Archaic language in writing poetry in the 21st century

[Dr Doom]

Hi all,

As they say, long time lurker, first time poster. I've been browsing the threads here and read something that dismayed me a bit and was compelled to register so that I could get some opinion.

In an old thread, which I won't raise from the dead so as not to disrupt any sense of time here, someone said that archaic language should not be used in modern poetry since this is the 21st century. Words such as o'er, e're, thy, hither, etc. may sound normal in a 17th-century poem because these words were in fact used in everyday speech, but the person argued these words would sound out of place in a 21st-century poem. Some may even say that archaic words in modern poetry is pretentious.

I can understand this view to a degree. But, what if a person today wrote a poem that reflects the 17th century and wanted to transport the reader to that period, would using words of that period be appropriate? Or what if a writer wants to write a poem in the style of Shakespeare, Milton, or Pope? Using the vocabulary of the 16th, 17th, and 18th century would seem right, though I can understand the need to keep words and spelling modern.

Then there is the use of elisions ala Milton. Would eliding words so that a line can be scanned metrically be out of line in modern poetry? I really don't find it wrong to use archaic words in writing poetry today. What say you?

[Lokasenna]

It depends on what you're trying to achieve with your poetry. If you're referencing the thread I think you are, then that particular poet's use of archaic terminology certainly needed a bit of work. But there's nothing inherently wrong with it.

That said, it depends entirely on the poem. Sometimes when you read poetry that's gone in for the full thee-thou-thy treatment, it does come across as somewhat twee. I think it requires a lot of skill as a poet, as well as a good working technical knowledge of archaic language, to pull it off successfully.

I think it was about a year ago (maybe more), but someone posted up a poem on here that they had written in bona fide Middle English. It was an extremely impressive poetic experiment, carried off with flair and aplomb. On the other hand, one occasionally reads poetry (not usually on here!) where someone has thought to lend their rather awful poem a certain air of elegance by arbitrarily (and usually incorrectly) changing certain words to old fashioned forms, with no reference to the theme of the poem itself. IT tends to feel rather strained.

Also, welcome to the forum!

[OrphanPip]

And then you have poets like Spenser who write entire epics in yee fake olde English.

There's no reason why it would not ever work, but like Loka said, it is often out of place in most contemporary poetry, and used poorly.

[stlukesguild]

There's no reason why it would not ever work, but like Loka said, it is often out of place in most contemporary poetry, and used poorly.

I concur as well. Another example that comes to mind is the pseudo-medievalism of Thomas Chatterton. What I think would need to be understood by the poet employing an archaic language is that this language would be clearly recognized as being archaic. The danger is that employing an archaic language results in something of a pastiche of the poetry of the past. I think that a better approach would be a poetic language built upon a archaic language. Here I think of Gerald Manley Hopkins, Ezra Pound, and Seamus Heaney whose language... such as the frequent employment employment of consonance and alliteration... hearken back to older poetic devices.

[MorpheusSandman]

I think Lokasenna and stluke have nailed my own feelings on the matter, though I've often expressed my dislike at the pervasive distaste for archaicisms in modern poetry. I definitely think they have a pertinent place. Not only do they evoke history, but they also evoke a certain remote distance, which I think can be a valuable aesthetic when used correctly. I think the outcry against them is that, as has been said, they're frequently used by inexperienced poets who only want to imitate their idea of what poetry is (or, more accurately, used to be). The funny thing about elisions ala Milton is that they're incredibly common in everyday speech, but almost absent in modern text. It's a good indication of how there actually is a disconnect between writing and speech. I live in the south (of the US) and if I were to write how most people down here actually speak it would probably LOOK archaic in text.

[Dr Doom]

Loka, actually, I'm not referring to any particular poem that someone submitted. The thread I'm referring talks about poetry in general and in fact is a place in which people can ask questions about poetry. I believe it's somewhere on page 15. Someone by the name of aunty-something said that archaic words have no place in modern poetry.

I have to disagree. I think archaic words can be be used in a modern poem that doesn't have a modern subject matter. But I do agree they should be used appropriately and even sparingly. Of course, the overall language of the poem need to accomodate the archaic words. You don't want to have a word like "laptop," "radio," or whatever with words such as "o'erwhelmed" or "e're."

Where is this poem in Middle English? Would love to read that.

[BienvenuJDC]

But it's poetry...how can we place rules for poetry?

[mortalterror]

I've been reading both Spenser and Chaucer this week and I don't find their archaic language to be part of their charm. Their poetry is good for other reasons which may not be so readily noticeable. Thinking you can write like some past master just by adopting their diction is a little arrogant and silly, like those folks who think they can write like Hemingway if they just drink enough and join the army. However, that's all an affectation, an imitation of some radical highly noticeable personality quirk, and is not the substance of true poetry.

Nowadays, there is an emphasis among the young, that creativity is all about uniqueness or originality. One must distinguish oneself from the pack in some way, and rather than developing something altogether new, the uninspired will rummage around in the past for some ancient relic, polish it off, and call it their own. But if they have no deep insight into the past, and what gave rise to their particular affectations they become inauthentic, and their poetry is the poetry of gimmicks.

[Dr Doom]

Reading Chaucer is not like reading a modern poem with archaic diction. Chaucer's wrote in a language contemporary with his time.

Writers have always looked to past writers for inspiration and instruction.

[Delta40]

Where is this poem in Middle English? Would love to read that.

http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?t=41727

The poem was edited over several posts. The content of the poem is timeless since it relates to marital woe.

[Lokasenna]

Loka, actually, I'm not referring to any particular poem that someone submitted. The thread I'm referring talks about poetry in general and in fact is a place in which people can ask questions about poetry. I believe it's somewhere on page 15. Someone by the name of aunty-something said that archaic words have no place in modern poetry.

I have to disagree. I think archaic words can be be used in a modern poem that doesn't have a modern subject matter. But I do agree they should be used appropriately and even sparingly. Of course, the overall language of the poem need to accomodate the archaic words. You don't want to have a word like "laptop," "radio," or whatever with words such as "o'erwhelmed" or "e're."

Where is this poem in Middle English? Would love to read that.

Ah, sorry - my supposition was a stab in the dark. And perhaps I have expressed myself poorly - a modern poem with a modern context can use archaic terminology, but I still think it has to in some way fit with the theme of it in order to work.

Alas, I can't remember who wrote the poem. It was a long time ago. All I remember is that it was in the Personal Poetry section.

[MorpheusSandman]

I've been reading both Spenser and Chaucer this week and I don't find their archaic language to be part of their charm.Well, Spenser was archaic even in his time while Chaucer wrote colloquially. In fact, Chaucer really preceded Shakespeare in capturing English as it was spoken by a variety of people in a variety of ways. That said, I do think Middle English has an aesthetic and rhythm that's completely different than Modern English and I actually tend to prefer it on an aesthetic, rhythmic, and basically phonetic level to modern English.


Nowadays, there is an emphasis among the young, that creativity is all about uniqueness or originality.That's hardly a modern emphasis. Ezra Pound flat-out said "Make it new", and a lot of older writers and poets wrote about originality, the giants of the past, and how to forge their own path.

[mortalterror]

Writers have always looked to past writers for inspiration and instruction.

Yes, there are both positive and negative emulations that are just a part of learning your craft. I was reading some poems of Ruben Dario's last night and it struck me, for the first time, how much he had in common with Walt Whitman. However, there's a difference between incorporating stylistic traits of an author you admire, and wearing a crumpled ascot or beret, dressing all in black, and drinking absinthe. We all know somebody who's done this at some point. The art world is full of posers and poetasters, really superficial people who think that hundred dollar words lead to million dollar sentences.

When Ezra Pound was writing in old fashioned styles, that was righteous. He was playing an incredibly deep game. That was a part of who he was as a person and an artist. It meant something to him and he wasn't just doing it to be different or showy. Modern writers, if they are writing in archaic ways, but they don't have the background for it... they can't do it right, and it's a little insulting to the people who really know the difference, that they would even try. I don't know if you've ever seen somebody try to be something they are not, or speak in an inflected way, in a gender, or accent they don't really possess. I don't know if you've ever seen someone unstudied attempt something foreign to them, but it tends to look silly and inappropriate. That's the way I see a lot of would be artists using specialized language today.

When appreciating the past, we should try to emulate what is eternal and not what is transient.

[mortalterror]

Well, Spenser was archaic even in his time while Chaucer wrote colloquially. In fact, Chaucer really preceded Shakespeare in capturing English as it was spoken by a variety of people in a variety of ways. That said, I do think Middle English has an aesthetic and rhythm that's completely different than Modern English and I actually tend to prefer it on an aesthetic, rhythmic, and basically phonetic level to modern English.

But do you like him for his aesthetics or because he used words and spellings that are now obsolete? I like him for his sense of meter, rhyme, humor, imagery, character, plot structure, etc. In Chaucer, archaism can't be helped. It's just the way the language was back then. But with Spenser I have a right to be annoyed at what I find to be an unnecessarily frustrating aesthetic choice.


That's hardly a modern emphasis. Ezra Pound flat-out said "Make it new", and a lot of older writers and poets wrote about originality, the giants of the past, and how to forge their own path.

I think the emphasis on originality is new, though it is a growing force. The roots of it are in the Romantic movement. The sentiment gets reborn and compounded in the era of Modernism and has reached it's zenith only recently.

I'm not sure how you are interpreting Pound's statement, but I don't think it's as clear cut as you make it sound in your post. I'd have to re-read the essay to be sure, and I don't have it by me at the moment.

[MorpheusSandman]

But do you like him for his aesthetics or because he used words and spellings that are now obsolete? I like him for his sense of meter, rhyme, humor, imagery, character, plot structure, etc.Why must it be either/or? If poetry is about capitalizing on the aesthetic possibilities inherent in any given language, then Chaucer did that for Middle English, and I value him because he wrote in that medium better than any other (at least, better than any other I've read, which, admittedly, isn't a ton). Without his use of "words and spellings that are now obsolete" he wouldn't have the same aesthetic. BTW, it's not really the spellings but pronunciations. I really just think of the spellings as a map to remembering that certain letters/words were pronounced differently so I should pronounce them differently in my head.


I think the emphasis on originality is new, though it is a growing force... I'm not sure how you are interpreting Pound's statement, but I don't think it's as clear cut as you make it sound in your post. I will say that modernism did seem to revel in perversity (literally "turning (art) around" as much as it could) for the sake of being original more so than any past age, and perhaps that came with the hyper-awareness of history and antiquity. I've often wondered if the weight of history mounts on artists as time goes on. IE, do modern writers have to worry MORE about equaling (in their own way) even MORE older greats, or is did the past generations have to face down just as many giants in slightly less compressed canons? Many of the writers the older greats imitated are nearly forgotten now. Then again, that also leaves centuries full of nothing but the best for modern/future writers to try and equal.

As for the Pound quote, it may be a bit more complicated, I haven't read the source in a long time either.

[mortalterror]

Why must it be either/or? If poetry is about capitalizing on the aesthetic possibilities inherent in any given language, then Chaucer did that for Middle English, and I value him because he wrote in that medium better than any other (at least, better than any other I've read, which, admittedly, isn't a ton). Without his use of "words and spellings that are now obsolete" he wouldn't have the same aesthetic. BTW, it's not really the spellings but pronunciations. I really just think of the spellings as a map to remembering that certain letters/words were pronounced differently so I should pronounce them differently in my head.

If you like that kind of thing, then good for you. But when I read:

Aurelius, that his cost hath al forlorn,
Curseth the tyme that evere he was born:
"Allas!" quod he. "Allas, that I bihighte
Of pured gold a thousand pound of wighte
Unto this philosophre! How shal I do?
I se namoore but that I am fordo.

my heart does not leap at the magnificence of "bihighte" or "fordo". That's where I begrudgingly check my footnotes. Now, I love Chaucer. I think he's the second best poet in English, but interrupting my reading to puzzle over what was actually written has a negative impact on my reading experience. I know some people delight in obscure words. There are some folks who get off on those word a day vocabulary builders. That's just not something that interests me.

[JCamilo]

And really, since I learnt english reading, most of the vocabulary was obscure, the meaning was build by the conection of words. So when I read Troillus and Creseyde with original words, the best thing I did was trying to ignore the footnotes and move on by Chaucer flow. Works wonderly (and works of Joyce too, who should be the ultimate argument everytime someone says about if you must or not use some language. You use blablabla if blablabla is suited to blablabla work)...

You are reading Dario in spanish? I got his whitmania from day one, he is more whithman than both Borges and Neruda or even more than one of Pessoa's personas. In a way he is the prototype of the latin american poet of XX century - Whitman + Poe + Verlaine.

[mortalterror]

You are reading Dario in spanish? I got his whitmania from day one, he is more whithman than both Borges and Neruda or even more than one of Pessoa's personas. In a way he is the prototype of the latin american poet of XX century - Whitman + Poe + Verlaine.

Heavens, no. I wish I could read Dario in the original Spanish. Up to now, I've only read a few of his poems, even though I quite like him. The Whitman-like elements weren't readily apparent in the previous translations I'd gotten a hold of either because of the poems selected or because of flaws in the translation itself. Although, it could have been a mistake on my part, for lack of familiarity with Dario himself.

[MorpheusSandman]

my heart does not leap at the magnificence of "bihighte" or "fordo". That's where I begrudgingly check my footnotes. Now, I love Chaucer. I think he's the second best poet in English, but interrupting my reading to puzzle over what was actually written has a negative impact on my reading experience. I know some people delight in obscure words. There are some folks who get off on those word a day vocabulary builders. That's just not something that interests me.Hmmmm... I've often wondered how people can love literature, especially poetry, but not love language and have a passion for knowledge about it. I mean, I've loved language since I was young, and I guess I've always had a certain talent for picking up words, their roots, remembering them, and connecting them to parse new ones. Now, I'm not saying I could read Chaucer straight through without checking footnotes, but it's not as if Chaucer's vocabulary was as large as Joyce's. Once I made it through the Prologue and Knight's Tale I didn't find myself looking at the footnotes all that much to figure out new words. At least, it was infrequent enough not to really interrupt my rhythm.

Plus, as I said to Brahma in the Personal Poetry forum, Online side-by-side translations with hyperlinked glossaries (http://www.librarius.com/canttran/frantrfs.htm) have significantly reduced the challenge of reading works in older languages. Granted, it's not available for every writer, but even texts with good footnotes are hardly all that difficult, especially if you take the time to really learn the new words. An inch of learning goes a long way towards enjoyment in these cases. Otherwise, we're no better than lazy teenagers complaining about reading Shakespeare.

[JCamilo]

Heavens, no. I wish I could read Dario in the original Spanish. Up to now, I've only read a few of his poems, even though I quite like him. The Whitman-like elements weren't readily apparent in the previous translations I'd gotten a hold of either because of the poems selected or because of flaws in the translation itself. Although, it could have been a mistake on my part, for lack of familiarity with Dario himself.

Maybe, but sometimes he is very imitative. As if he tested with several poets until finding a balance. His symbolistic poetry is very typical, less whitmanesque.

[Dr Doom]

Wow, Delta, that is an excellent poem, beautifully written! Impressive. Middle English is very melodious, and I can only wish I could speak it properly, much less write a poem in it.

Speaking of Chaucer, it sometimes amuses me to hear people (usually those who didn't study English in college) say that literature of the Middle Ages is too academic, lofty, and difficult. I think those people have never really read the Canterbury Tales, nothing lofty or noble about flatulence and bedding someone else's wife. Haha!

Now, Piers Plowman is a differemt story.

[mortalterror]

Hmmmm... I've often wondered how people can love literature, especially poetry, but not love language and have a passion for knowledge about it.

I'm less interested in sounds than in organized thought. If sound were all that mattered, Swinburne would be a giant. To me, well crafted language is more about the correct ordering of words than the number of different words used. If I wanted to be constantly surprised by the novelty of our language, I would read a dictionary. Philology, linguistics, language acquisition, crossword puzzles, cryptology, and other word games don't interest me at all.

[MorpheusSandman]

I'm less interested in sounds than in organized thought. Then you should be reading philosophy instead of poetry... I'm not saying that phonetics is all that matters, but poetry does have a musical element to it that's driven by how language works on an abstract, sound level. Of course, all of the meanings tied to words is important, but there are ways to enhance the intent behind thought through the use of language, and part of that is due to the language's sound and rhythm.

[mortalterror]

Then you should be reading philosophy instead of poetry...

And you should be listening to music.

[MorpheusSandman]

I do listen to a lot of music. But when I want thought behind the music I read poetry. It doesn't mean I have to give up the musicality of language for that thought.

[stlukesguild]

I'm less interested in sounds than in organized thought. If sound were all that mattered, Swinburne would be a giant.

Then you should be reading philosophy instead of poetry...

And you should be listening to music.

And this is where Mortal and I have butted heads and differed on not only literature, but also music, and art as well. He takes a very literal approach to the arts. He loves narrative... especially the epic or grandiose narrative. Its not surprising then that he is so enamored of epic poetry, the Greeks and Romans, Hemingway... and less of lyrical poetry, Proust, or James Joyce (although I tend to agree with him in the latter instance).

[JCamilo]

But in the end Mortal is right, the music effect of Poetry is not music (and if You want thought behind music, you obviously do not need to read), but the organization and order of the words. It works in silence.

People has no idea about the origem of Homer's words, not even their real sound. He works. While it is nice to some or other, to have a linguistic approach, it is not a rule, it is not the core of poetry. That is probally what Coleridge or Shelley meant when they said Keats was a greek or a natural poet. He has no idea where the words came, the meaning and yet, knew quite what poetry is.

[shortstoryfan]

It seems to me that many critics of poetry seem to be very interested in the thoughts of poetry, while poets seem more interested in language of just...beauty, craft. It's always terrified me to think that critics think in this way, because honestly, when I'm writing I don't think about the thoughts or rhetoric in the way they do.

[MorpheusSandman]

But in the end Mortal is right, the music effect of Poetry is not music (and if You want thought behind music, you obviously do not need to read), but the organization and order of the words. It works in silence.I don't think anyone is claiming that the music in poetry is literally music (although it's not hard to find direct connections between, especially when you consider the actual phonetics and rhythm of speech and reading), yet what I'm saying is that poetry is about more than simply what's said or the thought behind that saying. If you translate Chaucer into modern English you're still left with his stories, characters, narration, and, indeed, the majority of the thought behind it, but this isn't the same as saying that the aesthetic pleasure, or even the force of that thought, isn't diminished because of the change in language.


People has no idea about the origem of Homer's words, not even their real sound. He works. I think how much it works is debatable though. I generally hate reading poetry in translation, and while I can admire certain aspects of Homer, Virgil, Dante, Pushkin, Goethe, et al. I still find myself consistently disappointed. I read them and get the feeling that all it is are roughly the same words put into a much less effective context, as if Britney Spears did a dance version of Bob Dylan's Desolation Row, or like I'm trying to look at the Sistine Chapel through smudged sunglasses. You can still see/hear/understand much of the genius, but the genius is now buried under the language instead of being enhanced by the language. Even when translations work, and there are certainly talented, poetic translators out there, I still get the overwhelming sense I'm simply reading another poet's interpretation of a poet and that inevitably something is lost, negatively added, and lessened by that translation.


While it is nice to some or other, to have a linguistic approach, it is not a rule, it is not the core of poetry. I would say that poetry is the art of language, which may sound vague enough to allow anything to be poetry, but I think when you really parse everything that constitutes what language is, everything from rhythm and phonetics to extensional and intensional meaning, then you understand that poetry is about taking it all into account, and using it all towards a goal. Theater and prose can get by with ignoring various aspects of language, especially as they're arts typically built more around the art of drama and narration. But poetry can (and frequently does) incorporate these aspects as well while still taking everything else into account. I think when you lose any of these aspects then you're only reading a kind of limited, partial poetry.

[JBI]

I'm less interested in sounds than in organized thought. If sound were all that mattered, Swinburne would be a giant.

Then you should be reading philosophy instead of poetry...

And you should be listening to music.

And this is where Mortal and I have butted heads and differed on not only literature, but also music, and art as well. He takes a very literal approach to the arts. He loves narrative... especially the epic or grandiose narrative. Its not surprising then that he is so enamored of epic poetry, the Greeks and Romans, Hemingway... and less of lyrical poetry, Proust, or James Joyce (although I tend to agree with him in the latter instance).

I would say more with translation - if we will take your argument about Mortal, it could be assumed that his love of lyrical poetry is determined by the same criterion, that is, Du Fu over Li Bai, because of the other's realist style. But take out the translation, Du Fu is the far more device-heavy poet. His words are more archaic, his references more numerous, Li Bai was known for his not caring, and his use of simpler diction that the elevated authorities at times decried as too simple. Should we say then, that his penchants derive from the work of translations, in that Virgil himself is dense as hell in the Latin, using a literary language as apposed to a vulgar one, the exact opposite of someone like Augustine (though Augustine was a king rambler)?

[mortalterror]

I would say more with translation - if we will take your argument about Mortal, it could be assumed that his love of lyrical poetry is determined by the same criterion, that is, Du Fu over Li Bai, because of the other's realist style. But take out the translation, Du Fu is the far more device-heavy poet. His words are more archaic, his references more numerous, Li Bai was known for his not caring, and his use of simpler diction that the elevated authorities at times decried as too simple. Should we say then, that his penchants derive from the work of translations, in that Virgil himself is dense as hell in the Latin, using a literary language as apposed to a vulgar one, the exact opposite of someone like Augustine (though Augustine was a king rambler)?

