Thanks so much for your reply, Jon, and your explanation of these hemistichs!
most helpful and interesting, and thanks for the recommendation of the book
too. I went and googled it and it doesn't seem to be available but I'm sure I
could get it through the local or Brandeis library, so thanks and happy New Year,
Best,
Rebecca
---- Original message ----
>Date: Sat, 15 Jan 2005 09:12:38 -0800
>From: Jon Corelis <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: Cavafy's sounds
>To: [log in to unmask]
>
>> I'm intrigued by those midline spaced caesurae, Rebecca. Are they in
>> the Greek originals? What did that person find wrong with thte earlier
>> English translations?
>
>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.
>
>There's a book by Peter Bien, Three Generations of Greek Writers: Cavafy,
>Kazantzakis, and Ritsos, which has a good essay on Cavafy. My copy was
>published in Greece, but there may be a British or American edition available.
>
>
>=====================================
>Jon Corelis [log in to unmask]
>
> www.geocities.com/joncpoetics
>=====================================
>
>
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>
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