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Thread: What is your favorite poetic style?

  1. #16
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    I have been reading the introduction to David Hamilton's very original King Alfred's Jewel and was interested in his advocacy of depth in poetry rather than surface word patterning. Anyone agree with this?

    What a disgusting forum! I have just been prevented from posting because I posted a link to support my point.

  2. #17
    Artist and Bibliophile stlukesguild's Avatar
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    Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a talented translator and poet admired for his translations of Dante's La Vita Nuova and a collection of early Italian (Renaissance) poems wrote of the translation of poetry:

    The life-blood of... translation is this: that a good poem shall not be turned into a bad one. The only true motive for putting poetry into a fresh language must be to endow a fresh nation, as much as possible, with one more possession of beauty. Poetry not being an exact science, literality of rendering is altogether secondary to this aim. I say literality;- not fidelity, which is by no means the same thing.

    I wholly agree. I wholly literal word to word translation of poetry does not result in poetry... and is not always even possible as not every word in one language can be simply translated into a single word in another language. We also need to remember that even poetry in our own native language needs to be translated (to an extent) after a passage of time as not only certain words, but phrases, references and allusions etc... become archaic and forgotten.

    The French poet, Paul Valery spoke of translation of poetry from one language to another as akin to the transcription of music from one instrument to another. The sensuous, fluid, rubato of the violin he compared to French and admitted that while a transcription to the piano... closer to English with its breadth... would not be the same... if done well, the music would remain.

    Ideally, poetry should be read in its native language... but how many of us are able to master all the languages from which we wish to read? The best we can do is seek out those translations that have been acknowledged as remaining true to the original "music" and bring a new work of beauty to our native tongue.
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  3. #18
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    Quote Originally Posted by DavidH1 View Post
    I have been reading the introduction to David Hamilton's very original King Alfred's Jewel and was interested in his advocacy of depth in poetry rather than surface word patterning. Anyone agree with this?
    I read some of the introduction to the book on Amazon. The introduction seemed focused on Eliot.

    What do you mean by "depth in poetry"? I assume the "surface word patterning" is the rhyme, alliteration, meter or lack thereof.

    For my part I assume poetry has two components: (1) sound and (2) meaning. The meaning is the most important, but without the sound one might as well forget whatever meaning was intended. In this I assume meaning is the "depth in poetry" and sound is the "surface word patterning".

  4. #19
    On the road, but not! Danik 2016's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Ecurb View Post
    Who is the "author" of translated poetry? We discussed Ezra pound's loose translations of Chinese poems in another thread. Is Pound or Li Po the author? Here's Keats' take:



    So my question to stluke: do you read your favorites (like Dante, Homer, et. al.) in their original languages? Or do you read translations? Since poetry (even more than prose) is dependent on sound, the translation is necessarily very different from the original, and I (at least) would not think myself competent to judge the specifically "poetic" qualities of a poem written in a language other than English. Of course I like Homer -- the stories are great, and the translations are well told -- but their specifically "poetic" qualities are, I assume, very different from the original Epic Greek.

    p.s., to John Keats: It was "Balboa", not Cortez, who discovered the Pacific Ocean. However, if Keats could not appreciate Homer's rule over his demesne before reading Chapman's translation, it seems that the poet Keats loved is not Homer, but some combination of Homer and Chapman. Perhaps some multilingual litnetters can chip in.
    I can only give a very intuitive answer to that, Ecurb. My first reading of Shakespeare was in German, for I didnīt know enough English by then to read the original. I got so used to the beautiful translation of the German romantics Schlegel and Tieck, that when I at last read the original Shakespeare I was disapointed. The priginal verses didnīt sound as rich and colourful to me as those from his German translators. So I think the literary translation is a creative process based on the original text but not identical with it, because one has to look for solutions who work specifically in the target language.
    Last edited by Danik 2016; 04-17-2016 at 08:54 PM.
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  5. #20
    I'd have to say my favorite type of poetry is the epic. The Illiad, The Odyssey, Metamorphoses, Beowulf, Paradise Lost, and The Aenid are some of the epic poems I have read and enjoyed.

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    Quote Originally Posted by stlukesguild View Post
    Poetry is probably the literary genre I read and have read the most. I enjoy everything from ancient Greek (Homer, Sappho, etc...) and earlier (Biblical poetry, Gilgamesh) through contemporary poets such as Anne Carson, Adam Zagajewski, Yves Bonnefoy, and Geoffrey Hill. There are brilliant works of poetry by non-Western poets that I have greatly admired (Ferdowsi, Wang Wei, Omar Khayyam, Nizami, Hafez, Matsuo Bashō, Akiko Yosano, etc...) but I probably read more poetry from the Romantic/Post-Romantic and early Modern period (1800-1950) by British, French, German, American, and Spanish poets than anything else... with Italian, Russian, and Latin-American falling not too far behind. I can't say this amounts to a favorite style because even within this limited range there are examples of epic poetry, long and short lyric poetry, poetry that rhymes and poetry that doesn't, sensuous lush poetry, and poetry of crystalline simplicity. There are also works of poetry that fall well outside of this range that I count among my absolute favorite including Dante's Comedia, Spenser's Amoretti and Epithalimion, Ferdowsi's Shahnameh, etc...

    Thanks.

    I would like to ask stlukesguild: what do you think of the late epic poems of Victor Hugo - La Legende des Siecles, La Fin de Satan, and Dieu - and of the late prophetic masterpieces of William Blake?

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    Terza rima, when the poet can pull it off in English, is spectacular. Shelley rolls the form out at the height of his powers and it's pure virtuoso stuff, the opening to the Triumph of Life is as good as anything in English verse.

    I can only imagine what Dante is like in the original Italian.
    Last edited by Adonais; 04-23-2016 at 04:38 AM.

  8. #23
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    Quote Originally Posted by stlukesguild View Post
    Rhyme is but a single element of poetry... and not an essential. If you eliminate poetry without rhyme you lose a majority of the poetry of Greece (Homer) and Rome, a lot of the poetry of Shakespeare's plays, Milton's Paradise Lost, William Blake's epic poems, T.S. Eliot's Wasteland, Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, etc...

    There are endless marvelous poems that employ rhyme... but just as many... if not more... that don't use rhyme.

    The Raven? I personally like it... but honestly Poe was a better writer of short stories than of poetry and The Raven is far from being a major poetic work or one that blows away all the "competition".
    Rhyme is not essential. Ancient poems and sonnets and psalms and whatever they called them in their period of history were usually sung with a pre-determined melody and phrasing. It was like, we sing like these 4 different ways and that's it, fill in the words with any of these 1000 lyrics, whatever you'd like. The Irish in tradition were much the same way, as a recent example. They were simpler then and their songs and poems reflect that. Much of the time and in the oldest of times all songs and poems hadn't rhymed. There was a pre-loaded way to sing the 100 songs on any one scroll and rhyming wasn't an element. It hadn't even occurred to them in those days that they should pair lines with identical phrasing to make them stand out. When they listened to someone sing they got lost in every note with their minds and ears intent through each melodic line, beginning to end. These days we listen half-attentive through each line, rhymes breaking through to our consciousness wherever the artists may emphasize them. It's not as intense as it use to be.

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