Thanks Jon, as Rebecca said, very helpful.
Doug
On 15-Jan-05, at 10:12 AM, Jon Corelis wrote:
>> 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
> =====================================
>
>
> ____________________________________________________________________
>
>
>
Douglas Barbour
Department of English
University of Alberta
Edmonton Alberta T6G 2E5 Canada
(780) 436 3320
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/dbhome.htm
The poet is ecstatic, having dreamt of this visit for weeks.
He takes Erato’s face, dribbling and wild, between his hands
and kisses her gently as if she were a runaway teenager.
Diana Hartog
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