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Dear Martin, Many thanks for such a full and useful response. I am going to start absorbing it. You may or may not hear back from me... some time! L ----- Original Message ----- From: "Martin J. Walker" <[log in to unmask]> To: <[log in to unmask]> Sent: 24 April 2094 21:57 Subject: Re: Sappho | Responding (rather late) to your question about the sound of poets (past), | Lawrence, yes, this has occasionally bothered me; I think I tend to assume | that the "deep" sound is the same and quickly dismiss any basic doubts that | have arisen. I feel a resistance to any continuing concern about the point, | a resistance possibly caused by deep uneasiness. Hearing on the 3rd | Programme what Bunting had to say about the impossibility of "sudrons" (?or | southrons?) really hearing Wordsworth, for example, and his actual reading | of selected poems by W.W., excited and confused me many years ago. I am no | wiser now. I can only offer this: when we read poetry we usually hear it | internally in a way that is more open to phonetic variations than our actual | speaking voice. I can "hear" Scots poetry, for example, better than I can | read it aloud, when I tend to sound like the drunken Glaswegian next door | when as a young married I was living in a Southampton council flat yonks | ago. But the point remains: Wordsworth is a different experience spoken with | a Northumberland accent, though Bunting's version may also have been | phonetically doubtful. When I'm reading Hölderlin, I try to hear a Swabian | swish and lilt, though I cannot reproduce it with my speaking voice. The | implication is that we must develop a geo-historical phonetic awareness for | the adequate appreciation of poetry, even if this is an impossible ideal, | parallel to historically informed (geo-)political, aesthetic etc awareness. | I wonder if Erminia has a very exact idea about the sound of, say, | Cavalcanti. (I hesitate to call up Beatrice from the vasty deep or | wherever.) Does William Herbert have an idea about Henryson's historical | sound? Are these vain thoughts? | Cheers, Martin | | %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%