, then in the last words there is an accumulation of O, and even the very last sound is a stressed O.
Theory and practice
It cannot be assumed that the harmony of sound, color and content found in all the poems cited here is accidental. It is even more incredible to assume that the poets deliberately built precisely such sound patterns in their works, specifically orienting them to the sound effect. The only explanation for all these correspondences is the manifestation of the work of poetic talent, which heuristically finds ways to put all aspects and shades of linguistic meaning at the service of its plan, even such elusive, intangible ones as the colored halos of sound.
The computer captures these shades of semantics, imitates them quite convincingly, and even explains them to a person. But, as in working with other semantic phenomena, without a person, the computer becomes helpless in this area as well. As already mentioned, sound-color poems are quite rare. If you give the machine some text at random, it may happen that some vowel sound dominates in the text, and the machine will “color” the text in the color corresponding to this sound. And in the text there will be no color images, there is no word about any color, and therefore there can be no sound-color-content correspondences. Without understanding the text, the machine will not be able to decide whether sound color is used in this case as an artistic technique or it is an accident and the sound fabric of the text has no correspondence with the content.
You can try to enter all the color designations into the computer's memory, but this will hardly improve the situation. Firstly, there are a lot of them, their semantics is complex, ambiguous, and it is not always possible to reduce the whole mass of words describing various shades of color to a few words that name the color of vowels. And secondly, and most importantly, the color in the text can be indicated not only by color adjectives, but also through the description of colored objects. Then the computer needs to know the color of all objects and phenomena, which is still impossible to teach it.
But to help a person is another matter, it is quite capable of a computer trained to analyze sound color.
At least that's the idea. Lighting and color effects are now widespread as an accompaniment to variety performances, especially performances of vocal and instrumental ensembles. But the play of color is in no way connected with the content of the song being performed. Perhaps the impact of the performance on the audience will increase if such a connection is established?
Imagine that a song is being performed to the verses of S. Yesenin "The golden grove dissuaded ...". Let us also imagine a computer connected to some kind of color-synthesizing device. (Such installations, by the way, already exist, in which electronics control laser beams that create a very rich and effective play of colors.) The computer calculates in advance the main color gamut of the poem, and then, during the performance of the song, colors this gamut with the dominant vowels encountered along the way. text, especially percussive sounds.
Working with a computer will, of course, require rehearsals in order to achieve the teamwork of the entire ensemble, but even a “computer-free” performance requires a lot of preparatory work.
As we already know, the main color tone of the poem is yellow-brown. In this range, color accompaniment will be organized.
In the first line:
The golden grove dissuaded -
first, yellow O goes in a row, which means that the yellow color grows, intensifies. Then a single shock Y flashes briefly in blue, and the yellow color strengthens again, starting to mix with red, when A and Z appear. The line turned out really golden, with a brief gap of blue, like an autumn sky through yellow-red foliage.
But already in the next line, the golden colors darken, wither - this is the accumulation of low-frequency, and therefore especially noticeable dark brown Y:
Birch, cheerful language.
And immediately dark blue clouds float in:
And the cranes, sadly flying,
No more regrets for anyone.
At the beginning of the next verse, three drums AND in a row:
I stand alone among the naked plain -
create a bright blue gap, but dark U immediately thickens again:
And the wind carries the cranes far away,
I am full of thoughts about my youth cheerful...
And, like lightning in dark clouds, the red drum A flashes in the last word of the verse:
But I don't regret anything in the past.
A thunderstorm breaks out - these are A's in a row, occupying both shock and unstressed positions:
I do not regret the years wasted in vain.
See how figuratively, visibly, the course of a thunderstorm is conveyed in the sounds of three lines. First, there is only one A in the line - as if the first lightning flashed. Then five A's in one line - lightning flashes one after another. And in the next line, again, only one A, like an echo of a fading thunderstorm, and then swirling clouds U:
Do not feel sorry for the soul of a lilac flower.