It's not Du Fu's realist style I like better. I like Li Bai just fine. However, I find Du Fu's content more appealing. I'm more attracted to Bai Juyi than Li Bai for similar reasons, which is no reflection on Li Bai. I like him too.

I wouldn't say that Augustine is easy reading. He was a teacher of rhetoric, as well as a master theologian, and it shows in everything he wrote. His parables are deep and many layered. His references are frequent, think Bacon or Montaigne. You have to stay on your toes when reading St Augustine. His Confessions can get as complex as Plato's Republic or Dante's Divine Comedy.

I don't think my belief that language is first and foremost a vehicle for conveying thought to other persons was derived from my history of reading books in translation. I feel the same way about books in my native tongue. I tend to eschew the more shallow end of things. Light weight writing bores the hell out of me. It makes my brain go to sleep. Nonsense verse gives me back nothing comparable to the exhilaration I feel reading The Bhagavad Gita.

Since the concept of translation has now come up, there is something I wanted to ask you. You've been learning Mandarin (is it?) to read the Chinese classics in their original language. But I was reading a short story of Lu Xun's recently and there was some talk about the archaisms of ancient Chinese verse versus modern Chinese verse. Are you having any trouble reading the ancient texts as opposed to the modern? Does the sense come through though the sound has changed or what? And does that added difficulty ever effect the joy you receive in reading?

[JCamilo]

I think how much it works is debatable though.

It is not debatable at all. Homer power does not come from his original idiom. He is mostly read out of greek, and even greek is not the same language he wrote, the sound of the words lost. The most durable and perhaps powerful poet of all time power come from "unfaithfullness".


I generally hate reading poetry in translation, and while I can admire certain aspects of Homer, Virgil, Dante, Pushkin, Goethe, et al. I still find myself consistently disappointed. I read them and get the feeling that all it is are roughly the same words put into a much less effective context, as if Britney Spears did a dance version of Bob Dylan's Desolation Row, or like I'm trying to look at the Sistine Chapel through smudged sunglasses. You can still see/hear/understand much of the genius, but the genius is now buried under the language instead of being enhanced by the language. Even when translations work, and there are certainly talented, poetic translators out there, I still get the overwhelming sense I'm simply reading another poet's interpretation of a poet and that inevitably something is lost, negatively added, and lessened by that translation.

And there is translations that improve the original, as would defend Pound and Borges. And it is not hard to find it: 1001 Nights is strong due the translations. King James Bible. Chapman or Pope classical translations. Baudelaire and Mallarme translations of Poe. Translations are not a loss, neither can be dimished or reduce to simple idiomatic exchange. All is interpretation, all is added.


I would say that poetry is the art of language, which may sound vague enough to allow anything to be poetry, but I think when you really parse everything that constitutes what language is, everything from rhythm and phonetics to extensional and intensional meaning, then you understand that poetry is about taking it all into account, and using it all towards a goal. Theater and prose can get by with ignoring various aspects of language, especially as they're arts typically built more around the art of drama and narration. But poetry can (and frequently does) incorporate these aspects as well while still taking everything else into account. I think when you lose any of these aspects then you're only reading a kind of limited, partial poetry.

Joyce has show poetry is not contrary to prose (Joyce being not the only one). Just like Keats wrote without knowing from where the word Nightingale came, you can write poetry and like poetry without deepth linguistic knowledge. And just like Lewis Carroll showed (and Joyce and Guimaraes Rosa followed) the formation of words can enrich poetry, it is all used in minor or major part by poets.

[stlukesguild]

I think how much it works is debatable though. I generally hate reading poetry in translation, and while I can admire certain aspects of Homer, Virgil, Dante, Pushkin, Goethe, et al. I still find myself consistently disappointed. I read them and get the feeling that all it is are roughly the same words put into a much less effective context, as if Britney Spears did a dance version of Bob Dylan's Desolation Row, or like I'm trying to look at the Sistine Chapel through smudged sunglasses. You can still see/hear/understand much of the genius, but the genius is now buried under the language instead of being enhanced by the language. Even when translations work, and there are certainly talented, poetic translators out there, I still get the overwhelming sense I'm simply reading another poet's interpretation of a poet and that inevitably something is lost, negatively added, and lessened by that translation.

Your analogy of Bob Dylan as interpreted by Britney Spears is apt... but you seem to assume that all the interpreters are lacking in genius of their own. I think of literary translation not unlike transcription in music. The goal is to retain the music, but there is a recognition that the piano has a different range and vocabulary than the violin or the harpsichord. Bob Dylan by Britney Spears may be painful to imagine... but the Byrds and the Band achieved something of real merit with Dylan's songs. One suspects that the 23rd Psalm is actually better in the King James English translation than it was in the original Hebrew. Obviously a mastery of the original language is to be preferred over all else... but such is an impossibility if one wishes to gain a grasp of a wide array of literature. Even if we master the language, how much of the "meaning" is contained in cultural references that are lost in a short time... even within our own language? How much that Blake, Coleridge, Donne, Shakespeare, Chaucer, etc... refer to demand that we turn to our annotated texts?

[mortalterror]

I think how much it works is debatable though. I generally hate reading poetry in translation, and while I can admire certain aspects of Homer, Virgil, Dante, Pushkin, Goethe, et al. I still find myself consistently disappointed. I read them and get the feeling that all it is are roughly the same words put into a much less effective context, as if Britney Spears did a dance version of Bob Dylan's Desolation Row, or like I'm trying to look at the Sistine Chapel through smudged sunglasses. You can still see/hear/understand much of the genius, but the genius is now buried under the language instead of being enhanced by the language. Even when translations work, and there are certainly talented, poetic translators out there, I still get the overwhelming sense I'm simply reading another poet's interpretation of a poet and that inevitably something is lost, negatively added, and lessened by that translation.

Your analogy of Bob Dylan as interpreted by Britney Spears is apt... but you seem to assume that all the interpreters are lacking in genius of their own. I think of literary translation not unlike transcription in music. The goal is to retain the music, but there is a recognition that the piano has a different range and vocabulary than the violin or the harpsichord. Bob Dylan by Britney Spears may be painful to imagine... but the Byrds and the Band achieved something of real merit with Dylan's songs. One suspects that the 23rd Psalm is actually better in the King James English translation than it was in the original Hebrew. Obviously a mastery of the original language is to be preferred over all else... but such is an impossibility if one wishes to gain a grasp of a wide array of literature. Even if we master the language, how much of the "meaning" is contained in cultural references that are lost in a short time... even within our own language? How much that Blake, Coleridge, Donne, Shakespeare, Chaucer, etc... refer to demand that we turn to our annotated texts?

Here I agree somewhat with Stlukesguild. Jimi Hendrix, The Rolling Stones, The Band, The Byrds, Johnny Cash, Eric Clapton, The Grateful Dead, Guns N Roses, and Bob Marley all made covers of Bob Dylan songs, some of them better than the originals. I don't know if any of you have heard the Rebecca Black song Friday recently, but Stephen Colbert definitely improved it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1ahPFwGWVo

[MorpheusSandman]

It is not debatable at all. Homer power does not come from his original idiom.Homer's "power" may not come from his original language, but Homer's "poetry" very much comes from that. The part of Homer that survives in translation is the narrative. Indeed, would Homer still be so beloved were it not for his influence on Western narrative art, and would he have been beloved to begin with without his powerful use of the Greek language? You can't just point to the Western canon and say "See? The power of poetry survives in translation" because what you're pointing to that's survived may not be the poetry but something else that was originally related through poetry. You can translate Homer in prose (as Dante is so frequently translated into prose) and what you have is no longer poetry but a prose rendition of poetry that still may contain some poetic elements. But no matter how you look at it, you're still separated from what made the original great poetry.


And there is translations that improve the original, as would defend Pound and Borges.But then you're still reading a different work. Arthur C Clarke's and Kubrick's 2001 both stem from the same source and tell the same basic story, but there's no denying that they're two very different works. You can't translate without changing something (not just rhythm, form, phonetics, etc., but also subtle layers of meaning inherent in the original language), and you can't change something without creating something different. HOW different is another matter, but it should still be clear it's not the original.


Joyce has show poetry is not contrary to prose (Joyce being not the only one). You can always find exceptions that blur boundaries and definition distinctions, but they are nonetheless exceptions and don't effect the core of what intensions these words carry. If you say "poetry" people do not think of Joyce or others who wrote poetic prose, or, if you insist, prose poetry. You can frequently combine arts, like prose and poetry, to create fusions (opera is music and theater, afterall), but that doesn't mean that prose and poetry still aren't different, and that they still don't extensionally refer to different things. Afterall, when Joyce fused poetry and prose, what elements did he put together to begin with? Answer that and you begin to understand the distinction between the two.

[MorpheusSandman]

Your analogy of Bob Dylan as interpreted by Britney Spears is apt... but you seem to assume that all the interpreters are lacking in genius of their own. I think of literary translation not unlike transcription in music. The goal is to retain the music, but there is a recognition that the piano has a different range and vocabulary than the violin or the harpsichord. Bob Dylan by Britney Spears may be painful to imagine... but the Byrds and the Band achieved something of real merit with Dylan's songs. One suspects that the 23rd Psalm is actually better in the King James English translation than it was in the original Hebrew. Obviously a mastery of the original language is to be preferred over all else... but such is an impossibility if one wishes to gain a grasp of a wide array of literature. Even if we master the language, how much of the "meaning" is contained in cultural references that are lost in a short time... even within our own language? How much that Blake, Coleridge, Donne, Shakespeare, Chaucer, etc... refer to demand that we turn to our annotated texts?All of this is very true, and I realized as I wrote the Dylan/Spears analogy that there are plenty of poetic, talented translators out there that we should be thankful for. In fact, no translators are bad enough to be like Britney interpreting Dylan. But all I was relating was my own disappointment of feeling like I'm separated from the original text and author. Yes, many artists have done superb covers of Dylan songs, but their covers are nonetheless distinct from the original. We realize when we're listening to a cover where all that remains is the lyrics, but the new rendering of the music can (and does) transform the way we react to those lyrics. I guess that was my general point. It's not really about quality but the change of context (form, language, etc.) affecting a change of reaction. Dylan and Hendrix's renditions of All Along the Watchtower are both excellent, but I don't feel remotely the same listening to either, despite the same lyrics and similar melodies. The feelings and moods they evoke are quite different. The music of language, as well as the complex networks of associated extensional and intensional meaning, works the same way when we're talking about translation, and poetry typically tries to take full advantage of both of these elements that are inevitably lost or changed.

I do agree that we face a similar challenge even within English. Language's fluidity pretty much guarantees that associations and meanings are going to be changed. Language's greatest strength as a tool is its customizable flexibility, but that can work both for and against it as a medium for art. At least the language of music (in terms of what written notation refers to) doesn't change. That said, at least the difficulty of reading older forms of English is mediated by our knowing what MOST of the words mean. Some words remain intact and unchanged, some are only changed in pronunciation, and others may have lost/gained a few associations that don't severely limit our ability to understand the sense and meaning. At worst, reading older English is like reading a language with occasional gaps in meaning that can be mended by a simple gloss or footnote. That's hardly the same as translation where EVERY word is changed, not to mention the form, grammar, sound, etc.

[JBI]

It's not Du Fu's realist style I like better. I like Li Bai just fine. However, I find Du Fu's content more appealing. I'm more attracted to Bai Juyi than Li Bai for similar reasons, which is no reflection on Li Bai. I like him too.

I wouldn't say that Augustine is easy reading. He was a teacher of rhetoric, as well as a master theologian, and it shows in everything he wrote. His parables are deep and many layered. His references are frequent, think Bacon or Montaigne. You have to stay on your toes when reading St Augustine. His Confessions can get as complex as Plato's Republic or Dante's Divine Comedy.

I don't think my belief that language is first and foremost a vehicle for conveying thought to other persons was derived from my history of reading books in translation. I feel the same way about books in my native tongue. I tend to eschew the more shallow end of things. Light weight writing bores the hell out of me. It makes my brain go to sleep. Nonsense verse gives me back nothing comparable to the exhilaration I feel reading The Bhagavad Gita.

Since the concept of translation has now come up, there is something I wanted to ask you. You've been learning Mandarin (is it?) to read the Chinese classics in their original language. But I was reading a short story of Lu Xun's recently and there was some talk about the archaisms of ancient Chinese verse versus modern Chinese verse. Are you having any trouble reading the ancient texts as opposed to the modern? Does the sense come through though the sound has changed or what? And does that added difficulty ever effect the joy you receive in reading?

This deserves a thread on itself, but I'll give it a go. Classical Chinese is as distant to modern Chinese as French is to Latin, though it comes with adding more than anything else. Modern Chinese favors grammatical constructs, and two character words, whereas with the exception of a few words, classical Chinese favors single character words, and rather minimalist grammatical phrasing - simply put, much of the understood meaning is come by juxtaposition of characters in a phrase, given its ungrammatical structure then, classical Chinese prose itself relies on prosody, that is, a set length of phrase usually 4 or 5 characters to create a sort of tempo and division.

That being said, the sound of Chinese has changed nearly completely - the sound of Confucian readings in their original is undoubtedly as distant as Indo-European pronunciations - you can look back, and you can guess at certain things based on rhyme tables, but you cannot get there.

Tang dynasty Chinese too is distant, though far closer to Cantonese than Mandarin. The sounds of these poems though can be reconstructed, with difficulty albeit, through assembly work based on comparison of rhymes, and a system of identifying sounds (the tone of Chinese had been important to writing since the 3rd century CD, so a system of dividing a sound into two phonemes, an initial and final (with a tone), and then displaying the sound of a character by two characters (one for the initial, and one for the final and tone) became common. This was a great step because it also allowed unclear passages (since Chinese classical character usage tended to have more than one "sound" for each character in around 20% of cases, and often passages' meanings could drastically be altered as a result) to be read, and also left a legacy of how to read certain phrases (and later to reconstruct the now extinct language)).

Prosody itself since the discovery of tones (that is, people were speaking without realizing they distinguished sounds that way) brought in metrics that were totally rooted in the way tones change - Du Fu would be the expert of closed form poetry, since he follows form as closely as Dryden or Pope follow couplets. Also, the order of ideas became a great part of the pattern, with associative elements and parallels being a great part of the art form.

As for reading though, that is, reading for the meaning and the enjoyment, the experience must be akin to Latin readers reading Ancient Greek with their own reconfigured pronunciation of how it should sound (of course, more of the sound is lost in Chinese, as the Tones and rhymes, though often being half rhymes, or rather close, no longer match up, especially in Mandarin which is rooted in Northern "Barbarian" languages). The poems still can be enjoyed, but perhaps not to the fullest capacity that reconfiguring sounds, or reading in alternative dialects can facilitate. As for things written before the Tang Dynasty though, the sound is lost, and it is useless to try and recreate it.

As for the meaning and the language itself, it is like learning a separate language. It's like learning a Latin word, and then comparing it to an Italian equivalent - sometimes they are close, other times the meaning has totally been altered or a new word has replaced it. The biggest problem though comes from the instability of Classical Chinese, in that meaning is something of a debate (is this character to be read a) and signify this, or to be read b) and signify that, what is the subject of this sentence that has been left out, is this literal or figurative, etc.), likewise, a great pain comes from usage of obscure or archaic words for effect (if you think Spenser's archaisms are a pain, try reading Chinese texts).


As for meaning coming through, it does, but like any second or third, or whatever language, it must be worked at hard to gain proficiency. Sound generally has no bearing on the meaning, with the exception of making distinction between readings of characters (if the character has two or more sounds, you must be able to distinguish the different meanings). Modern Chinese verse is rather simple comparatively, and follows much stricter rules of grammar, but loser rules of prosody, so the meaning is easy enough to get, though the art of the ancient language is lost.

As for difficulty effecting the joy - well, at times it is very annoying, the same way reading Spenser can get annoying. But when you read things that you like, and you work at it, it is rewarding. Poetic sentiments in Chinese may be difficult, but the rewards are great. Even with sound changes, the beauty is still there.

Prose has lost relatively nothing in the sound change, and is far more accessible (especially after the movement to resimplify diction came about at the end of the Tang). It is perhaps the most crisp language ever created, and by far the most minimalist, putting Norse Sagas and Hemmingway to shame in its simple complexity.

Generally though, the major challenge is understanding the culture behind it - even Chinese people have great difficulty with it - the references, the meaning, the implication - all that is rooted in things long past. Western students have a hard time with Greek references, try taking that, and adding to it every single sentence of the classics and you'll have some idea of the scope required to get every single reference.

Still, it is very rewarding, and even Modern Mandarin literature has its rewards (though I have not dared to try and read Ming-Qing prose works entirely in Chinese yet, as they are quite lengthy and have their own peculiarities).

[JCamilo]

Homer's "power" may not come from his original language, but Homer's "poetry" very much comes from that. The part of Homer that survives in translation is the narrative. Indeed, would Homer still be so beloved were it not for his influence on Western narrative art, and would he have been beloved to begin with without his powerful use of the Greek language?

Uh? Homer is reverenced wityout the powerful use of Greek language. His greek prounuce, origem is lost, but even so, translations from greek are rare, only in the last centuries they went after it. Homer is an evidence that poetry can be powerful while translated. Not arguable.


You can't just point to the Western canon and say "See? The power of poetry survives in translation" because what you're pointing to that's survived may not be the poetry but something else that was originally related through poetry.

Every momment you imply narrative is not poetry, I must say it is a wrong path. Poetry is how narrative is dealt and certainly, lot of what has survive from Homer is poetry.


You can translate Homer in prose (as Dante is so frequently translated into prose) and what you have is no longer poetry but a prose rendition of poetry that still may contain some poetic elements. But no matter how you look at it, you're still separated from what made the original great poetry.

In case of Homer it is the norm. And what problem this caused?


But then you're still reading a different work. Arthur C Clarke's and Kubrick's 2001 both stem from the same source and tell the same basic story, but there's no denying that they're two very different works. You can't translate without changing something (not just rhythm, form, phonetics, etc., but also subtle layers of meaning inherent in the original language), and you can't change something without creating something different. HOW different is another matter, but it should still be clear it's not the original.

Considering every reading experience is different, does not matter. Having different experiences is always from the original. And I have no problem with that, sometimes the distance from the original is healthy.


You can always find exceptions that blur boundaries and definition distinctions, but they are nonetheless exceptions and don't effect the core of what intensions these words carry. If you say "poetry" people do not think of Joyce or others who wrote poetic prose, or, if you insist, prose poetry. You can frequently combine arts, like prose and poetry, to create fusions (opera is music and theater, afterall), but that doesn't mean that prose and poetry still aren't different, and that they still don't extensionally refer to different things. Afterall, when Joyce fused poetry and prose, what elements did he put together to begin with? Answer that and you begin to understand the distinction between the two.

Prose-poetry is not a exception. Is basically a norm. XIX and XX century history of prose is the approach of prose to poetical level and they did it. Joyce is just the extreme example, as Finnegans wakes explodes it. But Flaubert, Maupassant, Poe, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, Borges, Cortazar, Fernando Pessoa, Tchekhov, Apollinarie, Manoel Bandeira, Lautreamont, Guimaraes Rosa... are all notable "exceptions".

Unless you define strictly poetry as poems written in verse, then, making not poetry to be about language (your argument) but rather about edition of a text (rather restrictive), poetry used in prose is a norm.

[MorpheusSandman]

Uh? Homer is reverenced wityout the powerful use of Greek language. His greek prounuce, origem is lost, but even so, translations from greek are rare, only in the last centuries they went after it. Homer is an evidence that poetry can be powerful while translated. Not arguable. You seem to be missing my point. I am not arguing that Homer isn't revered, or that Homer isn't powerful/doesn't work in translation, what I'm arguing is that what you read of Homer in translation is not Homer's poetry, but frequently a prose interpretation of Homer's narrative excised from his poetry. Homer is not evidence that poetry is powerful when translated, Homer is evidence that narrative survives translation while poetry doesn't.


Considering every reading experience is different, does not matter. Having different experiences is always from the original. And I have no problem with that, sometimes the distance from the original is healthy. Reading experiences might be different, but at least when people are reading the original work they know their experiences and reaction is against the same object and not some interpretative reworking of the same object.


Prose-poetry is not a exception. Is basically a norm. XIX and XX century history of prose is the approach of prose to poetical level and they did it. I don't think the writers you listed are anything but exceptions. You seem to be living in a world where there is no distinction between prose, poetry, and narrative. If the question is "who's your favorite poet?" you'd say it's equally valid to answer Flaubert as it would be to answer John Donne, or if the question is "who's your favorite prose writer?" it'd be equally valid to answer Virgil as Faulkner. Again, I'm not disputing that prose and poetry can't be combined, but this still doesn't mean there isn't a difference, just like when you combine theater and music into opera it doesn't mean there isn't a difference between theater and music.

If this is just a dispute over definitions, then a simple extensional experiment could easily resolve it. Lay out examples of what would be considered classic examples of poetry, prose, and then prose poetry and ask people to label them. As is typically the case, you can't change reality by simply changing definitions. There is a clear difference between Donne and Flaubert, Virgil and Faulkner, and any other writers you'd like to throw out there who wrote distinctively in prose, distinctively in poetry, or mixed the two together. If you write out Homer in prose, nobody who didn't automatically associate Homer with poetry would label it poetry.

