> "Martin J. Walker" wrote:
>
> >> PPS What, by the way Jeffrey, if you're reading this, is
> >Germanische contamination<? Can you elucidate?
>
> It was a fogged term I was using to refer to the fear of B. Brecht
> guilt-by-association ("contamination") that Robin Hamilton was
> imputing to Auden. I may have been blurring any distinction between
> McCarthyite distrust of East Berliners (B.B.) as Communist, and WWII
> American germanophobia of Berliners as war time enemies--- since my
> perspective was less year-by-year/decades hairsplitting but a wider
> historical arc: American xenophobia and homophobia were (are)
> continuous currents, so that German/Russian didn't matter during that
> period, and Russian Communism as International Socialism was
> affectively indistinguishable from German Nazism as National
> Socialism. Clearer? (I might have chosen the exaggerated, purposely
> un-German-sounding sharp note of "Germanische" partly with Germanische
> Glaubens-Gemeinschaft's recent talk about "unjustified killing of
> animals, felling of trees, or contamination of water" floating in
> mind, and the related sort of "surface water contamination" that
> Germanische Lloyd Hamburg/ATOLL was similarly concerned about
> [1980?], Allgermanische Heidnische Front's February editorial about
> "contamination of nature", etc.)
> >> I 'm also a little puzzled as to what norm you're proceeding from
> in discussing the metrics of Auden's poem; to my ear the revised
> version sound perfectly all right
Martin, doesn't that seem a little unfair? I have to come up with a
"norm" but you're free proceeding from your "ear"?
How about if I answer that the norm I'm proceeding from is ~my~ ear?
Where does that take us?
The norm through which I ~expressed~ the incompatibiltiies of Auden's
revision was, quite plainly, the standard norm for English language
prosody: accentual-syllabic scansion, with names for specific feet, from
better to less well known terms (spondee, molossus, ambibrach, 3rd
paeon) and primary and secondary stress as the easiest, most widely
recognized weights for stressed syllables (third level of stress being
beyond ~my~ ear, and maybe mainly a linguistic concept).
Ear-training:
These sound like harmonious, homogeneous substitutions to your ear (!?):
in the sunlight
displaying his dildo
nude young
flirtatious .
Sure, where anything goes in free verse, it can be perfectly all
right---, but I find no metrical equivalence or convertibility (two
stresses for one stress, and four unstressed for three? one stress for
two stresses and three stresses for--- zero?) or even approximation.
What "norm" could Auden have been following (I genuinely don't known,
Robin)?
>> >> PS I'm struggling through Jeffrey's rather convolutedly reasoned
>> contribution
>
You flatterer you. (. . . "convoluted" as in Andre Breton: "La beauté
sera convulsive ou ne sera pas"?)
:)
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