Hi Jon
Thanks for that - it's very illuminating. Such dense concealed art makes me
(suddenly, this morning) want to learn Greek. As you say, untranslatable.
Best
A
On 16/1/05 4:12 AM, "Jon Corelis" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> A number of Cavafy's poems are written in hemistichs, with the strong midline
> caesura indicated as blank space. Typically, the number of syllables in each
> hemistich is constant but subject to occasional, always metrically
> significant, variation of one or two syllables, making the form a kind of
> syllabic verse, though unlike most syllabic verse it also always has a marked
> meter in the traditional sense. Usually such lines are rhymed -- not just
> end-rhymes, but rhymes of the end of the hemistichs, and sometimes also
> between the first and last hemistich -- elaborately but so subtly that you can
> read a poem for years before you suddenly realize that it's fully rhymed. The
> placing and variation of the normal speech accent against the pattern of the
> hemistichs is done with musical precision. The effect is of anything but
> "free verse" -- it's more like verse as elaborately formally patterned as
> Arnaut Daniel's, yet done with such concealed art that you could take it for
> casual conversation. This is one of the great, and untranslatable, things
> about Cavafy.
Alison Croggon
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
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