FWIW, I don't strictly define poetry as being about verse, yet verse and form are classic elements of poetry that affect the experience of reading it. They're also something irrevocably lost when you translate poetry.

[JCamilo]

You seem to be missing my point. I am not arguing that Homer isn't revered, or that Homer isn't powerful/doesn't work in translation, what I'm arguing is that what you read of Homer in translation is not Homer's poetry, but frequently a prose interpretation of Homer's narrative excised from his poetry. Homer is not evidence that poetry is powerful when translated, Homer is evidence that narrative survives translation while poetry doesn't.

I am not missing at all. You argue the power of Homer is under debate. It is not. Without knowing how the words sounded, his poetry is highly influential. And prose translations of Homer are quite recent, so His poetry survives, his greek didn't. It is not arguable: poetry is work with language, not work with an idiom.


Reading experiences might be different, but at least when people are reading the original work they know their experiences and reaction is against the same object and not some interpretative reworking of the same object.

I would wonder what relevance is this one, but even this is false. Your view on a Dostoievisky may have changed because you read a critic about it. You go to Brothers K and read and see "Oh, how could I not see this first time, thank good Nabokov opened my eyes..."


I don't think the writers you listed are anything but exceptions.

Yuo cann't have exceptions when you have hundreds of representative authors and those who are the most imitated authors of their time as exceptions. They became norm.


You seem to be living in a world where there is no distinction between prose, poetry, and narrative. If the question is "who's your favorite poet?"

Lautreamont is my favorite poet.


you'd say it's equally valid to answer Flaubert as it would be to answer John Donne, or if the question is "who's your favorite prose writer?" it'd be equally valid to answer Virgil as Faulkner.

Quite illogical. Prose is a format not used by Virgil. So I could not claim it.



Again, I'm not disputing that prose and poetry can't be combined, but this still doesn't mean there isn't a difference, just like when you combine theater and music into opera it doesn't mean there isn't a difference between theater and music.

And when you combine Music and theatre, you do not say it is not Music. Just like when you combine poetry and prose, it is still poetry.


If this is just a dispute over definitions, then a simple extensional experiment could easily resolve it. Lay out examples of what would be considered classic examples of poetry, prose, and then prose poetry and ask people to label them. As is typically the case, you can't change reality by simply changing definitions. There is a clear difference between Donne and Flaubert, Virgil and Faulkner, and any other writers you'd like to throw out there who wrote distinctively in prose, distinctively in poetry, or mixed the two together. If you write out Homer in prose, nobody who didn't automatically associate Homer with poetry would label it poetry.

Lautreamont.
I am not changing definitions, POETS did it in XIX Century. Today is undeniable you write poetry in prose, not just verse.


FWIW, I don't strictly define poetry as being about verse, yet verse and form are classic elements of poetry that affect the experience of reading it. They're also something irrevocably lost when you translate poetry.

And gained as it is was already dealt. And this happens with Prose too - Guimaraes Rosa is harder to be translated than Camoes. Perhaps more. And everything affects the experience of reading, so it is irrelevant.
Let's see if you can go beyond Make poetry, even in prose.

[MorpheusSandman]

I am not missing at all. You argue the power of Homer is under debate.YOU inserted the word "power" and created a strawman debate over that. I never used any such word. The exchange that started this was:

You: "People has no idea about the origem of Homer's words, not even their real sound. He works."
Me: "How much it works is debatable though."

Do you really think I was arguing that Homer isn't influential or original or powerful even outside of his original language? You ignored the entirety of my argument that was connected to the statement about reading an author as interpreted by another, like, as I said, listening to Britney Spears do a rendition of Bob Dylan. Yeah, the words may be the same, but how we react to them is affected by how they're rendered in music. The same way that how we react to poetry is affected by how they're rendered in any given language. There are certain aspects that are universal, primarily the narrative, but this is not an inherent aspect of the poetry. A single story can be narrated in a myriad of ways, many of them are anything but poetry.

So we agree Homer is "powerful", but what IN Homer is powerful? Is it really the poetry or is it the narrative?


I would wonder what relevance is this one, but even this is false. Your view on a Dostoievisky may have changed because you read a critic about it. Again, you seem to be arguing against something different than what I said. Our VIEWS on art may change, but that's different than saying the art itself has changed. If I read the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation and someone else reads the Garnett translation, then it's hardly inconceivable that we may end up arguing about something we read not because of our differing perceptions of the same work, but because of the difference in how that work was rendered in translation. If we were reading the original then at least we would know it was simply a matter of differing perspectives on the same work.

I mean, this shouldn't be hard to understand if we go back to the concept of opera and theater. Every rendition of a Shakespeare play creates a different work of art which in turn affects how we react to it, just like every opera production creates a different work of art that does the same. I can name plenty of opera and Shakespeare performances that if they had been my first/only exposure to a given work, I wouldn't have liked it at all. But at least we can always come back to the original score, or the original play (yes, I realize there are authorship issues with Shakespeare) and experience them without the cloud of interpretation.


And when you combine Music and theatre, you do not say it is not Music. Just like when you combine poetry and prose, it is still poetry.But when you combine music and theater you don't say there is no longer a distinction between the musical and theatrical aspects either. If prose and poetry were the same then there would be nothing to combine to create prose poetry. But this is still ignoring the fact that someone like Homer didn't write prose poetry, but wrote in a specific form in a specific language that was an integral aspect of his poetry, which is now lost.


And gained as it is was already dealt.If anything is "gained" then it's not because of what was in the original work. I'm sure we could rewrite some Shakespeare and maybe some things would be "gained" too, but that's hardly the point.


And this happens with Prose too.I'm not saying it doesn't, but at least prose is retranslated into prose. Can you imagine translating a prose novelist into verse poetry? What would be the difference in translationg a verse poet into prose?

[JCamilo]

YOU inserted the word "power" and created a strawman debate over that. I never used any such word. The exchange that started this was:

You: "People has no idea about the origem of Homer's words, not even their real sound. He works."
Me: "How much it works is debatable though."

Do you really think I was arguing that Homer isn't influential or original or powerful even outside of his original language?

Nice, he is powerful, he works, he is not debatable.


You ignored the entirety of my argument that was connected to the statement about reading an author as interpreted by another, like, as I said, listening to Britney Spears do a rendition of Bob Dylan. Yeah, the words may be the same, but how we react to them is affected by how they're rendered in music. The same way that how we react to poetry is affected by how they're rendered in any given language. There are certain aspects that are universal, primarily the narrative, but this is not an inherent aspect of the poetry. A single story can be narrated in a myriad of ways, many of them are anything but poetry.

Again, it is a imense mistake trying to imply narratives are not poetic. Epic poery is narrative poetry, your argument which implies a chasm between both is not sensate. And I am not ignoring at all that you can have interpretations depending the experience (Which is not just britney, it is your moody that day, listening on radio or live, etc), I am pointing that works so well, despite the origem of language, that worked with Homer. So, arguments that imply the experience of poetry cann't be lived, is inferior or transmited by moving away from the original are bound to fail.



So we agree Homer is "powerful", but what IN Homer is powerful? Is it really the poetry or is it the narrative?

I am trying to understand when you point what is poetry in Homer. Or evidences that how the Narrative is presented isn't poetic.


Again, you seem to be arguing against something different than what I said. Our VIEWS on art may change, but that's different than saying the art itself has changed. If I read the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation and someone else reads the Garnett translation, then it's hardly inconceivable that we may end up arguing about something we read not because of our differing perceptions of the same work, but because of the difference in how that work was rendered in translation. If we were reading the original then at least we would know it was simply a matter of differing perspectives on the same work.

Your are too worried with the object. The object is not art. The experiences are. You can obviously present the same experience with different objects, fidelity is not necessary as you claim.


I mean, this shouldn't be hard to understand if we go back to the concept of opera and theater. Every rendition of a Shakespeare play creates a different work of art which in turn affects how we react to it, just like every opera production creates a different work of art that does the same. I can name plenty of opera and Shakespeare performances that if they had been my first/only exposure to a given work, I wouldn't have liked it at all. But at least we can always come back to the original score, or the original play (yes, I realize there are authorship issues with Shakespeare) and experience them without the cloud of interpretation.

LOL. You can come back to the original and experience them without the cloud of interpreatation? You cann't. Every experience from the same original can produce and will produced different interpretations, you are not the authors, you must interpret.


But when you combine music and theater you don't say there is no longer a distinction between the musical and theatrical aspects either.

Really? Really? So, I cann't analyse the scenary or figurine (theatrical aspects) as a good, although the soprano was awful, out of tone? Sure, you can.


If prose and poetry were the same then there would be nothing to combine to create prose poetry.

If music and theatre were the same then there would be nothing to combine to create opera. Hey, both are not logical.


But this is still ignoring the fact that someone like Homer didn't write prose poetry, but wrote in a specific form in a specific language that was an integral aspect of his poetry, which is now lost.

Not ignoring it at all. You are however ignoring that the answer Lautreamont ended with your argument. (Aka. I do not need to prove Homer wrote prose, to present poetry used in prose, I need to show examples of poets - reckonized as such, like Lautreamont, who only wrote in prose to end the argument contrary to it. Which is done).



If anything is "gained" then it's not because of what was in the original work. I'm sure we could rewrite some Shakespeare and maybe some things would be "gained" too, but that's hardly the point.

For god's sake. Kafka beining of Metarmophosis is not possible to be translated to many languages. His capacity to delay the action, placing the verb only at the end, is a trait of german language. The point is you started to complain about Poetry is lost as if something is lost in all translations. So, it is not a point, there is nothing special about it.


I'm not saying it doesn't, but at least prose is retranslated into prose. Can you imagine translating a prose novelist into verse poetry? What would be the difference in translationg a verse poet into prose?

Ask Chaucer when he worked with Bocaccio. La Fointaine when he worked with Aesop. Shakespeare when he picked Romeo and Juliet from italian novelino.

[mortalterror]

So we agree Homer is "powerful", but what IN Homer is powerful? Is it really the poetry or is it the narrative?


This is a sticking point for me, and I think (though I don't want to put words into his mouth) JCamillo as well. You are taking a rather hard line approach that poetry is all about the sound of the words in the original language, and JCamillo and I believe that poetry is actually a variety of things, the sound included. To me, what it seems like you are saying is that narrative isn't a vital part of narrative poetry. You are denying narratives now the way you denied thought and meaning earlier. You are stripping away every aspect of poetry that isn't oral. When JCamillo challenges your assumption by stating that prose also has rhythms, meter, and sound effects; thus those cannot be the sole defining characteristics of poetry, you shrug him off.

[JBI]

This is a sticking point for me, and I think (though I don't want to put words into his mouth) JCamillo as well. You are taking a rather hard line approach that poetry is all about the sound of the words in the original language, and JCamillo and I believe that poetry is actually a variety of things, the sound included. To me, what it seems like you are saying is that narrative isn't a vital part of narrative poetry. You are denying narratives now the way you denied thought and meaning earlier. You are stripping away every aspect of poetry that isn't oral. When JCamillo challenges your assumption by stating that prose also has rhythms, meter, and sound effects; thus those cannot be the sole defining characteristics of poetry, you shrug him off.

Meh, the real answer to the question is, who cares if what you are reading is the "real Homer" or not if you are enjoying it.

The argument of translation is weird, as we are prone to make excuse for "it's the translation" when we should judge translation as its own work in itself. If one enjoys Dryden's Aeneid, then one aught to read and enjoy it, and ignore the original. It's once you get to actual discussion when the problem arises though, since more often than not, the serious discussion is not on the work read, but on the original.

[MorpheusSandman]

Nice, he is powerful, he works, he is not debatable. But HE (Homer) is not what we're reading! It's easy to throw a translation of Homer's work under the mental label "Homer", but that doesn't change the stone cold fact that what we're reading is something distinctly different than what Homer actually wrote.


Again, it is a imense mistake trying to imply narratives are not poetic... So, arguments that imply the experience of poetry cann't be lived, is inferior or transmited by moving away from the original are bound to fail.There is nothing about a narrative that is inherently poetic. Any narrative in the world, whether it originated in poetry or otherwise, can be set in an entirely different context. Would you argue that there's no difference between Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey novel and Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey film? Same story, same narrative, presented in vastly different contexts. Yes, the story "works", and it could conceivably work as, say, an opera. But we don't say that Kubrick's 2001 is the same as Clarke's. If we read Clarke's 2001 we don't say we've seen Kubrick's film. Yet, when we read a translation of poetry, which is not the original, we say we've read the original. Why? Only because it's as close as we can get without learning the original language.

You can't escape the fact that if you write Homer down in prose you are not reading poetry, you are reading prose, and even if you try to render Homer in poetic prose, or even verse poetry, you are still not reading the poetry of the original. You can listen to a cover of Dylan by any band you want. Some may be very good. Some you may even like better than the original. You can say that the words are still the same. But what you cannot say is that you've heard the original Dylan song unless you've actually heard it. You can't actually say that you've heard the words in context of Dylan's music as he intended it.


I am trying to understand when you point what is poetry in Homer. Or evidences that how the Narrative is presented isn't poetic.The biggest poetic elements in Homer that can't be replicated are rhythm (including meter) and phonetics. The former was certainly an integral part of Homer's, and most Greek, poetry, as the meter frequently shaped the line and created the natural pace. These are elements of poetic form and language unrelated to narrative. They have an affect on how we react to the poetry.


Your are too worried with the object. The object is not art. The experiences are.So, if you ask someone to point to art, everyone who points to a painting, a book, a theater performance, etc. is WRONG? Art can't exist without others experiencing it? That sounds like an awfully solipsistic (or, probably more accurately, sophistic) definition of what art is, or what people think of as being art.


Every experience from the same original can produce and will produced different interpretations, you are not the authors, you must interpret.Yes, but at least I can interpret one original and not one-hundred interpretations of an original.


Really? Really? So, I cann't analyse the scenary or figurine (theatrical aspects) as a good, although the soprano was awful, out of tone? Sure, you can.Errr, that was my point! Of course you can analyze the theatrical and musical aspects separately, just like you can analyze the poetic and prose, or poetic and narrative aspects separately in prose poetry and epic poetry. See my point? Here's the analogy:

Theater + Music = opera = theater and music still separate entities
Prose + Poetry = Prose poetry = prose and poetry still separate entities
Poetry + narrative = Epic poetry = poetry and narrative still separate entities

So if an artist creates a work of, say, poetry + narrative to create an epic poem, and someone comes along and takes the narrative aspect and then puts it in prose, or puts it to music, or whatever, then you no longer have and epic poem, you have a prose narrative, or an opera, or whatever the case maybe. Ergo, translations of Homer in prose is not poetry. It maybe prose poetry, but that's still beside the point that Homer didn't write prose poetry, nor does it mean there's no difference between reading a narrative in poetry VS reading it in prose, especially in a completely different language.



You are however ignoring that the answer Lautreamont ended with your argument. (Aka. I do not need to prove Homer wrote prose, to present poetry used in prose, I need to show examples of poets - reckonized as such, like Lautreamont, who only wrote in prose to end the argument contrary to it. Which is done). I have no idea what you're talking about now. You seem to be arguing against points I never made.


The point is you started to complain about Poetry is lost as if something is lost in all translations. So, it is not a point, there is nothing special about it. Yes, something is lost in all translations, which was my point from the beginning, so if you agree with that, then why the heck are we in a debate? You seem to be claiming that what's lost (namely, the poetry) doesn't matter, while I beg to differ.


Ask Chaucer when he worked with Bocaccio. La Fointaine when he worked with Aesop. Shakespeare when he picked Romeo and Juliet from italian novelino.And are you claiming that these translations did not affect how we reacted to each? That they're all the same as their originals, or that they're not distinctly different works than their originals?

[mortalterror]

You seem to be claiming that what's lost (namely, the poetry) doesn't matter, while I beg to differ.

No, he's claiming that poetry is more than the sounds, and you can lose the individual sounds but still retain other aspects of the poetry which are just as important as the sound. He's not saying sound isn't important. He's saying that sound is one of a number of important parts of what constitutes poetry. What you seem to be saying with your + and - analogy is that you can take anything but sound out of poetry and still have poetry, which I absolutely cannot agree with.

[MorpheusSandman]

This is a sticking point for me, and I think (though I don't want to put words into his mouth) JCamillo as well. You are taking a rather hard line approach that poetry is all about the sound of the words in the original language, and JCamillo and I believe that poetry is actually a variety of things, the sound included. To me, what it seems like you are saying is that narrative isn't a vital part of narrative poetry. You are denying narratives now the way you denied thought and meaning earlier. You are stripping away every aspect of poetry that isn't oral. When JCamillo challenges your assumption by stating that prose also has rhythms, meter, and sound effects; thus those cannot be the sole defining characteristics of poetry, you shrug him off.Perhaps I'm failing to elucidate my points well, but this is not what I'm trying to say.

Can we at least agree that meter, verse, and form are elements unique to poetry that prose doesn't utilize? Now, that's not to say that all poetry must use meter, verse, and forms to be poetry, but I think when we're dealing with poets who DID utilize these aspects, then they become an essential part of their poetry. I think the same is true for poets who utilized the unique phonetic and rhythmic aspects of their language. So if you remove these elements that were integral to their poetry, then what do you have left? You have the language and its meaning, including the narrative. I don't think the language and its meaning can be poetry in-and-of-itself. If you try to argue otherwise then we'd pretty much be at the mercy of vague subjectivity, ie, any utilization of language that someone likes suddenly becomes poetry. This paragraph I'm writing becomes poetry, even though I'm clearly not intending to write poetry but prose.

Likewise, narrative is a meta-concept that's not tied down to poetry, prose, or even literature at all. You combine narrative and poetry to get epic poetry (and some plays), you combine narrative and prose to get short-stories, novels, and some other plays. But the point I made to JCamilo above is that you can always take a narrative and transplant it into another medium entirely. Of course narrative is an essential aspect of narrative poetry, but do you really think that if you transplant the narrative that the poetry remains? That would require there to be no distinction to begin with!

I don't know why you say I "denied thought and meaning". Obviously thought and meaning can be expressed through all language. But not all thought and meaning expressed through language is poetry. Wasn't it Robert Frost who said, when asked what one of his poems meant, said something to the effect of "do you want me to restate it in a worse context?" The idea is that the medium affects the thought and meaning. If you you remove the medium you're left with the thought, but it doesn't mean you're left with the poetry.

I don't think I shrugged JCamilo off at all. I agree that prose has phonetics and rhythm, but is it the same as poetry, especially poetry that utilizes fixed meter, and is it typical in prose to give equal attention to rhythm and to sound as it is to focus on the content (be it a narrative or any thought/point in non-fiction)?

Like I said, if you actually consider what's lost when you translate poetry, typically the meter, rhyme, verse, phonetics, etc., what you're losing are elements that were essential to what made it poetry, to what made it different than most prose. While in most prose, other aspects (the thought/meaning, the narrative) are the more important focus to begin with, and aren't hurt as badly in translation. Of course, I'm qualifying "most" here. You get writers of prose who focus as much on poetic aspects, which is where you get "prose poetry". In which case, you lose just as much translating them.


It's once you get to actual discussion when the problem arises though, since more often than not, the serious discussion is not on the work read, but on the original.Exactly.

I'm with you in that people should feel free to enjoy works in translation, but I also feel they should be treated as their separate works. "I read Dryden's Aeneid" instead of "I read Virgil's Aeneid".

[MorpheusSandman]

No, he's claiming that poetry is more than the sounds, and you can lose the individual sounds but still retain other aspects of the poetry which are just as important as the sound.Well, I never claimed that poetry was wholly contained within phonetics either, so then either we have a strawman fallacy or a misunderstanding. The discussion started over how important specific words and phonetics are to poetry, and all I said was that they certainly create a different aesthetic that can be an important aspect of the poetry. I think when translation got brought up is where the debate about poetry and prose and what's lost in translation started up, but that's rather different than the original discussion.

I don't want this to end up in a definitions game of "what is poetry?" I think it would be better to parse the various aspects that typically make up poetry and discern which can and can't be translated. You lose phonetics, you lose meter, you lose rhythm, you lose rhyme. Whether these are an important part of poetry depends, I think, on the poetry. For someone like Homer, yes, I think the Greek Dactylic Hexameter was a key aspect of his poetic art that's irrevocably lost in translation. What we're left with is the narrative, and typically poetic elements like metaphor and simile (again, not unique to poetry, but typically more common). Obviously, these elements are great enough that Homer still "works" in translation. But do you consider reading these elements the same as reading poetry? Well, if you read them in prose without prior knowledge of who Homer was, would you call it poetry? I think that's the ultimate clincher; show people prose renditions of classic poetry and see if they think it's poetry. It's basically that extensional hypothesis that I'd base my "when you read Homer in prose, you're not reading Homer's poetry" claim on.

[JCamilo]

The problem is that your argument lies in for example, how different is Chaucer orginal and modern english Chaucer, born from the question of Mortal's seek for poetic pleasure wasn't affected by his lack of admiration fom the lingustic aspects. Mortal do let clear he cares more about the word's organization than the richness of vocabulary and you invite him to read Philosophy, as if this would affect poetry reading so much that is reading something wrong.

