Institut supérieur pédagogique de Kisangani ISP
Section: Lettres et sciences humaines
Département : Anglais
Mémoire en anglais :
Sujet:
English poetry and Lingala songs: a contrastive study
La poésie anglaise et les chansons Lingala: une étude contrastive
Etudiant :
LOBOLO Amuri Edouard
INTRODUCTION
Language is the medium for people’s communication. It’s also the principal method of human communication or a system of communication used by a particular country or community. What simply means that people express their thoughts through the language in either written or spoken forms.
Song lyrics are also a way in order to express the thoughts of people as the development of art in today’s life. Nowadays, song lyric is merely like poetry since composing song lyric is not a simple and easy thing.
0.1. CHOICE OF AND INTEREST IN THE WORK
Music has always played an important part of human lives, needs since the old generations until the present time. While singing a given lyric song, you find yourself in the world of thoughts, enjoyment that you cannot imagine. Popular music is listened to by both the youth and adults for a number of reasons, including power to bring joy, stimulate memories, happiness, comfort and other emotional inspired motivations (RENTFROW and AL, 2003). Research has shown that listening to music can reduce anxiety, blood pressure, and pain as well as improve sleep quality, positive mood, mental alertness and memory. Does poetry play the same role as music?
After listening to some Lingala Pop Music, we have noticed
something sounding like poetry, rhyme musicality that we learnt at school.
Let us see some lines of Fally’s Maria PM:
Le monde eh, le monde est trop matata
Or moto asala le monde eza yo Nzambe tata
Kita okata po mokili trop matata, kata
Adamu, Adamu pe na Eva
Présence ya nyoka na Elanga très matata
Or moto asala le serpent eza yo Nzambe tata
Kita okata po mokili trop matata, kata
This song can be translated into English like this:
Oh! The world, the world is full of troubles
Oh God father, you created the World
Come down and sort this out because the world is now full of trouble
Adam, Adam and Eve
The presence of the snake in garden caused a lot of trouble
While oh God the father, you are the one who created the snake
Come down and sort this out because the world is now full of trouble
These Fally’s lines rhymes ta-ta while contrasted to W.H.
Auden’s « The More Loving One »
Were all stars to disappear or die, [ai]
I should learn to look at an empty sky [ai]
And feel its total dark sublime, [aim]
Though this might take me a little time [aim]
This is the reason we want to identify whether English poetry can have some similarities and dissimilarities with the Lingala songs.
0.2. RESEARCH PROBLEM
A research problem is a specific issue or gap in existing knowledge that you aim to address in your research. A research problem is a statement about an area of concern, a condition to be improved, a difficulty to be eliminated, or a troubling question that exists in scholarly literature, in theory, or in practice that points to the need for meaningful understanding and deliberate investigation. In some disciplines the research problem is typically posed in the form of a question. A research problem does not state how to do something, offer a vague or broad proposition, or present a valued question.
The purpose of a problem statement is to:
Introduce the reader to the importance of the topic being studied i.e the reader is oriented to the significance of the study and the research questions or hypotheses to follow.
Places the problem into a particular context that defines the parameters of what is to be investigated.
Provides the framework for reporting the results and indicates what is probably necessary as data to conduct the study and explain how the findings will present this information (as theory).
As a research problem presents a valued question, we have asked ourselves the questions which answers helped us throughout the elaboration of this work under study:
Is there any relationship between poetry and music when they are taken in their own as far as structure form and theme are concerned?
Is any poem a song? And vice versa?
Are there any similarities rather than differences between English poetry and music of the Democratic Republic of the Congo in particular?
0.3. HYPOTHESIS
The Oxford Language Online dictionary states that a hypothesis is a supposition or proposed explanation made on the basis of limited evidence. It is a starting point for further investigation. The hypothesis is a primary probable answer from a research paper that we are investigating onto get more evidence to support the research.
Therefore, we have primarily selected these answers while glancing at the questions above this point:
Taken in isolation, there are some similarities between poetry and music as far as structure form and theme are concerned.
