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Italian 'classic' sonnet line was hendecasyllabic. There's an amazing letter of Hopkins on the quantitative difference between the sonnet in Italian and English wherein he calculates that a 14 line sonnet in Italian is about a third longer in real time than its English equivalent, hence the feeling of coming up short in the English breed of the critter. Of course, the sonnet didn't stabilise as 14 lines at birth in Italian, and there are famous examples like the 'long sonnet' translated by Rossetti, with that wonderful last line. On 4 April 2010 06:47, Mark Weiss <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > >> And pursuing that line, I'm not even sure if it makes sense to speak of >> "the iambic pentameter line" outside the context of English language poetry >> written in one of the syllable-accent metres. Though I don't know enough >> about Romance prosody to be categorical here. >> >> (Is Mark around this thread? He'd be the one to give a reasoned >> elucidation in this area.) >> >> > > Reporting for duty. French and Spanish simply syllable count, in French the > alexandrine (12 syllables), in Spanish endecasyllable (11). Not sure about > Italian. > > > Announcing The Whole Island: Six Decades of Cuban Poetry (University of > California Press). > http://go.ucpress.edu/WholeIsland > > "Not since the 1982 publication of Paul Auster's Random House Book of > Twentieth Century French Poetry has a bilingual anthology so effectively > broadened the sense of poetic terrain outside the United States and also > created a superb collection of foreign poems in English. There is nothing > else like it." John Palattella in The Nation > -- David Bircumshaw "A window./Big enough to hold screams/ You say are poems" - DMeltzer Website and A Chide's Alphabet http://www.staplednapkin.org.uk The Animal Subsides http://www.arrowheadpress.co.uk/books/animal.html Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/david.bircumshaw twitter: http://twitter.com/bucketshave blog: http://groggydays.blogspot.com/