Macaronic Verse

Macaronic Verse

 

comic or satirical verse interspersed with foreign words or words composed or altered in imitation of a foreign language.

Macaronic verse appears in the works of writers of antiquity (Roman poet Ausonius, fourth century B.C.); however, the term itself came into use in the 15th century in Italy, where it designated those burlesque poems whose language had a mixture of Latin and Italian words having Latin forms (for example, the poetry of T. Folengo, 16th century). In Russian verse, I. P. Miatlev created a vivid example of this language in his parody of the speech of the Francophiles among the Russian gentry (Sensations and Remarks of Madame Kurdiukova AbroadDans L’étranger). The macaronic style has also been employed in prose, usually for speech characterization (speech of the steward in the novel Fathers and Sons by I. S. Turgenev).