Richard, I'm in complete agreement with all of this, only you've put it a
great deal more succinctly and tellingly than I ever could. Thanks!
joanna
> 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.
>
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