Sound in Verse: Two Interpretations of Echo in Bulgarian Poetry

This article examines the relationship between sound and meaning, addressing the questions of the arbitrariness or (partial) motivation of their connection, as well as the related problem of the specific value of linguistic sound in poetic texts. The analytical section of the article comments upon three poetic texts: an episode from the third book of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” (ca. AD 8), Ivan Vazov’s poem “Echoes” (1884), and Nadezhda Radulova’s poem “Echo” (2020). The article argues that these three texts share a common poetic strategy that functionalizes sound by combining the repetition of words or word fragments with a transformation of meaning. Thus, new meanings arise through the repetition of an already existing acoustic image.