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POETRYETC  2005

POETRYETC 2005

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Subject:

Re: any formalists...

From:

Richard Jeffrey Newman <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

Poetryetc provides a venue for a dialogue relating to poetry and poetics <[log in to unmask]>

Date:

Wed, 24 Aug 2005 20:26:03 -0400

Content-Type:

text/plain

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Joanna wrote: 

>>Now that's *my take on scansion! Syncopation, rests, and tied notes across

the barline an' all. And not averse to a little plainsong where suitable. 
Fluid but not loose.<<

I have been working on the second of Saadi's books that I am translating,
the Bustan, for several months. It is a very different book from the first
one, the Gulistan, which I posted about here some time ago, not so much on
content, but in form. The Gulistan mixes prose and poetry; the Bustan is
entirely in verse, and it is--both from what I can hear when people read it
to me and from what I can tell from the trot I am working with--a very
intricate verse, in terms of wordplay, puns and so on. In Persian, the meter
of the Bustan is the one known as mathnavi (sometimes pronounced masnavi),
which is also the name given to a subset of Rumi's works. Mathnavi,
basically, is a rhymed-couplet form the meter of which is pretty much
irreproducible in English, partially because of its complexity and partially
because, as Elizabeth T. Gray says in her introduction to, The Green Sea of
Heaven, her translations of Hafez' ghazals, "Although Persian is an
accentual, Indo-European language, the meters used in Persian verse are
quantitative, and were adopted from classical Arabic prosody." As I talked
about when I posted here about my work on the Gulistan, I have for a variety
of reasons chosen to render Saadi's poetry in blank verse in English. What
this has meant is that, for the past two years, I have been working almost
every day in this form, on poems of varying length, from as few as two lines
in the Gulistan to several hundred lines in the Bustan. 

What I have noticed over time is that I have begun to pay very careful
attention to where I place the stresses in a blank verse line to achieve the
kind of fluidity that I think Joanna is talking about. It matters quite a
lot, for example, if there is a weak stress in the line--a function word
like "in" or "of" or "but" that falls on the second, fourth, sixth, eighth
or tenth syllable--whether it falls in the first, second, third, fourth or
fifth foot; it also matters, in situations where a line ends on an
unstressed syllable, whether the first syllable of the next line is stressed
or not. In other words, creating a "fluid but not loose" iambic pentameter
poem is as much a matter of very conscious crafting as it is of what "sounds
right"--and I realize, Joanna, that you did not say or imply that conscious
craft was not involved--because often, I have found, what "sounds right" in
one line, when what "sounds right" somehow breaks the pentameter beyond the
stretching the meter will bear, will have negative consequences for
subsequent lines--negative consequences in terms of whether or not the form
works.

Similarly, it is interesting to watch the way the meter and rhythm interact,
especially in the longer of Saadi's poems that I have done. Sometimes, a
poem will begin--or I should say I will begin a poem with as many as ten or
twelve pretty strict iambic lines, sometimes more, and then the placement of
stresses within lines will start to vary--analogous to syncopation and
triplets and so on in music--and sometimes I will end up with lines that are
six feet long, and so on, but the somehow the rhythm always moves back to a
point where it matches up with meter. This is not something that I think
about consciously until after the fact, but when I do start to think about
it consciously, as I am revising, it is again a very conscious process of
thinking deliberately about where stresses are placed, how many unstressed
syllables there in a line, whether or not that works with the next line(s)
and the line(s) before it.

I would not be able to do any of this metrical crafting, however--and I
think this metrical crafting has a lot to do with the degree to which my
translations are successful--had I not spent a great deal of time at one
point in my life trying very hard to write poems that were strictly iambic.
Strict metrical and formal training, at the very least, provides a way of, a
framework for, thinking about the writing of poetry--whatever form you
choose to write in--that distinguishes poetry from prose in very clear
terms. For me, at a time when an awful lot of what passes for free verse
poetry is really nothing more than chopped up prose--and perhaps should have
been written as prose poetry, a perfectly legitimate form in itself--this
distinction has become an important one. 

//Says Richard, stepping sort of sheepishly down off a soapbox he didn't
realize he was climbing on when he started writing this.//

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