Maybe it was a tongue-in-cheek remark, but does not help much when you insist in split the Narrative and poetry as if they are 2 and not 1 at same time.

The very logic (Narrative + poetry = epic poetry, poetry and narrative two separate things could be easily used Music + poetry = lyrical poetry, and I could claim this proves music and poetry are apart) is not useful.

You have Dante, before defining metric and words, defined the philosophy and the idea of the Comedy. Milton knew he would write an epic, about what, before he started. The Narrative and poetry can be seem apart, but they are an unity. Why the poet choses that momment, that scene, that system of metric, format is related to his subject. Coleridge knew what kind of words he would use from the fact he was designed to write about subjects like gothic tales. He does not apply the old english much elsewhere - it is suited for his Marineer. And it goes for lyrical poetry as well - because obviously, Homer is not the only poet that works despite the language be almost lost - Sappho or Pindar (those I read more) do as well. You cann't certainly try to argue only what has survive from them is the narrative...

Meter - which is basically the organization of words according to their sylabic-phonetic relation - is used in prose too. So, I cann't agree it is something related to poetic. Certain metrical systems - specially those organzied in verses (this something related to POEMS only) we will not find in prose (which requires less strict ordering, but not the absence of it), but that is all. (Some of Baudelaire or Rimbaud prose poems can be easily split in verses, they would present metrical system, and in fact, in many places they are publish in verses as well). That was relevant to Homer? Nice to him. Rhymes were irrelevant to him, but very commun. Would I rule Homer out, because his poetry does not conform with traits that are not relevant to him but were to Dante or Camões?

And I am failing to understand you.Narratives can always be taken to another medium entirelly? But you just claimed 2001 book is not the same as 2001 movie? I just gave you Kafka example. And there is hundred more: narratives cann't be taken from one place to another no more I can take poems. Try to make a perfect Moby Dick adaption to movies. To a poem. To music. They all will transform. You are resuming narrative to "plot resume", this way is easy. I can pick the poem She walks in beauty... and Say "A poem about the beauty of a woman even in saddness", which can be taken to another language. It was taken, most readers of Byron in other languages get it. it is not narrative at all. It is like the original? No, but if I translate Neruda to portuguese, almost NOTHING is lose. Even his metrical organization can be easily kept. If I translate Guimarães Rosa to spanish, almost everything is lost. It is not a feature of poetry - it is a feature of all adaptations - all can be lost. The narrative, as I have worked recording oral storytellers and producing the text version of the stories, is changed even in the same language.

As the shruging, you asked me, trying to bring evidence of the distinction between Prose and Poetry (I just pointed Poetry can be written in prose), you asked me if we would reckon Flaubert as a poet or not. I just said Lautreamont, a Poet, reckonized as such, which never wrote verses. It's undeniable that today the only aspect of Poetry which is no longer used in prose is the use of verses, which imply the old definition (Poetry as what is written in verse) was wrong, and your definition (The work with language) is applied with prose. You just need to apply your own afirmation.

And the problem is not that you want to read the original or not (I think most of us know the difference), it is the suggestion that poetry is the only one who must be read in the original language to allow us access to the "real" original and that the original is always superior. It is true for all texts.

[Delta40]

http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?t=60749

of course there may be loss in the translation. I listen to celtic songs and am amazed at the translation, which has no poetry at all and wish I had never looked in the first place. Better to use my imagination and senses to appreciate what I am hearing - or reading.

I think poetry and literature should be an accurate reflection of social attitudes and learning of the time which means the original should be the true masterpiece. To translate ME or omit politically incorrect terms from literature is to in some way devalue the work. I mean, if one cannot understand it, then the choice is to study it until you do or simply leave it be.

PS I fail at these discussions!

[MorpheusSandman]

JCamilo, I'm a bit hesitant to continue this conversation if only because I feel the language barrier is becoming an issue for progressing forward. As I read you last post, I could only follow the argument in parts; enough that I get the general idea of what you're expressing, but perhaps not enough that I'm understanding the details. Nonetheless, I'll try to reply, but if I seem like I'm missing something, it's probably just that I was unclear of a certain thought you were trying to express.


Mortal do let clear he cares more about the word's organization than the richness of vocabulary and you invite him to read Philosophy, as if this would affect poetry reading so much that is reading something wrong... Maybe it was a tongue-in-cheek remark, but does not help much when you insist in split the Narrative and poetry as if they are 2 and not 1 at same time.The remark about him reading philosophy WAS tongue-in-cheek, and that was expressed in response to him caring more about organized thought. To me, I think of philosophy more as organized thought than any literature, including poetry. Philosophy, indeed, is almost the science and art of thought. I'd definitely say the art of literature and poetry lies in something besides just thought.

Anyway, I don't know how it's possible to deny that narrative and poetry aren't two different things. All narratives are not poetry, all poetry doesn't contain narratives. Why would it be that when you put them together they become inextricable? You say: "The very logic (Narrative + poetry = epic poetry, poetry and narrative two separate things could be easily used Music + poetry = lyrical poetry, and I could claim this proves music and poetry are apart" which I don't have any problem with! I never even claimed that lyrical poetry WAS music. I would say it is musical, but that's using music as a metaphor. In that case I mean that lyric poetry has certain things in common with music, mostly in the way of rhythm and structure, but obviously they're just as different than similar.


Why the poet choses that momment, that scene, that system of metric, format is related to his subject.Correct, but this doesn't mean that the subject and the meter or format are one and the same. The same meter and format can be used for another subject, and the subject can be used in another meter or form. Ideally, you do choose the best meter and form for the subject and vice versa, but even in that case it doesn't mean they're a unity.


You cann't certainly try to argue only what has survive from them is the narrative...Yet, that's precisely what I am arguing.


Meter - which is basically the organization of words according to their sylabic-phonetic relation - is used in prose too.I think it's much less frequent in prose, and when it is used in prose it's most typically in prose poetry, in which case the metrical aspect becomes part of the poetry aspect.


And I am failing to understand you.Narratives can always be taken to another medium entirelly?I don't think I said "entirely", but they can be transplanted and still maintain the majority (If not all) of the broad sketching of what constitutes the narrative. Kubrick and Clarke's 2001 is basically the same story, the same narrative, but the change in medium and presentation radically changes the affect they have, they radically change the experience. Now, perhaps you might say that these changes are, in themselves, narrative changes, but then I think we're getting into the sticky distinction between narrative, plot, and story. There are certain events that Kubrick changes or omits, but that's often merely due to the different sized "canvasses" available for film and literature to relate their narratives.


It's undeniable that today the only aspect of Poetry which is no longer used in prose is the use of verses, which imply the old definition (Poetry as what is written in verse) was wrong, and your definition (The work with language) is applied with prose. You just need to apply your own afirmation. But then this goes back to my extensional challenge: find poems that are classically considered poems, prose classically considered as just prose, and prose poetry that you feel combines both and see how people react to them. Equally find prose translations of poetry and see what people label them as. I mean, all of this fussing over definitions really means nothing if it doesn't help us know what we're looking at when we're looking at it. Even if we limit poetry to being language in verse, meter, and specific form then we'd still have something much closer to what we associate with poetry than saying that there is, essentially, no distinction between poetry and prose at all. Equally, there's no denying that the vast majority of prose writers do not utilize most elements classically considered to belong to poetry like meter, phonetics, et al. and those that do are usually considered "prose poets" anyway.


And the problem is not that you want to read the original or not (I think most of us know the difference), it is the suggestion that poetry is the only one who must be read in the original language to allow us access to the "real" original and that the original is always superior. It is true for all texts.I never said or suggested otherwise, but I still think MOST prose survives better in translation for the simple reason that narratives do translate better than the specifics of language, and because narratives are usually more of a focus in most prose than the specifics of language. You can sit here and name all the prose poet exceptions you want, but I'd still insist that prose is different than poetry which is different than prose poetry, and latter two typically suffer a much greater deal in translation, to the point you essentially remove the aspect that makes them poetry to begin with.

[Cunninglinguist]

I think of literary translation not unlike transcription in music. The goal is to retain the music, but there is a recognition that the piano has a different range and vocabulary than the violin or the harpsichord.

Err... Sounds like you lifted this notion from the translator's note to Ciardi's translation of Dante's Inferno. The idea is to retain the gestalt, eh? :nod:

hehe


I don't know if any of you have heard the Rebecca Black song Friday recently, but Stephen Colbert definitely improved it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1ahPFwGWVo

Haha, nearly peed my pants.


Edit: I feel like this debate has digressed on to a topic other than archaic language; perhaps a new thread is in order?


But then this goes back to my extensional challenge: find poems that are classically considered poems, prose classically considered as just prose, and prose poetry that you feel combines both and see how people react to them. Equally find prose translations of poetry and see what people label them as.

The question of what is poetry is is difficult, if not impossible. If you read Shelley's defense of poetry he defines Plato as a poet. There's probably never going to be a hard and fast definition of poet or poetry - you've said that language is ambiguous yourself. It seems better, then, for one to approach the word with an open-mind than attempting to impose any absolute definition on it.

[MorpheusSandman]

The question of what is poetry is is difficult, if not impossible. If you read Shelley's defense of poetry he defines Plato as a poet. There's probably never going to be a hard and fast definition of poet or poetry - you've said that language is ambiguous yourself. It seems better, then, for one to approach the word with an open-mind than attempting to impose any absolute definition on it.If I had come up against this a year ago, I think I would've agreed more with this equivocal, "hard to define" notion. After reading Yudkowsky's sequence on words (http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/A_Human%27s_Guide_to_Words) I think (or, perhaps, at least I'd say I'd LIKE to think) I see these issues much clearer. I'd: highly recommend reading: Extensions and Intensions, all of the articles on Similarity Clusters, Neural Categories, Taboo Your Words, and Replace the Symbol with the Substance.

The first thing we must realize is that these words (prose and poetry) refer to objects in reality, and that they're both umbrella terms that lump a lot of organicistic elements into one label, while obscuring what elements both share. In Yudkowsky's terms, they're "category 2" neural network terms that try to determine if objects made up of a multitude of parts should be categorized in one arbitrary bucket or another: His "Disguised Queries" article gives an elaborate example of what I'm referring to. The Rube/Blegg example is analogous to the Poetry/Prose problem. Problem with this is the same thing we run into when we argue about whether Pluto is a planet or not. In such a situation, it actually makes more sense to "taboo" the words and break them down into their parts that make them up, "zoom in on the map" as Yudkowsky says. What are we left with?

If I say "poetry", what do you think of? If I say "prose", what do you think of? Chances are, your extensional associations are going to be pretty close to most people's. Most people are going to think of poetry as words in fixed form and meter, typically utilizing rhyme, typically more concerned with the idiosyncrasies of language, with metaphor, simile, rhetoric, etc. Most will think of prose either as works of non-fiction that relate facts or theories or arguments similar to how you would relate them to someone in a regular conversation, or fiction as expressed in short stories, novels, or most theater. In prose, the content takes precedent over the form and the specifics of language.

Now, with these immediate associations, it's clear that poetry and prose are typically pretty different. If one reads poetry with all those qualities, they'd never mistake it for prose, and if someone read prose with all of those qualities, they'd never mistake it for poetry. Now, if you imagine works that blur these lines, it helps to break them down to their constituent parts. Take Finnegans Wake. Now, it clearly utilizes the idiosyncrasies of language, even though it doesn't use rhyme or fixed forms and meters. It's laid out more like most prose, yet it doesn't contain a typical story that can be easily followed. So, is it poetry or prose?

Well, it's a trick question. Ideally, in such a case, we should be a brain wired like network 1 (http://lesswrong.com/lw/nn/neural_categories). The nodes of "idiosyncratic language" and "prose format" both fire, while other qualities from both the poetry and prose categories don't. So even if we call it "Prose poetry" it really only contains two elements definitely associated with either. Of course, we could break it down much more than this to say that, for instance, the aesthetics of language and phonetics takes precedence over linear content, which would also be a node more commonly fired when we think of "poetry".

This is a much more complex, but also much more complete, way of of looking at the issue. Poetry is, afterall, just a word, yet people fight over word definitions as if they're battlegrounds to be won or lost. But words are just symbols meant to stand for things in reality, and when they breakdown in doing that it's much better to break them apart and sort the nodes that fire and initiate the category to begin with. This is what I meant when I said that reading Homer in a prose translation is basically just reading prose and not poetry, which takes us significantly away from Homer in his original form, which was an important medium in how the content was related.

[JBI]

I'd argue all poetry contains at least some narrative, in that there clearly is a sequence within it, even if it is a concrete poem - there is still a progression, a sort of narrative. All poems die with their end at any rate.

[MorpheusSandman]

I'd argue all poetry contains at least some narrative, in that there clearly is a sequence within it, I think that would be severely stretching the definition of narrative or, at least, the extensions of what's associated with narrative. Where's the narrative in WCW's Red Wheelbarrow?

[JCamilo]

The remark about him reading philosophy WAS tongue-in-cheek, and that was expressed in response to him caring more about organized thought. To me, I think of philosophy more as organized thought than any literature, including poetry. Philosophy, indeed, is almost the science and art of thought. I'd definitely say the art of literature and poetry lies in something besides just thought.

Writen philosophy is literature, but I wouldn't go futher. Keats and Coleridge defined great poets as great philosophers. It is a romantic notion, but they idea that philosophical themes cann't be expressed in poetic form is not correct. Poetry is organized thought, it is not a simple organization of sound and words - otherwise Emerson jibe to Poe (A jiggle writer) would never make any sense. Poetry is not cacophony - it is the best words at the best momment expressing something.


Anyway, I don't know how it's possible to deny that narrative and poetry aren't two different things.


Nobody is denying it. However, we deny that you can split so clear than what survives from Homer is "Narrative" and not "Poetry". Both exists together. Just like the lyrical poets from homer's age are alive too.
I cann't deny a shadow and a man are two different things, but I can afirm that if my shadow is in a room, I must be there too.


All narratives are not poetry, all poetry doesn't contain narratives. Why would it be that when you put them together they become inextricable? You say: "The very logic (Narrative + poetry = epic poetry, poetry and narrative two separate things could be easily used Music + poetry = lyrical poetry, and I could claim this proves music and poetry are apart" which I don't have any problem with! I never even claimed that lyrical poetry WAS music. I would say it is musical, but that's using music as a metaphor. In that case I mean that lyric poetry has certain things in common with music, mostly in the way of rhythm and structure, but obviously they're just as different than similar.

That is denying that Poetry structure also have origem in the Narrative. The way they are split, mnemonic resources, dialogue organization, etc. all affecting rhythm and structure (even the metric was organized from narrations and not otherwise). And obviously, it is not a haiku we are talking here.


Correct, but this doesn't mean that the subject and the meter or format are one and the same. The same meter and format can be used for another subject, and the subject can be used in another meter or form. Ideally, you do choose the best meter and form for the subject and vice versa, but even in that case it doesn't mean they're a unity.

Just like the metric can be used for lyrical purposes or not. It is true for ALL forms of poetry, not just narrative. Anyways, it undenyable the existence of a poetic format (epic) which is only used by narratives.


Yet, that's precisely what I am arguing.

Which is non-sense. Their metric forms all survive. This is evidence enough to rule out such argument. The only lost thing is their language and not only "narrative" has survived.


I think it's much less frequent in prose, and when it is used in prose it's most typically in prose poetry, in which case the metrical aspect becomes part of the poetry aspect.

Without doubt. Yet, it is used, so we cannt say metric is only found in poems.


I don't think I said "entirely", but they can be transplanted and still maintain the majority (If not all) of the broad sketching of what constitutes the narrative. Kubrick and Clarke's 2001 is basically the same story, the same narrative, but the change in medium and presentation radically changes the affect they have, they radically change the experience.

Which is more than enough - all mediums demand changes, all mediums affect the message. Just like I cann't preserve metric system in a translation. Narratives, unless you reduce them to a simple plot, are always modified.



Now, perhaps you might say that these changes are, in themselves, narrative changes, but then I think we're getting into the sticky distinction between narrative, plot, and story. There are certain events that Kubrick changes or omits, but that's often merely due to the different sized "canvasses" available for film and literature to relate their narratives.

Sorry, but Narratives and Stories are the same thing. I can see plot as a resume of the narrative main events, but those are narrative changes. You simple change things - vital elements such as perspective of the narrator (how many movies can actually deal with first hand observer, the effect of subjective camera is not soo good), a 1 person narrator, more the unreliable narrator of Dom Casmurro? The very aspect of dimension, as a narrative is often time x space and continuity, the spliting in chapters... all changed.


But then this goes back to my extensional challenge: find poems that are classically considered poems, prose classically considered as just prose, and prose poetry that you feel combines both and see how people react to them.

People do reckonize poetry in prose today. Stlukes for example often mentions Rimbaud Iluminuries as his favorite poetry book. I mentioned Lautreamont. Poe called Eureka a poem. Today it is undeniable people do not think poetry = verse and can be writen in prose.

Streching to classic is avoind the point- classical poetry would not consider Walt Whitman free verse poetry either. Probally they would not consider Haikus either (which has formats that combine verse with prose and even imagem, and nobody call it non poetry).



Equally find prose translations of poetry and see what people label them as.

Again: there is certain poems of Baudelaire and Rimbaud which I have seen written in verse or prose. People call both poetry. Again: Lautreamont never wrote a single verse. People call him a poet. To argue people do have prose and poetry as an unity you must deny those evidences, not search for evidences where people do not and claim they apply to the whole. It is like saying there is not vegeratians because you didn't found a single one in a barbecue.


I mean, all of this fussing over definitions really means nothing if it doesn't help us know what we're looking at when we're looking at it. Even if we limit poetry to being language in verse, meter, and specific form then we'd still have something much closer to what we associate with poetry than saying that there is, essentially, no distinction between poetry and prose at all.

This is not true. The definition we have in mind must include Rimbaud, Lautreamont, Baudelaire, etc. If your definition makes Rimbaud not to be a poet, then yuor defintion is false. Simple as that. It must conform to the object and not our wishes.


Equally, there's no denying that the vast majority of prose writers do not utilize most elements classically considered to belong to poetry like meter, phonetics, et al. and those that do are usually considered "prose poets" anyway.

There is denying. They do use meter, phonetics, and this is not a barrier of language as Mortal told you so. You just insist in bringing the same point again to your definition of poetry, which exclude the last two centuries.


I never said or suggested otherwise, but I still think MOST prose survives better in translation for the simple reason that narratives do translate better than the specifics of language, and because narratives are usually more of a focus in most prose than the specifics of language. You can sit here and name all the prose poet exceptions you want, but I'd still insist that prose is different than poetry which is different than prose poetry, and latter two typically suffer a much greater deal in translation, to the point you essentially remove the aspect that makes them poetry to begin with.

Prose peotry is not an exception. It is a widely accepted form of poetry, their rule a basic story of XIX and XX history of literature, a major and central influence. Something vague as "Most" Prose survives better seems to ignore authors and just conform to your argument. Do you have any poem of Byron harder to translate than Finnegans Wake?

[JBI]

I think that would be severely stretching the definition of narrative or, at least, the extensions of what's associated with narrative. Where's the narrative in WCW's Red Wheelbarrow?

So much "depends" (present) upon a red wheel barrow, glazed (past) with rain (indicated as past tense), beside (through depends indicating present) the white chickens.

There is a past and a present - the wheel barrow has just been glazed with rain, there is a signified event, and now is being depended upon, a present action - we are in a still state, but there is still a narrative.

If we want to interpret the poem then, for instance, we can say, the wheel barrow, representing the American dream in the form of labor has been glazed with rain, sanctioning it as somehow being recognized by this higher calling, made more soft within the world of glazing, it has been purified, this red, as it stands beside the white chickens, the pure, innocent fruit of its labor, work beside result, the narrative of what is good, and the beauty and purity of its labor-driven aspiration.

Narrative right there. Beyond that to though, from a perspective, the poem is ultimately a narrative, as we are reading top to bottom, the poem opens, and then it ends - narrative in the act itself of reading it, of hearing the elements recounted in your head.

[MorpheusSandman]

Poetry is organized thought, it is not a simple organization of sound and wordsAgain, we may be getting hung up on the idea of "organized thought". When I think of "organized thought" I think of "the desire to lucidly express the contents of my mind to you". Poetry is certainly about more than the lucidity of expression. I frequently write poetry without knowing what it means, without knowing what I'm trying to say, without knowing my theme, without really knowing how to express it. Often it's driven by sheer intuition and improvisational inspiration. I wouldn't really consider that "organized thought" as much as "improvisational expression of thought", which is expressed before it can be comprehended or organized. Philosophy is much more logically rigorous, more "organized", than that.


Nobody is denying it. However, we deny that you can split so clear than what survives from Homer is "Narrative" and not "Poetry". Both exists together.If both exist together then they must be the same thing. I don't know how you can really get around this unless you do like I suggested and break both down to their constituent parts and say which belong to neither exclusively.


That is denying that Poetry structure also have origem in the Narrative. The way they are split, mnemonic resources, dialogue organization, etc. all affecting rhythm and structure (even the metric was organized from narrations and not otherwise). And obviously, it is not a haiku we are talking here. Not quite sure what you're saying here. I'd have to check, but I'm pretty sure poetry has its roots in rhetoric more than narrative, and I'm pretty sure most poetic "devices" did too, and rhetoric was used in far more than just narratives.