Poem and song both are described as a composition of words with similar nature. The major difference between the; is that a song is set to the music while a poem is not set to music.
For sure, Congolese Music has some similarities and differences with the English poetry in general.
Therefore, we have to tackle the topic in order to see whether these hypotheses will match the theory and then be accepted or not.
0.4. AIMS AND OBJECTIVES OF THE WORK
In many literary works, it is not an easy task to differentiate these two concepts: aims and objectives. This allows us to first of all give you a slight difference between them before saying other things:
Objective is simply defined as the goal intended to be
attained (and which is believed to be attainable) rather than aim is the direction or path along which something moves or along which it lies.
This material and analysis in the research paper aim at:
Strengthening readers of poems and listeners of music skills of understanding and appreciating the themes, the structures, features and language in a range of poems and songs,
Finding out that some written poems may be sung as songs while some other songs can be written as a poetry text-a poem.
Helping the audience both readers and listeners to respond to and give expression to the imaginative ideas, moods and feelings expressed in poems and songs through written, oral and performance means.
This present work has these principal objectives:
Sorting out some similarities and dissimilarities of both English poetry and Congolese Lingala pop music.
Showing how both poetry and music has to be structured in and how they can be taken together.
0.5. METHODS USED
For any scientific work to be jotted down and be well achieved, it has to follow a certain number of methods to render it clear and simple.
Research methods are specific procedures for collecting and analyzing data. Developing our research methods is an integral part of our0.6. SOURCES OF DATA
In short, the sources of data are physical or digital places
where information is stored in a database table, data object, or and even some other storage formats.
Data can be gathered from two places: internal and external sources. The information collected from internal sources is called “primary data,” while the information gathered from outside references is called “secondary data.”
In this work, we have selected data both from internal and external sources but the main sources of documentation are the internet, courses in literature and linguistics and some literature books. A number of critical works in poetry and stylistic have also been exploited as you will notice as indicated or shown in the general Bibliography.
Apart from those sources, we also interviewed some informants about which Congolese song of their generation that they preferred and why they are interested in it.
0.7. LIMITATION OF THE WORK
As far as this section in concerned, we can easy start up by
saying that a scientific work can’t be achieved without limiting the space and the time of the work. Indeed, no study is completely flawless or inclusive of all possible aspects. Therefore, listing the limitations of our study reflects honesty and transparency and also shows that we have a complete understanding of the topic.
It is not a simple task to work with all Music played in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, so, some singers only are selected and some songs from them, as poetry in a wide world, we have to talk only about the English Poetry and our investigations are relevant and consisted in comparing Lingala songs to English poetry.
0.8. REVIEW OF LITERATURE
A scientific work cannot be produced without having a simple
glance at a certain number of previous works related to a one’s field of work. We are not out of the scientific works, that’s why we have read some authors which worked with about topic before us and we have been interested in, we have:
0.9. DIFFICULTIES ENCOUNTERED
Various difficulties have been encountered during the
elaboration of this work as mentioned below:
English poetry has been a huge task for many who always find them difficult to be understood,
Getting local data about poetry were not merely easy because students are not interested in the genre,
Lingala songs lyrics are not always findable on internet and for us who are not always stuck in the secular music we had a huge task to listen to them,
In our Alma Mater, Teachers’ Training College of Kisangani, there is a poor number of books related to our domain and previous works related to poetry were not found in our disposition.
0.10. DIVISION OF THE WORK
This work entitled “English Poetry and Congolese Music: A Contrastive Study”; besides the introduction and the conclusion; it is divided by four chapters.
The first chapter deals with the historical background of both English Poetry and Congolese Music;
In the second chapter preliminaries and theory of english poems and congolese songs in which we described thoroughly each genre;
And in the third chapter, which is the contrastive study between the the English poetry and Lingala songs, we sorted out some similarities and dissimilarities between them in quietness,
The Last, which is the Pedagogical implications of English Poetry and Lingala songs, we have realized that both of them have to be studied as lesson in the classroom, in that section, we have found that not all but some English Poetry and Lingala Songs translated in English can be used to teach pupils the language.