The original autumn colors O, A, I are gradually returning, but now they are not so bright, they are muted by the dark Y:
Say so ... that the grove is golden
She answered in a sweet way.
In the last two words, the shock And and two Y create a gray-blue gloomy spot, on which the last shock O flashes briefly with yellow light and fades out.
But literary material, of course, must be of good quality, otherwise no technique and no inventions will save.
Computer sound-color data and translators can be useful. After all, if a sound-color halo is created in the original poem, then it must be preserved during translation. And there is such a suspicion that the sound-color correspondences are specific to each language. If this is the case, then when translating, you need to pick up new sounds so that in another language you can create the same sound effect.
Let's take a look at one striking example of the work of a translator with sound color. At the beginning of this chapter, A. Rimbaud's sonnet "The Vowels" was already mentioned, in which he colored the sounds in a completely different way from the results of experiments with native speakers of the Russian language. It is not known what sound-color correspondences are observed in French, but A. Rimbaud's associations are preserved in the Russian translation of A. Kublitz-Coy-Piottukh's sonnet.
The sonnet is exceptionally interesting for us because the color of sounds is described twice in it - once it is called directly and once again it is “deciphered” through color images. It can be assumed that the descriptions of color images should be dominated by those sounds, the color of which is “deciphered”. So, And for Rimbaud it is black, and the decoding is as follows:
A - velvet corset on the body of insects,
Which buzz over the stench of sewage.
In these lines, the sound A should exceed the norm, but in fact it is less than the norm, and sharply, 2.5 times, the sound Y exceeds the norm. What's the matter? Isn't it because in Russian black is really not A, but Y? Then it turns out that consciously the translator, echoing Rimbaud, writes that A is black, and subconsciously inflates in the “black” lines really black for Russian Y. Is this possible?
Let's check the "red" decryption. And if in it, instead of I, red dominates for Russian A, then we will have to admit such an incredible, it would seem, discrepancy between consciousness and intuition.
And - purple blood, oozing wound,
Or scarlet lips amid anger and praise.
Already without counting it is clear: And here it is almost never found, but A is in a row, including in many shock positions (here, at least, an oozing wound). Calculations confirm that, of course, A dominates, exceeding the norm by 2 times, while I is much less than the norm. There is no doubt - the translator, as it should be, has a really red A, but not an I at all.
As for And, then its frequency is highest in the “blue” decoding:
Oh - the ringing roar of the trumpet, piercing and strange,
Flights of angels in the silence of the vast heavens -
About - marvelous eyes of her purple rays.
That is the work of poetic intuition! Even the direct pressure of consciousness cannot bring it down, direct it onto a false path. It turned out that where poetic intuition worked (in “decodings”), the sound color was not copied, but built using the means of a new language. In the same place where consciousness exerted pressure (in the direct definitions of vowel colors), we got a dubbing of the original.
It is important to take into account the regularities of sound-color correspondences in other practical areas as well. Specialists in the media, agitation, advertising, manufacturers of various visualizations - posters, signs, posters, visual aids - can also use sound color data. For example, advertising often uses color, but without regard to the sound of the text, and it is quite possible that the correspondence of the sound and visual range will increase the impact of the message.
Or such a seemingly small thing. In the primer, color drawings are given for the letters. Let's say the letter A is shown and next to it is a watermelon. Illustrators intuitively feel that what is needed here is not green, but red, therefore, as a rule, they “cut” a watermelon in the picture, exposing its red flesh. And it is right. But in other cases, the drawing does not make it possible to reinforce the letter with the desired color. Meanwhile, it is possible that the correspondence of sound and color would improve the memorability of sounds and letters by children.
In any case, wherever it is necessary to achieve the maximum impact of a text on a person, it would be worthwhile to study the effect of sound color. And if this phenomenon helps at least a little in such an important matter, it must be used, especially since this will not require any special labor and expense, since the computer takes on the most laborious work.
