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In the Footsteps of a Poem... (The Interpretation and Exegesis in an Archival Research)
Authors: Ivica Hajdučeková
Number of views: 305
In the study, the author verifies two different interpretations of the poem Dar (The Gift)
(1926) by Maša Haľamová (1908 – 1995) based on the inheritance of the poet stored in
the Literary Archive of The Slovak National Library in Martin (an unprocessed fund).
In the process of contextualization, she reconstructs the personal history of the poet
through correspondence, press excerpts, personal documents and specialized literature
and uncovers both her creative beginnings and the genesis of the emblematic
poem in her emotional mishaps. While when published for the first time, the poem
contained also a dedication, in the manuscript form of the collection The Gift and
its debut printed version, the dedication was missing in the subtitle. Although the
initials lead to the literary critic Andrej Kostolný, direct (autoreferential) evidence
that the dedication of the poem belonged to him is absent, on the contrary, it is possible
to conclude from the correspondence analysed in detail that it was added only
on purpose and “additionally”, while the impulse for the one-time indication of the
initials remained unexplained. However, the archival research confirmed one of the
interpretations, namely based on the commentary of the author herself in the radio
programme from 1967, stating that the poem in question was a love confession to
her lover. With respect to the interpretation, it has been confirmed that revealing of
the relationship of the text and its context for the research purposes also by means of
the archival research is productive. It allows to reconstruct the genetic links, verify
and confirm the analytical-interpretative conclusions in the process of exegesis, thus
achieving certain level of exactitude.