Which is non-sense. Their metric forms all survive. This is evidence enough to rule out such argument.You misunderstand; what I meant was that the meter doesn't survive in translation. I thought that's what we were referring to here?


Without doubt. Yet, it is used, so we cannt say metric is only found in poems.Errr, we can say it's only found in poetry if it's never found in prose outside of prose poetry. In such a case, meter becomes part of the poetry aspect of prose poetry, not the prose aspect.


Which is more than enough - all mediums demand changes, all mediums affect the message. Just like I cann't preserve metric system in a translation. Narratives, unless you reduce them to a simple plot, are always modified.Narratives may get modified but they still survive to be largely the same. You can't say this for the medium and the form which is entirely different. That was my point to begin with; you change the medium and the form and you change how the narrative is related and how affective it is, which in turns changes the experiences, which in turn means you aren't experiencing the same work that the original was.


Sorry, but Narratives and Stories are the same thing.I know there's actually quite a lot of theoretical debate about this. I think David Bordwell, one of the leading film theorists, defined story as everything both expressed and unexpressed in a narrative, ie, the history, social context, the implications of what happens between cuts, etc. while the plot is the part of the story that's actually shown and the narrative is how it's shown. In such a definition, story becomes complete context, plot becomes what actually happens in that context, and narrative becomes the perspective from which and manner in which that content is related. So when I used the word I really meant that the basic "story" is the same, while the exact plot and narrative can be changed.


People do reckonize poetry in prose today. Stlukes for example often mentions Rimbaud Iluminuries as his favorite poetry book. I mentioned Lautreamont. Poe called Eureka a poem. Today it is undeniable people do not think poetry = verse and can be writen in prose.

Streching to classic is avoind the point- classical poetry would not consider Walt Whitman free verse poetry either. Probally they would not consider Haikus either (which has formats that combine verse with prose and even imagem, and nobody call it non poetry).I'm not suggesting we should go back to some classic definition of poetry, what I'm proposing is an extensional experiment. Whether or not Whitman or haikus would've been considered poetry under a classic definition, I think it's indisputable they wouldn't have been thought of as prose either. That's one reason we come up with all kinds of categorical qualifiers, like "free verse poetry" and "haikus". Haikus are certainly unalike verse poetry, yet they still probably share more in common with most verse poetry than most prose. I think if we configured them in thingspace (read my reply to Cunninglinguist, which I probably should have addressed to you) then neither is going to be that close to prose, even if they're not in direct contact with each other either.


there is certain poems of Baudelaire and Rimbaud which I have seen written in verse or prose. People call both poetry. Again: Lautreamont never wrote a single verse. People call him a poet.What people? I'd like to see an extensional experiment with people who are unaware of either.


This is not true. The definition we have in mind must include Rimbaud, Lautreamont, Baudelaire, etc. If your definition makes Rimbaud not to be a poet, then yuor defintion is false. Simple as that. It must conform to the object and not our wishes. Actually, this is much not-truer than anything I said. The definitions we have mustn't include anyone or anything. The definitions much simply attempt to outline objects in reality and be able to relate the essence of those objects to others in communication well enough that if you use the word then the other person will have a clear idea of what you're referring to. Just because we label someone a poet doesn't make them a poet any more than labeling someone a unicorn makes them a unicorn. Poetry is an umbrella term that scoops up a lot of elements that a lot of objects share and attempts to tie them together. When the word is such that it includes so many objects of completely different elements to the point that someone unacquainted with the word would never think these objects were similar, then we have a major problem. If you look at Les Chants de Maldoror, Basho's Old Pond, and Donne's The Ecstasy and kind find any similarity between them, then it's rather useless to insist they all must fall under the definition of a single word that's meant to evoke the similarity of objects where there is none.

Yes, definitions should conform to the objects, but when our definitions refer to objects that are completely unalike then it's time to either bring in qualifiers, new definitions, or new words altogether and abandon the old word. If the word "poetry" can't bring to mind any cluster of similar objects, then the word has become rather corrupted and useless. The funny thing is, people seem to fight over words precisely in that state, as if "winning" is going to allow the word to become any more communicably viable. The ironic thing is, I don't think poetry really has that problem. I think you're just so busy finding exceptions to the classic extensional examples of poetry that you haven't even bothered to ask what all of these objects have in common that would allow them all to be poetry in the first place. "They must all be poetry, even though they have nothing in common" is a really silly thing to say.


There is denying. They do use meter, phoneticsSo you're insisting that MOST prose writers concentrate on these elements? I'd be interested to see if you could find anyone to agree with you.


Something vague as "Most" Prose survives better seems to ignore authors and just conform to your argument. So you would argue that more prose authors suffer as much in translation than poets, or that they suffer equally?

[MorpheusSandman]

Narrative right there. Beyond that to though, from a perspective, the poem is ultimately a narrative, as we are reading top to bottom, the poem opens, and then it ends - narrative in the act itself of reading it, of hearing the elements recounted in your head.You really don't find this little more than sophistry, JBI? As if there's little difference between Red Wheelbarrow and War & Peace or even the Odyssey? You're doing the same thing JCamilo is doing, and that's suggesting that two almost completely unalike objects must fall under the same label, although while he's insisting on their radical differences, you're insisting on very thin similarities. Both have the same problem. People don't read Red Wheelbarrow and recognize or experience narrative--events, characters, context, progress, etc.--in even remotely the same way they would in War & Peace, The Odyssey, or the vast majority of films out there.

[Cunninglinguist]

If I say "poetry", what do you think of? If I say "prose", what do you think of? Chances are, your extensional associations are going to be pretty close to most people's.

Well there's the problem. The associations made vary on a personal basis so widely that there is no "hard and fast" definition. You're trying to impose one, which has its various conveniences, but will ultimately prove to be futile and inconvenient.

The semiotics is interesting; the properties that you may call the properties of prose and the properties that you may call the properties of poetry are distinct objects, indeed; in the same way that the symbols 1 and 2 refer to distinct objects, even if you suddenly make '2' refer to oneness and '1' refer to twoness, the symbols are epiphenomenal. All this and how it functions is well and fair, but besides the point.

The word poetry and prose have an ambiguous meaning - there is so much gray to treat it as black and white becomes almost absurd. I don't mean there is ambiguity between the objects they represent, but only in the words themselves. And since this is the case, it is generally best to consider the context of the argument when assessing their meanings.


This is what I meant when I said that reading Homer in a prose translation is basically just reading prose and not poetry, which takes us significantly away from Homer in his original form, which was an important medium in how the content was related.

Then it seems like you're suggesting that a poem is classified as such only in virtue of its aesthetic content. When you don't retain the meter, the rhyme, the assonance, dissonance, alliteration, etc. (which is impossible), all of which are aesthetical, something becomes prose. This seems to be in line with your refutation that the narrative isn't necessary for poetry. All in all, many people would and have disagreed with this. Personally, I have always preferred defining the poet as more than a makeup artist (but then again, so many of them seem to be anyways)

[mortalterror]

You really don't find this little more than sophistry, JBI? As if there's little difference between Red Wheelbarrow and War & Peace or even the Odyssey? You're doing the same thing JCamilo is doing, and that's suggesting that two almost completely unalike objects must fall under the same label, although while he's insisting on their radical differences, you're insisting on very thin similarities. Both have the same problem. People don't read Red Wheelbarrow and recognize or experience narrative--events, characters, context, progress, etc.--in even remotely the same way they would in War & Peace, The Odyssey, or the vast majority of films out there.

I thought JBI just owned you there, man. He was laying it down. Every time he goes overseas, studying some crazy language, he comes back with his game stepped way up. He's one bad mother ****er.

[MorpheusSandman]

Well there's the problem. The associations made vary on a personal basis so widely that there is no "hard and fast" definition.I think this is a simplification of what I'm saying. Let's assume, for a moment, that there is no word "poetry" or "prose". People create things before they have "words" for them. This happens all the time. So let's imagine in this world stripped of these words, that we encounter (going back to the previous examples): Les Chants de Maldoror, Basho's Old Pond, Donne's The Ecstasy, Homer's Odyssey, and War & Peace

Would we, having encountered these objects without any predisposition or bias as to what they are, create words that would lump 4 or the 5 into the same category and call it quits? I don't think we would. There, indeed, lies the problem, one of how these umbrella words obscure the real elements that constitute things made up of many elements, which can often overlap with other labels that we think of as being distinctly different. It helps if you just forget about the labels and focus on the actuality of the objects themselves. Ask yourself "what elements make up these objects? What do they have in common that might allow them to be categorized as one things? What do they have have only some share and what could we categorize it as? Where do they differ and are unique and what should we call these elements?"

There's really no limit to how far we should break them down, but I would say that when you're in a position where you find yourself using one (or two) words that are completely inefficient to draw a detailed treasure map to the object you're trying to describe, then something needs to be changed.


The semiotics is interesting; the properties that you may call the properties of prose and the properties that you may call the properties of poetry are distinct objects, indeed;But this isn't what I was saying. These properties don't inherently belong to poetry OR prose inherently, they're simply different properties. The words "poetry" and "prose" were classical constructions used to describe literary phenomenon that shared a lot of similar properties that, for a long time, didn't find their way into the other realm. Now that they have, we have two options: one is to defined what properties are ALWAYS in poetry that's ALWAYS absent in prose (and vice versa), or to do away with the terms or start using a lot of categorical qualifiers (which we have already).

I actually think the distinction is clearer than is being made to suggest. Just to look at MOST poetry on the page VS MOST prose and it becomes obvious that there's typically a difference in form, with prose being written out in full sentences, periods, paragraphs, etc. while MOST poetry is. Now, JCamilo objects "but prose poets write it out in the form of prose!" in which case I say that in prose poetry, elements more typically associated with poetry take a place of equal importance than other elements more typically associated with prose. Again, we're in the realm of typical and atypical similarities and clusters here. JCamilo thinks that pointing out exceptions (even widespread ones) invalidates the concept of thingspace, which it doesn't; it simply means that certain elemental nodes start getting spread around to other other sectors as they begin cropping up in other forms. EG, a typically poetic element like "elaborate use of metaphor" or "idiosyncratic use of non-everyday language" begins triggering in formats that resemble prose more than poetry, so these elements become associated with prose, or perhaps we say that they're borrowed from poetry and the works becomes "prose poetry", in which case we're still looking at these elements as belonging to the concept of poetry instead of prose.


The word poetry and prose have an ambiguous meaning - there is so much gray to treat it as black and white becomes almost absurd. I don't mean there is ambiguity between the objects they represent, but only in the words themselves.Errr, the ambiguity in the words is due to them being used to describe very unalike objects. That's where ambiguity arises in the first place. If referents remain fixed and static and consistent, then words don't get confused.



Then it seems like you're suggesting that a poem is classified as such only in virtue of its aesthetic content. When you don't retain the meter, the rhyme, the assonance, dissonance, alliteration, etc. (which is impossible), all of which are aesthetical, something becomes prose. This seems to be in line with your refutation that the narrative isn't necessary for poetry. All in all, many people would and have disagreed with this. Personally, I have always preferred defining the poet as more than a makeup artist (but then again, so many of them seem to be anyways)FWIW, I'd classify meter as a formal element, and I'd say form, in general, is something that's typically more important in poetry than in prose, so are the other elements you listed (rhyme, assonance, etc.). Again, it's really about saying "these elements tend to play more of a role in most poetry compared to prose, and typically a more important role". So you encounter, eg, meter and forms in poetry more than prose, and it's usually a very important aspect in poetry. So I do think it's possible to say that such elements are much more distinctly poetic.

As for narrative, I still think that is a meta-concept not inherent to prose or poetry.

[MorpheusSandman]

I thought JBI just owned you there, man. He was laying it down.I'm well aware of JBI's intellect, but I didn't find that one of his better moments. That's one of the problems with words in general, is that you can easily stretch most to fit a lot of things that aren't really associated with what the word was used to refer to to begin with. Modernists and postmodernists had a lot of fun with this; "OK, so music is sound in time, so let's give the silence in time and let arbitrary sound serve as music." --John Cage (not actual quote, just illustrative)

Of course, you don't change reality by changing definitions, nor do you change extensional associations. 4'33" is no closer to what we think of as "music" as Red Wheelbarrow is to what we think of as "narrative". Even though you can stretch the definitions of either to make them fit, you can't change their positions in thingspace to being closer to those things we think of as "narratives" and "music".

[blank|verse]

So much "depends" (present) upon a red wheel barrow, glazed (past) with rain (indicated as past tense), beside (through depends indicating present) the white chickens.

There is a past and a present - the wheel barrow has just been glazed with rain, there is a signified event, and now is being depended upon, a present action - we are in a still state, but there is still a narrative.

Hi Morpheus – you might like to argue that 'depends' is the only finite verb in the poem (present tense); 'glazed' is a participle and non-finite, so to say it gives us the past tense is wrong. From the present tense antecedent, we are to presume the image is also present, the red wheelbarrow is glazed with rain water, not was glazed. If the poem were to begin:

A red wheel barrow, glazed with rain water, beside the white chickens
it would raise the questions: what about it? When in this happening? We wouldn't know as there is no finite verb to give us this information.

If we want to interpret the poem then, for instance, we can say, the wheel barrow, representing the American dream in the form of labor has been glazed with rain, sanctioning it as somehow being recognized by this higher calling, made more soft within the world of glazing, it has been purified, this red, as it stands beside the white chickens, the pure, innocent fruit of its labor, work beside result, the narrative of what is good, and the beauty and purity of its labor-driven aspiration.

Narrative right there. Beyond that to though, from a perspective, the poem is ultimately a narrative, as we are reading top to bottom, the poem opens, and then it ends - narrative in the act itself of reading it, of hearing the elements recounted in your head.
This is all speculative as it not based on information contained within the poem, but relies on external knowledge, and, as discussed, is based on an incorrect understanding of the poem's syntax.

You might also like to quote an essay on poets.org about The Red Wheelbarrow (http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19883), which supports your suggestion that not all poems contain narratives:

This brings us to the poem’s statement, its meaning. Many poems, especially nonnarrative poems, are difficult—if not impossible—to paraphrase, especially after a first reading or a first listen. And expecting to find a meaning that’s obvious is often frustrating, as it may be here. Why does so much depend? So much what?
Hope that helps! b|v

[MorpheusSandman]

^ Errr, blank|verse, you're responding to JBI and not myself.

[blank|verse]

It was addressed to you like an aside, Morpheus - here are some points you might like to use in your discussion with JBI and others. I'm in agreement with what you're saying, but don't want to get fully involved in the discussion. I hope I've raised some valid points that support your view. Over to you...

[JBI]

Quit the language nonsense. Glazed implies having been glazed - the action has taken place. I don't care what you call it, as it is not a "perfect past" tense, but still a past tense.

As for the interpretation, that is how the poem works, it invites people to interpret, to say that there is no room for interpretation is silly- nonnarrative poems is a misconception based on a technicality.

[Cunninglinguist]

There's really no limit to how far we should break them down, but I would say that when you're in a position where you find yourself using one (or two) words that are completely inefficient to draw a detailed treasure map to the object you're trying to describe, then something needs to be changed.

Perhaps this is where I disagree - and the only place where I really need to respond. There is a limit to how far and hard we should impose a certain definition of a symbol. On the one hand, "breaking them down" to the umpteenth degree just becomes a waste of time and gets into a lot of discursive rambling when, on the other hand, one can just start exercising his interpretive capacities. The latter is more efficient; the former, while having the goal of efficiency though precision, becomes self-defeating.

As for the rest, a rose is still a rose by any other name. On that we can agree, whether one calls it a rose, lily or a daffodil.

[MorpheusSandman]

It was addressed to you like an aside, Morpheus - here are some points you might like to use in your discussion with JBI and others. I'm in agreement with what you're saying, but don't want to get fully involved in the discussion. I hope I've raised some valid points that support your view. Over to you...Oh, you certainly raised some good points, but the angle I was taking was a bit different. Any debater wouldn't find themselves lacking for ammo to explain how something like Red Wheelbarrow would fit any but the most generalized criteria for what constitutes "narrative", but I think the best illustration is to simply point out the massive difference between a work like that and something like War & Peace or even the short stories of Chekov or Henry James.


nonnarrative poems is a misconception based on a technicality.Or it's the ridiculous Procrustean stretching of a definition as to make the label meaningless.


Perhaps this is where I disagree - and the only place where I really need to respond. There is a limit to how far and hard we should impose a certain definition of a symbol. On the one hand, "breaking them down" to the umpteenth degree just becomes a waste of time and gets into a lot of discursive rambling when, on the other hand, one can just start exercising his interpretive capacities. The latter is more efficient; the former, while having the goal of efficiency though precision, becomes self-defeating.When you talk about "efficiency through precision" you remind me of the neural network 1 VS 2 (http://lesswrong.com/lw/nn/neural_categories) diagram for the processing and utilizing of words. Really, the entire purpose of words is being precise enough to relate thought content from one person to another. You're right that for general applications, there is no need to understand every component that typically makes up the label "poetry" and "prose". But, look at this from the perspective of empirical hypotheses. If you say to someone "I'm going to show you a poem to read", and then you hand them Finnegans Wake, would their expectation match the experience? Likewise, if you said to someone "I'm going to tell you a narrative", and then recite Red Wheelbarrow, would their expectation match the experience?

People say "yeah, but that's just about associations", but in truth it's about how words work intensionally and extensionally. If you point to several alike things and say "poem", then those extensional properties (some of them, at least), creates a network in someone's mind that, when encountered again, triggers the label "poetry". If, suddenly, you begin giving them many very unalike things, then the label gets very confused to the point they can't know what to expect when you say "I'm going to give you a poem to read". This is when a more elemental knowledge of what comprises the label of "poetry" becomes useful, because these elements are no longer finding themselves neatly bundled together, but are becoming piecemeal in other, typically non-poetic contexts. Unfortunately, the way the human brain works is, like you said, in models of efficiency. We can know everything about a literary work, but there might be a remaining question of "is it poetry or prose?" When, at some point, both labels become useless because what the labels originally bundled together is now no longer sufficient for describing certain objects in reality.

Objective elements don't BELONG to labels, they simply belong to objects. So nothing is innately poetry or prose. In truth, these terms should be emergent, coming into existence because enough alike things were found together to make the words useful in pointing to those objects. But when you start stretching those definitions to include unalike things to the point you can't even point out what they all have in common, then you've essentially drawn on the mental word map too much to make finding the treasure impossible.

[JBI]

IT isn't, what the hell is non narrative - basically anything without verbs. That poem has verbs. Poetry is set to time, always, because language is set to time, it lives, it is not something static and dead.

Even still life paintings have a sort of narrative to them， and that is far closer than this poem.

Time is almost always associated with art, regardless of what art it is. If there is a sense of time, there is a sense of narrative. This isn't a new idea.

[MorpheusSandman]

IT isn't, what the hell is non narrative - basically anything without verbs. Right, so all writing (maybe even all art) is narrative, hence, the term narrative becomes useless when you're wondering what to expect when you encounter a piece of writing. See the problem here?

[JBI]

Right, so all writing (maybe even all art) is narrative, hence, the term narrative becomes useless when you're wondering what to expect when you encounter a piece of writing. See the problem here?

Not all, but close to it. You do note, after all, that poetry seems to know itself as poetry, and thereby be part of the discourse, or lets say, narrative of poetry. Likewise, the span of a poet's career, the arrangement of a poet's books, the association of elements all gesture to narratives.

The word isn't useless, it has its points - for instance, one could call this poem a narrative of the American turn of the Century, or one could call it a narrative of a morning - the point is, narrative is not so limited as to only apply to War and Peace - there are different types. I can think of a few poems that are do not seem to be narratives (for instance, various shape poems) but for the most part narrative is contained within any discourse.

The word narrative is not useless, just its application as a binary is pretty much useless - why are you so obsessed with labeling things narrative or not anyway, does that add to anything? Knowing if something is a "narrative" with a big grand title around the word that is, add something? I doubt it. Basically understanding things as forms of narrative allow for the application of understanding things within the understanding of conventions, rules, and attributes of narrative - if anything it allows the poem to be open up more, in whichever way the reader decides, rather than be limited to the status of "nonnarrative" which in itself means nothing, and gets nobody anywhere - (so you put this poem in a box and say there is no narrative, well then, you might as well just say there is no meaning).

[MorpheusSandman]

JBI, I don't know how to put this delicately, but your entire post above is a bunch of semantic hogwash. If the word narrative provides absolutely no clue as to the kind of literary object one is going to encounter, then it IS useless. Saying Red Wheelbarrow is the "narrative of a Red Wheelbarrow" is redundant when you can say "it's about a Red Wheelbarrow". So anything that has content or a subject becomes narrative. There's no need to actually stitch events and characters together to create narrative when you can just present a subject where nothing actually happens.

Let me point out the problem here: I taboo the word "narrative". You can no longer use this word when describing what a "narrative" is, nor can you use any words you can find in a thesaurus when looking it up. If you describe what a narrative is I don't think you'll find your description fitting a good chunk of poetry in any meaningful way. I mean, other than the fact that they're literature, what does War & Peace and Red Wheelbarrow have in common that would be worthy enough to allow both of them to fall under the same label?

Anyway, what's really useless is you turning this on me, as if I'm the one deviating from common use and extensional expectation here. If you tell someone "I'm going to read you a narrative" and you recite Red Wheelbarrow, do you think you'll fulfill their expectations? That's the key here, because the word narrative exists to describe many literary objects that have many things in common, namely characters, plots, settings, multiple events, etc. I can't name any that are merely a description of an object combined with a vague comment and spatial location.

