Is Poetry international?

[galloway]

Is Poetry international or is it bound to be only national?

[amuse]

is it bound to be only national?

can you elaborate?

[Jay]

In general I'd agree with internationality of poetry (be it 'intended' or not)

Welcome galloway

[Koa]

big problem, considering that translation is a painful process where a thing turns into another and even if the power in some lucky cases might be respected, there is always a change involved... I guess that in a way the feelings and ways or poetry are universal (well that' s the point of it), but formally a lot is lost or changed...

[baddad]

when I was twelve years old I submitted a few short poems to the Readers Digest magazine company. Although they claimed the poetry to be worth printing, they declined to do so in their own magazine citing a need for translation into 57 different languages (the number of countries where their readership reposed), and the inherent loss of meaning/transferability of reason to different cultures. I suppose 'loose' translations may not suffice for poetry, and literal translation costly or prohibitively time consuming for the publishing industry, unless a large profit is probable. So it goes......

But of course, as we all here know, poetry, a reflection of the human experience, is thankfully, universal.

[Koa]

sometimes thinking of translation or attempting it gets me very near to losing the little mental sanity i have left....

btw, why is this topic here in this section?

[Avalive]

It is universal.

[Logos]

Thanks to the `net and sites likes this, it's global.

Although of course you still will be able to appreciate cultural and literal differences in style and content depending on where the author is from.

Is Poetry international or is it bound to be only national?

[amirah_almas]

I find poetry a tool most commonly used by individuals to manifest emotions or aspects of themselves which otherwise remains extremely private and locked deep within their psyches.
Themes like fear, hopelessness are actually very comforting to come across when studying poetry as it reaffirms the fact that we are all human beings and asserts us to the primordial nature within us.
.It also shows the struggle of people in an oppressed society to express their views and passions, I wonder the type of poetry they would have composed without such oppression. This leads me to a paradoxical belief that sometimes such events that may be overtly seen to be destructive can infact amplify the creativity of individuals otherwise who would have made such allusions which now is platform for romanticism.

[galloway]

Thank you for your answers! Poetry, then, is not universal, it is personal. It is Universal in the sense that it belongs to me, to you, to all, but it gets dissolved into the language it expresses itself. So doing, it becomes universal but it also kills itself. If it wants to survive, it's got to remain personal. We must read it in the original language in which it expressed Herself...

[adilyoussef]

This is a question that I'v asked to myself befor. Looking for the origings of poetry, I'v found none. Poetry deals with feelings and emotions. To translate it, it may lose some of its beauty. For me, poetry is universal but is now dying because no one is intrested in it no more. It is replaced by other forms of intertainement.

[galloway]

No, Poetry never dies. It does change indeed, because Man changes. Poetry will survive Man/Woman and His/her world, beyond time and space. Be careful, though, to listen...

[Maxos]

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see
so long lives this and this gives life to thee.

[galloway]

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.


I remember once I heard a lecture on this sonnet, no. 18 by Shakespeare. The speaker emphasized the relativity of the situation in the first couplet. He said that the comparison "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" could be part only of a scenario in a northern country. The idea of a perfect and eternal beauty would be extremely difficult to accept and offer it to a dedicated lover. Just imagine the heat in a tropical desert, under a torrid tent, among silent dunes, during the the day or under a starry, cold, black sky at night... in May... in Arabia...

[Koa]

poetry doesn't die also because it has many forms... it's not just some lines with rhyme on a page, it can be a song for example...good lyrics are poems to me, and i'm not going to change my mind about it...