Just to reinforce one of Rebecca's points: the couplet as used by Dryden
and Pope is largely an importation from France at the Restoration. It's
surrounded by very rigid rules, as to caesuras and lack of enjambment and
the occasional use of an alexandrine in a second line as an indication of
closure. It was an aristocratic convention, meant to be an expression of
hierarchy. So, a very different cultural artifact from Chaucer's couplets.
Mark
At 12:50 PM 2/4/2005, you wrote:
>Richard,
>
>a belated welcome from me, too, and I've read your discussion, and the
>questions, and your replies to them, and various work at your website, so all
>most interesting.
>
>I'm a sometimes translator from the Spanish but haven't chimed in on this.
>If I've
>understood correctly you're not translating from the original but rather from
>pre-existent English translations? I've known of translators who don't
>know the
>original and work from crib sheets, literal translations of the original,
>which
>then, usually as poets, they work into poetry and I think a number of
>translations that are more reflective of the translator's sensibility
>(though I don't
>know if this is the case with the Coleman Barks' translation of Rumi)
>originate
>this way. Perhaps being from the beginning unbound by the original. And then
>there are some who work from crib sheets while in collaboration with another
>who reads the original. So this is somewhat a different process, your working
>from a previous English translation. And so results in a different
>approach. For
>instance, for me, form is integral to the original, if the original is a
>sonnet or
>couplets or has a particular meter that seems to exert some requirement of
>form and meter upon the English. Whereas you included form in one of your
>earlier posts as part of 'time and space and form' as if it were a
>consideration
>primarily of cultural and historical context. So in terms of this question
>about
>Saadi and using couplets, as a translator who works from the original, I'd be
>inclined to use couplets only if it were somehow analogous to his form. Not in
>terms of some 'essence' of the piece, or the making of 'explicit
>statements.' Do
>you feel that Saadi is making 'explicit statements'? I don't know his work
>well
>but reading your translation at the url the poetic passages seem somewhat more
>complex than that, to not be explicit in the way of Pope "The proper study of
>Mankind is Man".
>
> >I suppose I am not thinking of Pope in terms of anything other than a formal
> >sense, the way the couplet is suited to a poetry that makes an explicit
> >argument.
>
>And just in terms of English poetry, Chaucer also used the couplet in
>Canterbury
>Tales and The Tale of Good Women, which perhaps ties in with your earlier look
>at Carruth's essay of the couplet being close to prose, plain rather than 'hi-
>falutin.' It's true that in Pope the couplet is suited to a poetry that
>makes an
>explicit statement, but Pope and Dryden made the couplet somewhat 'closed,'
>fitting the syntax and sense within the form. Donne also uses couplets but
>differently, un-closed, by means of his enjambments, to create a perhaps more
>complex argument,
>
>Anyway thanks to you and to Alison's and Edmund's questions for an interesting
>discussion,
>
>Best,
>
>Rebecca
>
>
>---- Original message ----
> >Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2005 17:59:06 -0500
> >From: Richard Jeffrey Newman <[log in to unmask]>
> >Subject: Re: Introduction and Oops!
> >To: [log in to unmask]
> >
> >Alison
> >
> >>>I can see what Edmund means by nodding towards Marvell; it's not just the
> >ethical inquiry, but a certain sensuality present in the translation, at
> >least, which I can't say I quite see in Pope.<<
> >
> >I suppose I am not thinking of Pope in terms of anything other than a formal
> >sense, the way the couplet is suited to a poetry that makes an explicit
> >argument. Saadi is perhaps more subtle than Pope, but he is very much about
> >making an argument, not so much in the samples I have on line, but in much
> >of the rest of the book, and certainly in the parts of the Bustan that I
> >have worked on so far. Still, I will have to go look at Marvell now.
> >
> >>>With different intent, it has, in English translation at least, the same
> >kind of elegance of Haibun.<<
> >
> >Who is Haibun?
> >
> >>>Then I started wondering what traditions we have in English of this
> >prose/poem style. I could only think of the prose of the King James Bible
> >and Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, but it is early in the morning
> >and my thoughts aren't exactly sharp and scintillating...<<
> >
> >I don't think we have a genre quite like the one Saadi wrote in the Gulistan
> >in English. True, there is mixed genre writing in English, but Saadi's genre
> >has in Persian a name that I cannot remember now, and it has very specific
> >features in terms of form and content, that I also do not yet have committed
> >to memory, that differentiate it significantly--I remember thinking when I
> >was reading about it--from stuff in English.
> >
> >I have, obviously, a lot of learning/research to do about all this, and I am
> >thinking that, when I am done with the translations, there is a long essay
> >about this stuff waiting to be written.
> >
> >Rich Newman
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