[JBI]

JBI, I don't know how to put this delicately, but your entire post above is a bunch of semantic hogwash. If the word narrative provides absolutely no clue as to the kind of literary object one is going to encounter, then it IS useless. Saying Red Wheelbarrow is the "narrative of a Red Wheelbarrow" is redundant when you can say "it's about a Red Wheelbarrow". So anything that has content or a subject becomes narrative. There's no need to actually stitch events and characters together to create narrative when you can just present a subject where nothing actually happens.

Let me point out the problem here: I taboo the word "narrative". You can no longer use this word when describing what a "narrative" is, nor can you use any words you can find in a thesaurus when looking it up. If you describe what a narrative is I don't think you'll find your description fitting a good chunk of poetry in any meaningful way. I mean, other than the fact that they're literature, what does War & Peace and Red Wheelbarrow have in common that would be worthy enough to allow both of them to fall under the same label?

Anyway, what's really useless is you turning this on me, as if I'm the one deviating from common use and extensional expectation here. If you tell someone "I'm going to read you a narrative" and you recite Red Wheelbarrow, do you think you'll fulfill their expectations? That's the key here, because the word narrative exists to describe many literary objects that have many things in common, namely characters, plots, settings, multiple events, etc. I can't name any that are merely a description of an object combined with a vague comment and spatial location.

What do war and peace and The Story of an Hour have in common. What does Tom Jones have in common with a Sea Shanty?

Your problem is you cannot see how there is narrative because you have not taken the step to interpret the poem - read the poem - what does it mean, what does it say, what significance does it have? Tell me that, and then see how you arrive at that. As it is, I gave a reading, which isn't 100% my own reading mind you, and showed how it fits in with narrative. You have only gone on to call my argument semantic hogwash when really your argument is one line, "War and Peace is not the Red Wheel Barrow." Well, I am not an ant, but me and an ant both have legs, is an ant's leg not a leg then?

In basic terms, a narrative is anything that tells of an event, or contains within it a temporal account - that "recounts" to use the Latin term from which it comes from - the description of the Red Wheel Barrow is a recounting of a picture, it has a narrative voice, the poem's speaker (which is hardly objective), it has characters and subjects, and it has movement. War and Peace also has these elements. I think you are confusing the world "Novel" and "Narrative."

As for the second paragraph of your post, I am not making it taboo - I am merely allowing the poem to be read without the shackles of some myth of no narration - which makes no sense in itself. Nor am I straying from the opinion of scholars, as this position of mine is hardly new, the same way terms like "narrative mode" are used to describe camera angles for movies despite the camera itself not being a narrator - narrative is a much larger idea, like discourse, or space.

Just because you have a limited view of the poem, and regard it as merely such a small detail does not make it not narrative. From that perspective, we can open it up - we can ask questions of narratology, for instance, what perspective is this written from? So much depends for whom? why is it the wheel barrow being focused on and not the chickens?

Are those not questions of narrative? Just because you don't think much of the poem, doesn't make you right.

[JCamilo]

Again, we may be getting hung up on the idea of "organized thought". When I think of "organized thought" I think of "the desire to lucidly express the contents of my mind to you". Poetry is certainly about more than the lucidity of expression. I frequently write poetry without knowing what it means, without knowing what I'm trying to say, without knowing my theme, without really knowing how to express it. Often it's driven by sheer intuition and improvisational inspiration. I wouldn't really consider that "organized thought" as much as "improvisational expression of thought", which is expressed before it can be comprehended or organized. Philosophy is much more logically rigorous, more "organized", than that.
Sorry, but your argument is the same of guys like Bataile or Breton, writers that wrote (in prose) "spontaneous flows of feelings before the organization of etc,etc,etc". I would point:
1 - It is not a trait of Poetry. It cann't be. Anyone can be inspired and say anything that pop up in your mind (or say), it does not give you the format and as Psychology points, it give you colloquial language not the styled language that poetry is. So, I cann't see how you can use this too define poetry - not because Poetry is not more than organized ideas (which I never said it is), but because all literature is more than just organized ideas. Style is behind every great philosopher, novelist, etc.
2 - And that you start your poems from inspiration, does not imply when they became a poem in the end, they are without organization. This is basically the musing idea. Language is organized, a poem with verses is organized, they do not break in the end of line just for eye candy (not implying you think otherwise). So, poems do have organization.


If both exist together then they must be the same thing. I don't know how you can really get around this unless you do like I suggested and break both down to their constituent parts and say which belong to neither exclusively.

I am not going to dwell on this. You gave examples of Opera and Movies. They are inherently things living together that are not the samething. Movies use text, music, photography, painting, theatre - they form 1 thing and are not the same thing. The same goes to opera. It is not about art, it is simple mathematical, good sense, etc: different things can be combined to form a unity.


Not quite sure what you're saying here. I'd have to check, but I'm pretty sure poetry has its roots in rhetoric more than narrative, and I'm pretty sure most poetic "devices" did too, and rhetoric was used in far more than just narratives.

Sure, Homer and Hesiod were rhetorical authors, and not storytellers. I would say by no mistake the first western text of rhetorical nature is Homer...
But the point is not even this, we are talking about poetry, I talk about rhetorical devices and you point there is rhetorical devices for something else? Of course, there are devices for rethread only. Just like the most probably device was for counting, neither narratives, poetry, rhetoric...

And again: Rhetoric can be used as poetry. So, it would be pretty irrelevant. We know there are specific devices for Epic Poetry, which implies devices developed for narrative and poetry as a whole.


You misunderstand; what I meant was that the meter doesn't survive in translation. I thought that's what we were referring to here?

Wait? You were saying narratives aspects are the only thing that survives and with this you wanted to imply that metric could not be translated? That was a very weird way to say it.

Anyways metric can and is translated.




Errr, we can say it's only found in poetry if it's never found in prose outside of prose poetry. In such a case, meter becomes part of the poetry aspect of prose poetry, not the prose aspect.

No, you cann't say you ONLY find in poetry if you find ANY place outside poetry that uses it. Unless you admit Prose Poetry is Poetry, which is not something you admit.

Plus, you find metrical care outside prose poems.


Narratives may get modified but they still survive to be largely the same. You can't say this for the medium and the form which is entirely different. That was my point to begin with; you change the medium and the form and you change how the narrative is related and how affective it is, which in turns changes the experiences, which in turn means you aren't experiencing the same work that the original was.

You insist to affirm that Narratives survive less modified (albeit I listed several aspects that need to be changed. Heck, so languages do not even the same verbal times, the same plurals, all this is lost) albeit the fact that Much of Neruda survives if translated to portuguese and Finnegans Wake is almost impossible to be translated to anything. You should review your affirmations on face of modern facts.


I know there's actually quite a lot of theoretical debate about this. I think David Bordwell, one of the leading film theorists, defined story as everything both expressed and unexpressed in a narrative, ie, the history, social context, the implications of what happens between cuts, etc. while the plot is the part of the story that's actually shown and the narrative is how it's shown. In such a definition, story becomes complete context, plot becomes what actually happens in that context, and narrative becomes the perspective from which and manner in which that content is related. So when I used the word I really meant that the basic "story" is the same, while the exact plot and narrative can be changed.

Ok, I do not know this guy to say anything about his definition. If Narrative is how a story is show (meaning the narrator point of view, option for language, etc) then it is even harder to understand your point. This much dependent on language, while the plot is basically easier and story seems to be not under discussion (you can translated something that seems to the context, or if you do, it is a different text).


I'm not suggesting we should go back to some classic definition of poetry, what I'm proposing is an extensional experiment. Whether or not Whitman or haikus would've been considered poetry under a classic definition, I think it's indisputable they wouldn't have been thought of as prose either. That's one reason we come up with all kinds of categorical qualifiers, like "free verse poetry" and "haikus". Haikus are certainly unalike verse poetry, yet they still probably share more in common with most verse poetry than most prose. I think if we configured them in thingspace (read my reply to Cunninglinguist, which I probably should have addressed to you) then neither is going to be that close to prose, even if they're not in direct contact with each other eithe

Your definition of poetry ignores 200 years of poetry. To conform to it, you must return to a time poetry development was another. I see no reason for this. I will not do a experiment about a modern discussion that ignores Baudelaire, Mallarme, Borges, Rimbaud, Apollinarie, Joyce, Lautreamont and several representative authors.


What people? I'd like to see an extensional experiment with people who are unaware of either.

Let me understand this: I will subject the specialized study of a topic based on the limited knowledge of others? Your argument to avoid the fact Prose and Poetry are not exclusive as you imply is that we must seek the opinion of people who has no idea of what poetry is? Serious Morpheus, is like asking people about anime. "that porn cartoon from japan with cute animals and big eyes?" and you having to say "hey, I like porn cartoon because people who knew nothing about it said Anime is that." :smilewinkgrin:



Actually, this is much not-truer than anything I said. The definitions we have mustn't include anyone or anything. The definitions much simply attempt to outline objects in reality and be able to relate the essence of those objects to others in communication well enough that if you use the word then the other person will have a clear idea of what you're referring to. Just because we label someone a poet doesn't make them aa poet any more than labeling someone a unicorn makes them a unicorn.

You label something as poetry, you tried to define it. I mention recognized poets and you will argue it? Based on sophistry? Whale is not a fish... Know why? Because when they outlined the object (Hello, Lautreamont is your object, you must outline him, not, as Mortal pointed, just shrug him off) and found the definition to be improper. Just as the definition of poetry - it must include those who made poetry exactly challenging the outline imposed by others. You are the one holding yourself in an outdated definition of poetry which implies "It is not prose", when we know both are symbiotic. (And this should be enough, I did not argue Poetry and Prose are the same thing, otherwise I would not use 2 different words for them. I said poetry happens in prose creating a single object, therefore they are not exclusive)





If you look at Les Chants de Maldoror, Basho's Old Pond, and Donne's The Ecstasy and kind find any similarity between them, then it's rather useless to insist they all must fall under the definition of a single word that's meant to evoke the similarity of objects where there is none.

Reality check, they all are called Poets and Poetry. Because Poetry is how the language is used, not the format. Homer is already different from Petrarch enough. I find interesting you want to argue that Lautreamont is not a poet. But you must do better to propose an experiment.


Yes, definitions should conform to the objects, but when our definitions refer to objects that are completely unalike then it's time to either bring in qualifiers, new definitions, or new words altogether and abandon the old word.

Hmmm? Really? You have a new law for Vocabulary formation? Words are reused for new definition since ever. Anyways, definitions should conform to object: if we have poets which do not use metric, or write in prose, you cann’t just dismiss them. You must include them all, because they are your object.


If the word "poetry" can't bring to mind any cluster of similar objects, then the word has become rather corrupted and useless. The funny thing is, people seem to fight over words precisely in that state, as if "winning" is going to allow the word to become any more communicably viable. The ironic thing is, I don't think poetry really has that problem. I think you're just so busy finding exceptions to the classic extensional examples of poetry that you haven't even bothered to ask what all of these objects have in common that would allow them all to be poetry in the first place. "They must all be poetry, even though they have nothing in common" is a really silly thing to say.

Why do you keep arguing an outdated definition to come to you conclusion about translatation and Is a saint and I am "winning" guy? We are doing the samething. And frankly, in an argument, it is reasonable to expect one to be right and other wrong. It is not offensive.
And like I said, trying to shrug off the symbolists as exceptions is a joke. Prose poetry or prose authors who are careful with poetic aspects of their words are not exceptions, they are very representative of literature writing in XIX and XX century.


So you're insisting that MOST prose writers concentrate on these elements? I'd be interested to see if you could find anyone to agree with you.

Metric? The organization of words according the sound to make it more pleasant and fluid? It is how even journalists must write. It is Flaubert Le Mote Just. I do not mind what people argue it and even if it is MOST writers. The point it is that metric is not used only on poems, hence your question if we can agree they only belong to it, is answered with no.


So you would argue that more prose authors suffer as much in translation than poets, or that they suffer equally?

Neither. Morpheus, it is about idioms, not the text itself. A poem can be easily translated to some language, a prose text harder, a scientific text (they are amazingly hard to translate) can be more difficulty. It depends which idiom to which idiom and the nature of text.

[blank|verse]

Quit the language nonsense.
You mean, "Stop proving me wrong!"?

Glazed implies having been glazed - the action has taken place. I don't care what you call it, as it is not a "perfect past" tense, but still a past tense.
It might be implied, but is not stated by the poet. Rather, it is inferred by you, the reader. There is no past tense verb in the poem, only the present tense verb 'depends'. Because of this, we understand the wheelbarrow is glazed (which would be present perfect) – look, there it is now, all red and glazed with rain water. The poem gives the reader an image, not a narrative.

As for the interpretation, that is how the poem works, it invites people to interpret, to say that there is no room for interpretation is silly- nonnarrative poems is a misconception based on a technicality.
Of course, all poems invite interpretations, but here, you're interpreting an image (the wheelbarrow glazed with rainwater) to construct a narrative (that it has been raining, and maybe still is raining, we don't know) that has been invented by you, the reader, not stated by the poet. The narrative is in your head, not on the page, therefore the poem is non-narrative.

Perhaps we could say the poem contains an implied narrative. But that's different from actually having one.

[JBI]

You mean, "Stop proving me wrong!"?

It might be implied, but is not stated by the poet. Rather, it is inferred by you, the reader. There is no past tense verb in the poem, only the present tense verb 'depends'. Because of this, we understand the wheelbarrow is glazed (which would be present perfect) – look, there it is now, all red and glazed with rain water. The poem gives the reader an image, not a narrative.

Of course, all poems invite interpretations, but here, you're interpreting an image (the wheelbarrow glazed with rainwater) to construct a narrative (that it has been raining, and maybe still is raining, we don't know) that has been invented by you, the reader, not stated by the poet. The narrative is in your head, not on the page, therefore the poem is non-narrative.

Perhaps we could say the poem contains an implied narrative. But that's different from actually having one.

Well, on one hand,
The present perfect is a grammatical combination of the present tense and the perfect aspect, used to express a past event that has present consequences. An example is "I have eaten" (so I'm not hungry). Depending on the specific language, the events described by present perfects are not necessarily completed, as in "I have been eating" or "I have lived here for five years."
The present perfect is a compound tense in English, as in many other languages, meaning that it is formed by combining an auxiliary verb with the main verb. For example, in modern English, it is formed by combining a present-tense form of the auxiliary verb "to have" with the past participle of the main verb. In the above example, "have" is the auxiliary verb, whereas the past participle "eaten" is the main verb. The two verbs are sometimes labeled "V1" and "V2" in grammar instruction.

On the other hand, glazed is not in the present perfect, as the present perfect is constructed with an auxiliary verb. In truth, it is a participle conjugated into the past tense (the present tense would be glazing, or something like receiving its glazing).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participle

I know not what your native language is, but in general English speakers tend to confuse these details, whereas a French language speaking person in general would learn these ideas more clearly (partly from having a language that is more inflected).

Call it what you want though, it is a past-tense verb.


As for the narrative being in my head, well, part of it is built around my own assumptions, interpretations, and generated meaning, something which makes the poem special (imagist poems in general benefit from this property). That being said, there is still narrative within the poem itself, it just isn't particularly stable - more like a narrative with limited given elements, and unstable interpretation.

[blank|verse]

On the other hand, glazed is not in the present perfect, as the present perfect is constructed with an auxiliary verb.
True – it's an incomplete verb phrase which imitates spoken English and is missing a finite verb, therefore has no tense. Which is why I used the modal auxiliary verb 'would' in my reply:

(which would be present perfect) [see post #76]
it would be, were a present tense finite verb given. But because of the antecedent present tense verb 'depends' the poem remains in the present tense, and we are to read it as if the present tense primary auxiliary verb 'is' were included, which would give us a verb phrase in the present perfect tense.

There is nothing in the poem to suggest a change of tense to the past tense.

In truth, it is a participle conjugated into the past tense (the present tense would be glazing, or something like receiving its glazing).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participle
It's not: participles don't give tense, they give aspect. The inflection 'glazed' can be used as a past tense verb, but you would have to change the syntax of the poem to achieve this, ie. 'rain water glazed the red wheelbarrow', shifting to the active voice; but it's a passive construction, so needs a primary auxiliary verb to show tense.

I know not what your native language is, but in general English speakers tend to confuse these details, whereas a French language speaking person in general would learn these ideas more clearly (partly from having a language that is more inflected).
Let's stick to the facts and not include veiled insults or generalisations about other speakers of English.

Call it what you want though, it is a past-tense verb.
It's not past tense because it is not a finite verb. The only finite verb in the poem is 'depends', which means the whole poem, as it is one sentence, is in the present tense. Ironically, you argued this point yourself when discussing the prepositional phrase 'beside the white chickens':

beside (through depends indicating present) the white chickens. [from post #57]
The same is true of the phrase 'glazed with rain water'. So, in effect, the poem reads: 'So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow [that is] glazed with rain water, [and that is] beside the white chickens.'

If it were shifting tenses, as you suggest, it would read: 'a red wheelbarrow [that was] glazed with rain water [but is now] beside the white chickens' which would be bizarre, and would lead the reader to wonder whether the wheelbarrow is still glazed with rain water or not. Williams avoids this confusion by not changing tense.

As for the narrative being in my head, well, part of it is built around my own assumptions, interpretations, and generated meaning, something which makes the poem special (imagist poems in general benefit from this property). That being said, there is still narrative within the poem itself, it just isn't particularly stable - more like a narrative with limited given elements, and unstable interpretation.
I think this is redefining the word 'narrative' to fit your argument. I take the point that because of the very linearity of texts, this automatically creates some form of narrative, but I don't think it's a point worth rewriting dictionaries for.

[JBI]

Ok, now you are making things up, take this sentence, the cooked chicken is tasty. Cooked is behaving like glazed. IT is not in the present tense clearly, though the sentence is, as the participle is functioning like an adjective.

[Cunninglinguist]

...the entire purpose of words is being precise enough ... If you say to someone "I'm going to show you a poem to read", and then you hand them Finnegans Wake, would their expectation match the experience? Likewise, if you said to someone "I'm going to tell you a narrative", and then recite Red Wheelbarrow, would their expectation match the experience?

...But when you start stretching those definitions to include unalike things to the point you can't even point out what they all have in common, then you've essentially drawn on the mental word map too much to make finding the treasure impossible.

Precise enough is pretty much what I'm saying - there is a golden mean.

How you define a word isn't set in stone, nor should it be. Things wont always conform to the expectations you place behind a label and trying to force everyone into your perspective with a shoehorn is pretty much futile. I'm not saying that we should foster or even accept an infinite degree of variability, which is what you seem to think I am. But that there is a degree of variability that exists which no one man can do anything about and must be accepted if we are to get anywhere worth going to.

[stlukesguild]

SLG- I think of literary translation not unlike transcription in music. The goal is to retain the music, but there is a recognition that the piano has a different range and vocabulary than the violin or the harpsichord.

Cunninglinguist- Err... Sounds like you lifted this notion from the translator's note to Ciardi's translation of Dante's Inferno. The idea is to retain the gestalt, eh?:nod:

hehe

Actually I think that Dante Gabriel Rossetti's introduction to his classic translation, Early Italian Poets and the introduction to my volume of Paul Valery in translation are more likely the source of my thoughts on translation as being akin to transcription in music. I love Ciardi's Dante, but I can't claim that I've read the introduction since college.

[JCamilo]

Precise enough is pretty much what I'm saying - there is a golden mean.

Precise word is a translation of Flaubert, not William Blake. All language can be like this, the speech of a politician, scientific treatises, etc. He fails to see he dwells in generalizaitons which can be anywhere, so he cann't preciselly define or talk exclusivelly about poetry.

I wont go futher, but Morphy is discussing the meaning of poetry without defining it (or prose) for 3 pages. He has even the proper information, but without analysing it he is going on generalities which cause all the clashes with Mortal and me.

[JCamilo]

SLG- I think of literary translation not unlike transcription in music. The goal is to retain the music, but there is a recognition that the piano has a different range and vocabulary than the violin or the harpsichord.

Cunninglinguist- Err... Sounds like you lifted this notion from the translator's note to Ciardi's translation of Dante's Inferno. The idea is to retain the gestalt, eh?:nod:

hehe

Actually I think that Dante Gabriel Rossetti's introduction to his classic translation, Early Italian Poets and the introduction to my volume of Paul Valery in translation are more likely the source of my thoughts on translation as being akin to transcription in music. I love Ciardi's Dante, but I can't claim that I've read the introduction since college.

Paul Valéry also thought the use of colors of Baudelaire was akin to painting... He is great, what makes him even better is that he did poetry even in essays.

[MorpheusSandman]

What do war and peace and The Story of an Hour have in common. What does Tom Jones have in common with a Sea Shanty?I don't know about Sea Shanty (are you referring to something in particular or sea shanties in general?), but the rest all have characters and multiple events and settings that occur linearly. Poetry frequently doesn't have characters, even it always has subjects and speakers. Sometimes it describes events and pieces them together, but it can also simply describe images or a state of mind or, hell, even word associations. Narratives typically call to our attention characters facing conflicts, interacting with settings, other characters, and events occurring in a time frame. Yes, there is plenty of prose narratives that subvert this, and plenty of poetry that contains it. As I said elsewhere, narrative isn't an inherent property of either poetry or prose, but something emergent when it has many of the above qualities. As I said in another thread, poetry often acts as a snapshot to the video of prose narratives, calling our attention to details and moments and all of the stuff behind the narrative that can't be contain by events, by time, by characters. Even taking something like Donne's The Flea, which is rather like a sophistic logical argument between two potential lovers with events, Donne focuses our attention on the arguments and theme instead of the events, instead of the characters, instead of the time. It's a narrative, but it's an obscured one where non-narrative elements dominate. The same can not be said with War & Peace, Tom Jones, or The Story of an Hour.


Your problem is you cannot see how there is narrative because you have not taken the step to interpret the poem - read the poem - what does it mean, what does it say, what significance does it have?Narrative shouldn't rise out of interpretation but be a matter of fact as much as stating that Pierre is a character in War & Peace. When you're talking about interpretive narratives it's more in a metaphoric rather than literal sense, the way you might look at a painting of an event and call it a narrative because of how you can interpret what's happening in the moment. But I still do not think this is narrative in the literal as it lacks the element of time and multiple events. Can we have a narrative of a single event? I think that's debatable. Something like "I went to the store" seems more like a factual statement than a narrative. "I went to the store and got lost and felt great confusion, before I found the cereal isle and made a purchase" is more like a narrative, taking us through three distinct event and the feeling behind it, which changes the perspective from the event to the character/narrator.


Well, I am not an ant, but me and an ant both have legs, is an ant's leg not a leg then?Ants legs are legs but calling an ant a leg wouldn't allow you (or anyone) to know you're referring to an ant. A leg is a generalized part that makes up many unique creatures, so saying the word "leg" will point someone to this part of the body on any creature. Likewise, saying "narrative" should point someone to this aspect no matter what context they encounter it in, whether prose or poetry. If you say narrative and someone walks away feeling they can't find it, then the problem is either with the word/definition, or the people using it. Either way, it's something that can be easily resolved if you specify exactly what you mean when you say narrative.


In basic terms, a narrative is anything that tells of an event, or contains within it a temporal account - that "recounts" to use the Latin term from which it comes from - the description of the Red Wheel Barrow is a recounting of a picture, it has a narrative voice, the poem's speaker (which is hardly objective), it has characters and subjects, and it has movement.But there is no event, there is only a subject. An event requires action, not just description. There isn't even time. Even if B|V and I accept your argument about glazed indicating the past, it's no different than if someone took a photo of a red wheelbarrow in this condition. Everything we see or experience has an intuitive past behind it, so if we see a wheelbarrow with rain in it, we intuit that it previously rained. But this is not the same as saying "It was raining, and after the red wheelbarrow sat glazed with rain water". That's a clear progression from cause-and-effect, not just the effect that allows us to intuit the cause. I also don't see where the movement is; if anything, it's movement like eyes scanning a photograph is movement, but this is not the same as temporal movement.


As for the second paragraph of your post, I am not making it tabooNo, I said "I taboo the word narrative", meaning you cannot use that word or synonyms but you have to break down what constitutes a narrative and how this fits with whatever you're trying to label as such.


Are those not questions of narrative? Just because you don't think much of the poem, doesn't make you right.I think quite a bit of the poem, but I don't feel compelled to label it a narrative when it's not. Narrative is a description not a qualitative judgment. Anyway, those are questions of interpretation, because there's nothing in the actual poem that would allow us to answer them. The poem couldn't be interpreted at all without tying it to some context and reading it as symbolic, but then the onus is on the reader rather than the poem. Again, nothing wrong with this, nothing inferior about this, but I don't feel it's narrative. If it is, it's in an extremely loose sense. In such a case it would be a very atypical similarity (http://lesswrong.com/lw/nk/typicality_and_asymmetrical_similarity/), an outlying blip rather than the glowing center (http://lesswrong.com/lw/nl/the_cluster_structure_of_thingspace/)

[MorpheusSandman]

Precise enough is pretty much what I'm saying - there is a golden mean. But how can something be precise enough when you can't even point to the element in common that all categorical members contain? The problem I'm having with JCamilo is that he's insisting that since certain elements more typically found in poetry occur in prose, then those elements aren't poetry. Yet, you put those elements in prose and the prose becomes prose poetry. Now how can those elements not be considered poetry if putting them in prose creates prose poetry? What he's arguing is that the ability for prose to assimilate these elements makes them not unique to poetry, which makes them not poetry, yet when prose assimilates them it crossed into the arena of poetry. Does that make any sense?

I mean, for much of the 20th century this worked in reverse without being considered as such. The commonality of prose replaced the rhetorically, artificially heightened tradition of poetic diction. So a lot of modern poetry reads more like prose with line breaks (it's one thing that made "found poems" possible; merely reorganizing prose lines made it possible to reconfigure the sense; like Duchamp's Fountain--art by way of recontextualization). We can say that this common speech is prose, while elements like, say, the line breaks or what remains of the rhetoric, texture, rhythm, lines, etc. is poetry. There's no reason that poetry and prose have to be all-or-nothing categories. They exist anyway because, as I said, people found enough alike elements bundled together to make the distinction useful. Modern poetry and prose now frequently like to adopt elements more commonly found in the other, creating hybrids in the process. Something like Finnegans Wake contains very un-prose like language, rhythm, diction, aesthetics, focus, etc. but a very prose-like format. So is it poetry or prose? Again, this is a false dichotomy created by the Network 2 brain that treat categories as all-or-nothing labels rather than as umbrellas for multiple elements which don't necessarily innately belong to it or define it.

[MorpheusSandman]

I am not going to dwell on this. You gave examples of Opera and Movies. They are inherently things living together that are not the samething. Movies use text, music, photography, painting, theatre - they form 1 thing and are not the same thing. The same goes to opera. It is not about art, it is simple mathematical, good sense, etc: different things can be combined to form a unity.Right, different things combine to form a unity which is, nonetheless, made of elemental parts that can exist separately. Music+Theater = Opera, but we can clearly distinguish in an Opera what is music and what is theater. Cinematography+music+design+etc. = Movie, but we can clearly distinguish in a movie what is music and what is cinematography.

So you say Prose Poetry is both poetry and prose, so what in prose poetry is prose and what is poetry? What element do you add to prose to make it poetry, and what element do you add to poetry to make it prose?


Wait? You were saying narratives aspects are the only thing that survives and with this you wanted to imply that metric could not be translated? That was a very weird way to say it.

Anyways metric can and is translated.When I said "survived" I meant "survived in translation". Meter can't be translated. It's a near impossibility. If you translate meter then you have to warp other elements to make it fit, and the cost usually isn't worth the price. It's why very few Divine Comedies are translated using terza rima (I realize there's one or two) and usually not verse at all. Plus, you especially can't translate meters that relies on languages with different timing systems, or multi-moraic languages like Japanese and Greek. There's no English substitute for the "long" Greek syllable in a Dactylic Hexameter.


Unless you admit Prose Poetry is Poetry, which is not something you admit. What? I never said Prose Poetry wasn't Poetry, what I said was that it was Poetry the same way Opera was music, or theater. It has elements associated with poetry and others with prose, likewise it has or lacks qualities commonly associated with either. See my reply to Cunninglinguist above.


Ok, I do not know this guy to say anything about his definition. If Narrative is how a story is show (meaning the narrator point of view, option for language, etc) then it is even harder to understand your point. This much dependent on language, while the plot is basically easier and story seems to be not under discussionUnder that definition what I was actually referring to is plot. The plot survives. I say narrative because I think a good chunk of the narrative survives as well, more so than those elements we'd call poetic or formal. Even if we change "she flew at him with her fingernails glinting like claws, ready to disfigure his smug face" to "with her claw-like nails she lunged at him in an attempt to wipe the smile off his face" then even though we've changed the specific narration, the general sense is still the same. There's nothing in either that can't be equated to something in the other. Now, of course, translation can make more radical alterations than this, but the entire point is for it not to, although sometimes it's impossible to capture all of the subtleties and ambiguities so translators must choose.

But this still isn't the same as rendering meter or rhythm into something completely different.


I will subject the specialized study of a topic based on the limited knowledge of others? Your argument to avoid the fact Prose and Poetry are not exclusive as you imply is that we must seek the opinion of people who has no idea of what poetry is? Serious Morpheus, is like asking people about anime. "that porn cartoon from japan with cute animals and big eyes?"You're missing the point though. You're putting the onus on the people to know the words when I'm putting the onus on the word to conform to the associated objects they're describing, something that's already ingrained intentionally in people's mind. The extensional referents of common words shouldn't change behind closed doors where only the cognoscenti are aware of it (I say "common words" because there are specialty terms in the realm of say, science, that should be up to science to use how they please). What I'm arguing is that if you present an ignorant audience with a sampling of what we're arguing about, they are not going to declare that they should all fall under the same umbrella term and be done with it, because what they're recognizing is something you're missing, and that's that these works are very unalike things, with more unalike than alike elements, yet you're still trying to insist that they all must fall under the same definition when you can't even point to the constant element they all share, or see how certain elements are more typically products of one than the other. Yet you insist it's the people's fault for getting it wrong? They're just telling you what's right in front of your face. They're not lost in a realm of signifers and signifieds, but referents.

Your anime example doesn't really work because anime IS defined as "animation from Japan". It's associated with all kinds of certain things, yes, but there are words for those that most people aren't aware of (porn+animation from Japan = Hentai, animation from Japan with cute creatures = anime mascots). Yet it's also fair to say that animation from Japan is too limited a label to point to what one is going to experience in an anime. Evangelion is nothing like Grave of the Fireflies which is nothing like La Blue Girl, yet they're all animation from Japan. That's why we form sub-labels and modifiers and don't insist that these works are anime unless they're animated and made in Japan.

So let's return to poetry. Unlike anime, poetry was more of an emergent label, meaning that many works that shared certain formal and linguistic qualities were found together and the label "poetry" was put on it. This originally did contrast with "prose" which more closely imitated everyday speech. Some elements more common to poetry was heightened/formal language, line breaks, meter, greater emphasis on rhythm, phonetics, rhyme, imagery (including metaphor), rhetoric, artificial syntax, etc. Now, over time, poetry was made that didn't include all of these elements, but retained most/some of the others, while prose began incorporating these elements as well. What this is means is that none of these elements are innately poetry, yet they are associated with poetry enough that if you put them together you create poetry. Likewise, if you stuff them in a prose format you create prose poetry. But why is it that prose, ie language that attempts to more closely replicate common speech, that's found in poetry not create prose poetry as well? Is it that prose can't contain line breaks? Are line breaks the only consistent element in all of poetry? Surely line breaks can't define all poetry since prose poetry usually doesn't contain line breaks, so how could it be poetry at all?


(Hello, Lautreamont is your object, you must outline him, not, as Mortal pointed, just shrug him off) and found the definition to be improper. Just as the definition of poetry - it must include those who made poetry exactly challenging the outline imposed by others.You're still stuck on "Lautreamont is a poet, Lautreamont made poetry" when I'm beyond that. Lautreamont made linguistic art objects that share certain qualities that we associate with the umbrella labels poetry and prose. Even if you point these elements out and separate them, that's not the same as saying that these elements define poetry in prose or are found in all poetry in prose. No different than when I said "the poetic qualities in Homer, like meter, rhythm, and phonetics don't survive in translation" isn't the same as me saying "meter, rhythm, and phonetics define poetry". It's saying these are elements that are usually given more emphasis in poetry, and when they are given as much emphasis in prose we typically call it prose poetry, in which these elements constitute the poetry aspect of prose poetry.


Metric? The organization of words according the sound to make it more pleasant and fluid? It is how even journalists must write.Errr, meter isn't "organization of words due to pleasant sounds", that sounds more like phonetics than meter. Meter is concerned with rhythm but, specifically, the patterned organization of the timing element of the language (moras, stress, or syllables). Homer's Dactylic Hexameter is a pattern of moras that is arranged 2/2 or 2/1/1 in lines of seven, while Milton's Iambic Pentameter is a pattern of stresses arranged weak/strong in lines of five. I don't know of any prose arranged in such a manner.

[JCamilo]

Right, different things combine to form a unity which is, nonetheless, made of elemental parts that can exist separately. Music+Theater = Opera, but we can clearly distinguish in an Opera what is music and what is theater. Cinematography+music+design+etc. = Movie, but we can clearly distinguish in a movie what is music and what is cinematography.
Look what you actually said previously: “If both exist together then they must be the same thing. I don't know how you can really get around this unless you do like I suggested and break both down to their constituent parts and say which belong to neither exclusively.”
It is an absurd to keep any argument if you return to contradict yourself. You do reckon two things can be together without having to be the same thing as you claimed, so how you can come with that like “they must be the same thing”, just to deny that prose and poetry can form an unity? You should be coherent, not apply your logic only to opera or movies, because they do not deny your point.


So you say Prose Poetry is both poetry and prose, so what in prose poetry is prose and what is poetry? What element do you add to prose to make it poetry, and what element do you add to poetry to make it prose?

Even this… Prose Poetry shows some form of textual denial: why don’t you say like most who know the subject “prose poems”? Just because, obviously, poetry as “the work with the language in a specialized and stylized way to transmit an idea or feeling” it is not bound to formats either prose or poetry.
Anyways, texts in prose which use poetical language are discernible as prose is the form and poetry the how. And I am not talking about prose poets. Among my examples, there is many who weren’t. Flaubert prosaic technique was described to him as following for a novel the same precepts of poetry. You can find almost everything you will find in several poets.

When I said "survived" I meant "survived in translation". Meter can't be translated. It's a near impossibility. If you translate meter then you have to warp other elements to make it fit, and the cost usually isn't worth the price. It's why very few Divine Comedies are translated using terza rima (I realize there's one or two) and usually not verse at all. Plus, you especially can't translate meters that relies on languages with different timing systems, or multi-moraic languages like Japanese and Greek. There's no English substitute for the "long" Greek syllable in a Dactylic Hexameter.
Again, you cann’t say something is not possible then say that when it happens, there is a consequence. I cann’t breath under the sea. There is no option “if you breath under the sea, you will lose your hair.”
Metric is and have been translated. My Comedy is in Terza Rima and in fact, I know about 3 different Portuguese translations and 2 spanish, all in Terza Rima. If there is elements lost (there is), it is irrelevant: metric was translated. Therefore your affirmation is wrong. (And it should be obvious, the same metric is used in several languages, it is not a trait of any in particular, so it can be translated.

What? I never said Prose Poetry wasn't Poetry, what I said was that it was Poetry the same way Opera was music, or theater. It has elements associated with poetry and others with prose, likewise it has or lacks qualities commonly associated with either. See my reply to Cunninglinguist above.
You do not admit, to the point you need to keep calling it “Prose Poetry”. It is just poetry, like all else. You even called exceptions and moved the definition to some “classical” definition which would exclude them at all. And you actually said: “but I'd still insist that prose is different than poetry which is different than prose poetry, and latter two typically suffer a much greater deal in translation, to the point you essentially remove the aspect that makes them poetry to begin with…”, In other word, you did said Prose poetry is not the same as Poetry.
Fact is: You tried to imply people would usually identify poetry as the use of classical elements (verses, rhymes, etc) as asked me it. I answered with Lautreamont, which is know as poet by anyone who knows him (as you) to show that the so called classical recognition which you use to argue over the translation question cann’t deal correctly with all poetry. If you show up saying “Lautreamont is a prose poet”, most people will say “Lautreamont is poet”. It is poetry, no need to work with splitting the patterns.

Under that definition what I was actually referring to is plot. The plot survives. I say narrative because I think a good chunk of the narrative survives as well, more so than those elements we'd call poetic or formal. Even if we change "she flew at him with her fingernails glinting like claws, ready to disfigure his smug face" to "with her claw-like nails she lunged at him in an attempt to wipe the smile off his face" then even though we've changed the specific narration, the general sense is still the same. There's nothing in either that can't be equated to something in the other. Now, of course, translation can make more radical alterations than this, but the entire point is for it not to, although sometimes it's impossible to capture all of the subtleties and ambiguities so translators must choose.
Again: that s what you said “So when I used the word I really meant that the basic "story" is the same, while the exact plot and narrative can be changed.” The definition you threw is causing rather a confusion. Plot changes or plots, your definition is not even Bordwell? Why bring him anyways.
Fine, in a Narrative (let’s say Red Ridding Hood) , there is a plotline (Girl cross forest to take food to the granny, a wolf goes ahead, eat granny and the girl), which is a basic skeleton in several versions of Red Ridding Hood. This is obviously easier to translate. But this is irrelevant if either poem or prose, oral or written. If we admit the narrative how it actually happens, it is obviously always particular. Homer Narrative is particular to him , it is an epic, verses, etc. Obviously, much harder to translate. But the same is true to prose translations. The way Faulkner tells Sound and Fury belongs to it. When I read “O Som ea Fúria”, I did not read the original either.
The point is not that this does not happen – it does. The point it does for several texts. There are elements of prose, there are elements of anagrams that are harder to translate. It all down to the language used. Chinese to German? Spanish to English? Italian to French? Arabian to Russian? It is not exclusivity of poetry (even because sometimes you translate well, faithfully and when you see, you have a bad text)

You're missing the point though. You're putting the onus on the people to know the words when I'm putting the onus on the word to conform to the associated objects they're describing, something that's already ingrained intentionally in people's mind.
I am not missing any point. You can use any argument to try to justify why the words of specialists should be ignored in favor of a bunch of people who will say that the meter of Virgil is 15 centimeters. I will not waste my time with this as much as biologists didn’t discussing with sailors who always called whales fish, kept saying it is a fish, just because they are familiar with it as a fish.
And to you: the object is poetry? So, by definition Lautreamont, Bauldelaire, etc are there. You are trying to find a way to exclude them, just to suit your argument. Just stop with that.
And yes, it is people fault. They are those who are ignorant about it.

Your anime example doesn't really work because anime IS defined as "animation from Japan". It's associated with all kinds of certain things, yes, but there are words for those that most people aren't aware of (porn+animation from Japan = Hentai, animation from Japan with cute creatures = anime mascots).
Worked perfectly, Your first attempt was to bring to the vocabulary of a specialist. And the example works perfect: people who do not know it will call it any suits them. They will be wrong. Like you showed: they do not even know what hentai is. So I will refrain to ask them what anime is and you will refrain to suggest me to ask to so guy who have headaches reading the newspaper crossword. You, me and all people who know the subject treats Lautreamont as a poet. End of it.

So let's return to poetry. Unlike anime, poetry was more of an emergent label, meaning that many works that shared certain formal and linguistic qualities were found together and the label "poetry" was put on it. This originally did contrast with "prose" which more closely imitated everyday speech. Some elements more common to poetry was heightened/formal language, line breaks, meter, greater emphasis on rhythm, phonetics, rhyme, imagery (including metaphor), rhetoric, artificial syntax, etc. Now, over time, poetry was made that didn't include all of these elements, but retained most/some of the others, while prose began incorporating these elements as well. What this is means is that none of these elements are innately poetry, yet they are associated with poetry enough that if you put them together you create poetry
The fact the word has a much wider use is irrelevant. The label science is immense, yet, no specialist will define science as Greeks did.

The definition of prose as everyday speech is false – it is straightforward, direct. Because of course, the oral poets used everyday speech. Latter this academic definition was in vogue, but easily dismissed when the value of popular poetry was recognized. As the list you made, many are related to various form of texts, I find funny you talk as if they all grouped together and not in a 500 years old process, but more funny is the rethoric thing – a function of speech and not a poetic specific trait – which prime examples came in prose… but well, I am really not interested in this part. It is also funny, you do not mention Narrative, the prime form of poetry form centuries, but well…

. Likewise, if you stuff them in a prose format you create prose poetry.
Prose poems are not prose where you stuff it. That is a narrow definition, but I will say: when I gave you examples of prose written with rythim, care with sound, etc I listed guys like Flaubert or Proust. They are spefifically more concerned with that than Whitman or Neruda. Yet, you ignore them over and over. When Flaubert use many of those elements, he does Emma Bovary.

But why is it that prose, ie language that attempts to more closely replicate common speech, that's found in poetry not create prose poetry as well?
The definition of prose as the language that attempts to more closely replicate common speech is absurd. Cicer does NOT try to replicate common speech. Neither did Plato. For good sakes, for years, they use latim, a dead spoken language while a poet went for poetry in search of common speakers (he does not, Dante justification is similar to Wordsoworth defense of his poems). Even Aesop, every day language is not made of animals talking and it was not. And I dare someone to say that Proust is like any blogger or journalist…
And the question, if Understood, is why when find elements of prose in poetry, we do not call it Poem-prose? I dunno which example do you point, but obviously, calling a poem prose would be considered offensive until XIX century and the prose poem had to be revolutionary to give prose status and not the other around. Not a technical matter.

. Is it that prose can't contain line breaks? Are line breaks the only consistent element in all of poetry? Surely line breaks can't define all poetry since prose poetry usually doesn't contain line breaks, so how could it be poetry at all?
Line breaks was part of an old formal definition, yes. Today outdated, more because poems broke the lines quite before the prose poems appeared.

You're still stuck on "Lautreamont is a poet, Lautreamont made poetry" when I'm beyond that. Lautreamont made linguistic art objects that share certain qualities that we associate with the umbrella labels poetry and prose. Even if you point these elements out and separate them, that's not the same as saying that these elements define poetry in prose or are found in all poetry in prose.
I do not need to define anything. Lautreamont is a challenge to your definition. It is necessary only one penguin to dismiss the claim that all winged animals fly.

No different than when I said "the poetic qualities in Homer, like meter, rhythm, and phonetics don't survive in translation" isn't the same as me saying "meter, rhythm, and phonetics define poetry".
You have no said it and if you did I would point those elements are not the only poetic qualities of Homer and two of them (rhythm and phonetics) didn’t survived at all, so they were never his poetic quality. And this argument is exactly because you said those elements are found only in poetry, so they can define poetry (or be a starting point for the definition).

It's saying these are elements that are usually given more emphasis in poetry, and when they are given as much emphasis in prose we typically call it prose poetry, in which these elements constitute the poetry aspect of prose poetry.
It is better, as you previously claimed they do not exist in prose. I do not call journalistic text poetry. They have rythim. I do not call Guimarãoes Rosa prose poems, the guy is a master of phonetics. Lewis Carroll too. Flaubert was over worried with the rythim of his text… Nobody call him prose poetry…

Errr, meter isn't "organization of words due to pleasant sounds", that sounds more like phonetics than meter. Meter is concerned with rhythm but, specifically, the patterned organization of the timing element of the language (moras, stress, or syllables).
Do not make me laugh. Syllables are nothing but a word’s unity. If you organize syllables, you organize words. And the place where the accent enters, how long the syllables are, is executed in search of harmony to imitate music if the poem is intonated. Phonetics is not worried with the harmony of sounds like prosody is, just about the sound.

Homer's Dactylic Hexameter is a pattern of moras that is arranged 2/2 or 2/1/1 in lines of seven, while Milton's Iambic Pentameter is a pattern of stresses arranged weak/strong in lines of five. I don't know of any prose arranged in such a manner.
So, does this proves that prose writers do not organize the words to produce rythimic variation? No, it does not. So, still: prose does organize the words according the rythim of the text. It is very basic. Try to find newspapers written with cacophony. The text is cleaned to kept a free-flowing rythim. It is not iambic, but it is the care with rythimical organization of words.

[MorpheusSandman]

Look what you actually said previously: “If both exist together then they must be the same thing. I don't know how you can really get around this unless you do like I suggested and break both down to their constituent parts and say which belong to neither exclusively.”
It is an absurd to keep any argument if you return to contradict yourself.I said what you quoted in response to what you said here:

You: "However, we deny that you can split so clear than what survives from Homer is "Narrative" and not "Poetry". Both exists together."

So when I said "if both exist together then...", I was arguing that if both exist together to the point they can't be separated/split, then you cannot say they constitute two different things, you must admit they are the same thing. If they weren't, then why couldn't they be separated? It was never my opinion that they couldn't be separated or that they were the same thing. You insisted they couldn't be separated, and I stated that the only way they couldn't be separated is if they were the same thing.


Metric is and have been translated. My Comedy is in Terza Rima and in fact, I know about 3 different Portuguese translations and 2 spanish, all in Terza Rima. If there is elements lost (there is), it is irrelevant: metric was translated.You're correct. What I should have said was that you cannot translate meter without damaging (usually significantly) the content, and for most the damage done to the content is not worth preserving the meter. Still, I was absolutely correct in saying you can't translate meters from one language with one timing system to another with a different one. There are simply certain features that some languages have that others don't share, and when writers in that language utilize those elements it is absolutely impossible to translate.


You do not admit, to the point you need to keep calling it “Prose Poetry”.Because that's what it is! It's not like I'm making it up. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prose_poetry) Prose poetry exists. It features elements of prose and poetry, that's why it's called prose poetry instead of JUST poetry or JUST prose. I don't get what your problem is here... you seem to be suggesting that prose poetry is as much poetry as any other, again treating words as all-or-nothing categories. Calling prose poetry just poetry does not account for all of the elements that makes up its existence, which is why the hybrid term was invented to begin with. Saying something is different than something else is not tantamount to saying that there is nothing alike in those two things. Saying prose poetry is different than other poetry is no different than saying epic poetry is different from other poetry. I never said it was NOT poetry AT ALL.


In other word, you did said Prose poetry is not the same as Poetry.The same way Opera is not the same as theater.


Fact is: You tried to imply people would usually identify poetry as the use of classical elements (verses, rhymes, etc) as asked me it.Yes, and I think that's as much true now as when I first said it. These are amongst some of the element that originally distinguished poetry from prose to begin with. You could simply look at them on a page and dub the work "poetry". When they were removed other elements more commonly associated with poetry were maintained and emphasized, and when they transferred over into a prose format it's these elements that inspired people to dub it "prose poetry". They looked at it and saw prose format, but other elements more commonly found in poetry.


Fine, in a Narrative (let’s say Red Ridding Hood) , there is a plotline (Girl cross forest to take food to the granny, a wolf goes ahead, eat granny and the girl), which is a basic skeleton in several versions of Red Ridding Hood. This is obviously easier to translate. But this is irrelevant if either poem or prose, oral or written. If we admit the narrative how it actually happens, it is obviously always particular. Homer Narrative is particular to him , it is an epic, verses, etc. Obviously, much harder to translate.Now you're conflating narrative and form. An element like Homer's verse is not part of the narrative but the poetic form. Thinking of plot as a skeleton works, but it's also a kind of baseline content, events without perspective. Little Red Riding Hood "Girl crosses forest to see grandmother... etc." Then the narrative would be the manner in which this was rendered. Saying "Red Riding Hood skipped happily" VS "strode confidently" VS "lazily walked", or describing forest as "dark and scary" or "bright and happy" or whatever else is when you move from plot to narrative detail, because now the exact verbs and adjectives are providing a tonal, perhaps thematic, sense of how the events are unfolding. They're providing perspective, adding embellishments that go beyond just a plain account.

In such a case, I would still argue that such a narrative can be translated much easier. While if we look at the poetic aspects as the formal elements, the exact rhythms, the meter, the phonetic qualities, certain linguistic idiosyncrasies, etc. then they don't translate because they reside in the realm of the particular language rather than the translatable words/senses themselves. Now, there are poetic elements that CAN be translated, like metaphor and simile. The latter is one particular element that survives strongly in Homer's poetry and is even rather a trademark.

The thing about MOST prose is that the story/narrative elements dominate and are of a greater importance and focus than any of those formal concerns or idiosyncratic concerns. Not many writers pored over a single line for days/weeks like Flaubert; they wouldn't ever be able to churn out 100,000+ words if that was the case. However, plenty do borrow poetic elements heavily, like Faulkner or Joyce or others, and when they do get into these poetical elements is precisely when they become immensely difficult (if not impossible) to translate. It seems to me what you've been arguing is that these elements within their prose is still prose, even though it's these very elements that are focused on in prose poetry that provoke most to call it prose poetry instead of just prose.


And to you: the object is poetry? So, by definition Lautreamont, Bauldelaire, etc are there. You are trying to find a way to exclude them, just to suit your argument. Just stop with that.I don't know what you're saying. The works of literature are the object, yes; they just exist. The words "poetry" and "prose" attempt to classify a number of literary objects in which certain elements appear together often enough to make those words meaningful and useful in connecting intensional concepts to extensional objects that share these qualities. What's happened is that these elements have stopped being separately bundled together so neatly and have found themselves mingling with other elements more commonly found in the other. This is where the problem has arisen, and this is where your Network 2 brain ("Lautreamont IS poetry") has stopped being adequate to describe the objects being encountered. You still haven't pointed to the element in Lautreamont that makes him poetry. You've simply insisted that he is poetry, as if poetry was a fixed object in itself rather than just an outline on a map.


Worked perfectly, Your first attempt was to bring to the vocabulary of a specialist.If you look anime up on Wikipedia the first thing it says "animation from Japan". It says nothing about the content of that animation. This is not the same for poetry. Both Dictionary.com and Merriam Webster basically define poetry in terms of it being composition in verse, although the latter stretches it to include this incredibly vague definition: "writing that formulates a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience in language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response through meaning, sound, and rhythm"

Pretty much everything from "writing" to "language" is a matter of pure subjectivism because you can't point to "concentrated imaginative awareness of experience in language" externally. However, the fact that it lists this being achieved by "meaning, sound, and rhythm" is interesting, as it rather supports what I said from the beginning about phonetics and rhythm being amongst the cornerstones of poetry, to which you took such offense because these elements were found in prose (never mind that they're not usually focused on to any great extent in the vast majority of prose). Further, if you look up poetry in Wikipedia it defines it as: "a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning." The problem here, again, is that the definition doesn't really allow us to point to extensional examples. This equally relies on pure subjectivism. Any literary art in which someone finds an aesthetic and evocative quality in the language then becomes poetry.

People saying that anime is all porn or cute animals hasn't even bothered to look up the definition of anime, or to see if there is a specific name for anime porn or anime with cute animals, or anime that doesn't include those things. Even if we assume that certain associations have become attached to the label, the idea that anime must originate from Japan is set in stone no matter where you hear the word used. You can't accuse people of wrongly thinking that poetry is primarily identified by it being focused on rhythm, verse, sound, etc. when two dictionaries define it this way, especially when the two definitions that don't define it as that are so vague and subjective as to make finding extensional examples and elemental groupings impossible from an objective standpoint.

To simply conclude: You can define anime by saying "Anime is... animation from Japan". You cannot define poetry by saying "poetry is..." because whatever follows "is" cannot possibly account for everything we call poetry, and it probably would only capture a minute part of it if you did find something.


I gave you examples of prose written with rythim, care with sound, etc I listed guys like Flaubert or Proust. They are spefifically more concerned with that than Whitman or Neruda. Yet, you ignore them over and over. When Flaubert use many of those elements, he does Emma Bovary.Then why are Flaubert and Proust labeled as prose writers and Whitman and Neruda labeled as poets? I want to see YOU answer this.


Line breaks was part of an old formal definition, yes. Today outdated, more because poems broke the lines quite before the prose poems appeared. Terry Eagleton still defined poetry in terms of line breaks in his How to Read a Poem. Of course, he also defined poetry as a moral statement as well, and I'm not certain I agree with either. Although, I think he has a point that line breaks are one of the few consistencies in poetry that doesn't appear in a prose format.


It is necessary only one penguin to dismiss the claim that all winged animals fly.See Atypical Similarity (http://lesswrong.com/lw/nk/typicality_and_asymmetrical_similarity). I've insisted over and over that my definitions of prose and poetry are emergent rather than all-or-nothing, a matter of certain elements cropping up in one more so than the other enough to make these labels useful. Me saying that certain elements are a part of what we use to define (perhaps "identify" would be a better word) poetry is not tantamount to saying that all poetry contains these things.


I would point those elements are not the only poetic qualities of Homer and two of them (rhythm and phonetics) didn’t survived at all, so they were never his poetic quality. And this argument is exactly because you said those elements are found only in poetry, so they can define poetry (or be a starting point for the definition). I never said those were the only poetic qualities in Homer, yet they are still poetic qualities that do not survive in translation. But saying they were never part of his poetic quality is absurd since Homer was spoken and recited long before we lost the phonetics of the language, and we haven't really lost the rhythm or, at least not the meter.

Plus, I never said that those elements are "only found in poetry", what I said was that they are frequently focused on in poetry enough to make them an important aspect of it, and when they're focused on as much in prose it's frequently referred to as prose poetry or at least poetic prose. All of the writers you've listed that used these aspects to a high degree like Proust and Flaubert are frequently described as "poetic" precisely because of these qualities. Yet these qualities aren't found more in poetry than in prose?

If I see a line in prose that uses something like phonetics to enhance a point, or a line in prose in which the rhythm is very carefully constructed to shade the meaning, then I don't say "Oh, look, prose just like all other prose I encounter" I say "Oh, look, poetic prose", because such features are much more commonly found in poetry. This isn't to say that they're always found in poetry, or that they define poetry, but merely that they are particular literary elements that find themselves bundled together with others more frequently in objects we called "poetry", and when they're found unbundled with those other elements it makes more since to say that these qualities evoke a poetic feeling more than a typical prose feeling.


It is better, as you previously claimed they do not exist in prose. I do not call journalistic text poetry. They have rythim. I do not call Guimarãoes Rosa prose poems, the guy is a master of phonetics. Lewis Carroll too. Flaubert was over worried with the rythim of his text… Nobody call him prose poetry…All language has rhythm and phonetics but this isn't the same as saying that these two elements are focused on by the writer or speaker when they're utilized. Poetry consciously uses them and manipulates them in a way that works together more effectively with what's being said. And it very well could be an oversight that people don't refer to Flaubert as a prose poet. There's no reason to think that just because someone is or isn't referred to as a poet means that they are or aren't. Afterall, what's stopping Flaubert from being as poetic as any other poet?


Do not make me laugh. Syllables are nothing but a word’s unity. If you organize syllables, you organize words. And the place where the accent enters, how long the syllables are, is executed in search of harmony to imitate music if the poem is intonated. Phonetics is not worried with the harmony of sounds like prosody is, just about the sound.You're confusing me as your last sentence referred to prosody rather than meter. What I responded to was your statement that: "Metric? The organization of words according the sound to make it more pleasant and fluid?" when meter clearly isn't defined as the organization of words according to sound. It's defined as the consistent organization of a line according to a language's timing qualities. Prosody is a larger concept that includes meter, but equally the issue of intonation and rhythm, which is partly, but not wholly, determined by the meter. Meter is similar to a tactus in music, which is consistent (assuming the time signature doesn't change) even if the rhythm and intonation are always varying.


So, does this proves that prose writers do not organize the words to produce rythimic variation? No, it does not. So, still: prose does organize the words according the rythim of the text. It is very basic. Try to find newspapers written with cacophony. The text is cleaned to kept a free-flowing rythim. It is not iambic, but it is the care with rythimical organization of words.Arguing that all text, indeed, all language, has rhythm is different than arguing that all text has meter or that the rhythm is given an equal amount of attention and focus across all texts. When you read a newspaper you are not focusing on the rhythmic qualities of the language, while if you read Homer in his original Dactylic Hexameter the rhythm is inescapable.

[JCamilo]

I said what you quoted in response to what you said here:

You: "However, we deny that you can split so clear than what survives from Homer is "Narrative" and not "Poetry". Both exists together."

So when I said "if both exist together then...", I was arguing that if both exist together to the point they can't be separated/split, then you cannot say they constitute two different things, you must admit they are the same thing. If they weren't, then why couldn't they be separated? It was never my opinion that they couldn't be separated or that they were the same thing. You insisted they couldn't be separated, and I stated that the only way they couldn't be separated is if they were the same thing.

Non sense. Not only I have never said they cann't be separated, as your argument that the if two things exist together must be the same thing still illogical, considering you gave examples of what live together and are the same thing. Telling me to what you replied does not change anything. Two things can form a unity and still be two different things.

I wont be digging back things you said, I wont insist in arguments if you will insist in non sense as asking people who is not knowleagable about the subject (couldn't you get I wasn't arguing what Anime was? I gave a example of what happens when people without knowledge on the matter "defines" the subject. It is irony, because average people will say poetry is what rhymes or have verse, something outdated that exclude everything but a certain style of poetry), I wont tell you prosody is the study of metre, and that the reason Flaubert is not called poet is because he didnt wrote poems, yet, we all are happy to see you reckonize prose who use elements of poetry and normal people wont call poetry (the contrary of your argument). I would ask you to translate "Saudade" to english, but heck wikipedia, may teach it...

You're correct. What I should have said was that you cannot translate meter without damaging (usually significantly) the content, and for most the damage done to the content is not worth preserving the meter. Still, I was absolutely correct in saying you can't translate meters from one language with one timing system to another with a different one. There are simply certain features that some languages have that others don't share, and when writers in that language utilize those elements it is absolutely impossible to translate.

Because that's what it is! It's not like I'm making it up. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prose_poetry) Prose poetry exists. It features elements of prose and poetry, that's why it's called prose poetry instead of JUST poetry or JUST prose. I don't get what your problem is here... you seem to be suggesting that prose poetry is as much poetry as any other, again treating words as all-or-nothing categories. Calling prose poetry just poetry does not account for all of the elements that makes up its existence, which is why the hybrid term was invented to begin with. Saying something is different than something else is not tantamount to saying that there is nothing alike in those two things. Saying prose poetry is different than other poetry is no different than saying epic poetry is different from other poetry. I never said it was NOT poetry AT ALL.

The same way Opera is not the same as theater.

Yes, and I think that's as much true now as when I first said it. These are amongst some of the element that originally distinguished poetry from prose to begin with. You could simply look at them on a page and dub the work "poetry". When they were removed other elements more commonly associated with poetry were maintained and emphasized, and when they transferred over into a prose format it's these elements that inspired people to dub it "prose poetry". They looked at it and saw prose format, but other elements more commonly found in poetry.

Now you're conflating narrative and form. An element like Homer's verse is not part of the narrative but the poetic form. Thinking of plot as a skeleton works, but it's also a kind of baseline content, events without perspective. Little Red Riding Hood "Girl crosses forest to see grandmother... etc." Then the narrative would be the manner in which this was rendered. Saying "Red Riding Hood skipped happily" VS "strode confidently" VS "lazily walked", or describing forest as "dark and scary" or "bright and happy" or whatever else is when you move from plot to narrative detail, because now the exact verbs and adjectives are providing a tonal, perhaps thematic, sense of how the events are unfolding. They're providing perspective, adding embellishments that go beyond just a plain account.

In such a case, I would still argue that such a narrative can be translated much easier. While if we look at the poetic aspects as the formal elements, the exact rhythms, the meter, the phonetic qualities, certain linguistic idiosyncrasies, etc. then they don't translate because they reside in the realm of the particular language rather than the translatable words/senses themselves. Now, there are poetic elements that CAN be translated, like metaphor and simile. The latter is one particular element that survives strongly in Homer's poetry and is even rather a trademark.

The thing about MOST prose is that the story/narrative elements dominate and are of a greater importance and focus than any of those formal concerns or idiosyncratic concerns. Not many writers pored over a single line for days/weeks like Flaubert; they wouldn't ever be able to churn out 100,000+ words if that was the case. However, plenty do borrow poetic elements heavily, like Faulkner or Joyce or others, and when they do get into these poetical elements is precisely when they become immensely difficult (if not impossible) to translate. It seems to me what you've been arguing is that these elements within their prose is still prose, even though it's these very elements that are focused on in prose poetry that provoke most to call it prose poetry instead of just prose.

I don't know what you're saying. The works of literature are the object, yes; they just exist. The words "poetry" and "prose" attempt to classify a number of literary objects in which certain elements appear together often enough to make those words meaningful and useful in connecting intensional concepts to extensional objects that share these qualities. What's happened is that these elements have stopped being separately bundled together so neatly and have found themselves mingling with other elements more commonly found in the other. This is where the problem has arisen, and this is where your Network 2 brain ("Lautreamont IS poetry") has stopped being adequate to describe the objects being encountered. You still haven't pointed to the element in Lautreamont that makes him poetry. You've simply insisted that he is poetry, as if poetry was a fixed object in itself rather than just an outline on a map.

If you look anime up on Wikipedia the first thing it says "animation from Japan". It says nothing about the content of that animation. This is not the same for poetry. Both Dictionary.com and Merriam Webster basically define poetry in terms of it being composition in verse, although the latter stretches it to include this incredibly vague definition: "writing that formulates a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience in language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response through meaning, sound, and rhythm"

Pretty much everything from "writing" to "language" is a matter of pure subjectivism because you can't point to "concentrated imaginative awareness of experience in language" externally. However, the fact that it lists this being achieved by "meaning, sound, and rhythm" is interesting, as it rather supports what I said from the beginning about phonetics and rhythm being amongst the cornerstones of poetry, to which you took such offense because these elements were found in prose (never mind that they're not usually focused on to any great extent in the vast majority of prose). Further, if you look up poetry in Wikipedia it defines it as: "a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning." The problem here, again, is that the definition doesn't really allow us to point to extensional examples. This equally relies on pure subjectivism. Any literary art in which someone finds an aesthetic and evocative quality in the language then becomes poetry.

People saying that anime is all porn or cute animals hasn't even bothered to look up the definition of anime, or to see if there is a specific name for anime porn or anime with cute animals, or anime that doesn't include those things. Even if we assume that certain associations have become attached to the label, the idea that anime must originate from Japan is set in stone no matter where you hear the word used. You can't accuse people of wrongly thinking that poetry is primarily identified by it being focused on rhythm, verse, sound, etc. when two dictionaries define it this way, especially when the two definitions that don't define it as that are so vague and subjective as to make finding extensional examples and elemental groupings impossible from an objective standpoint.

To simply conclude: You can define anime by saying "Anime is... animation from Japan". You cannot define poetry by saying "poetry is..." because whatever follows "is" cannot possibly account for everything we call poetry, and it probably would only capture a minute part of it if you did find something.

Then why are Flaubert and Proust labeled as prose writers and Whitman and Neruda labeled as poets? I want to see YOU answer this.

Terry Eagleton still defined poetry in terms of line breaks in his How to Read a Poem. Of course, he also defined poetry as a moral statement as well, and I'm not certain I agree with either. Although, I think he has a point that line breaks are one of the few consistencies in poetry that doesn't appear in a prose format.

See Atypical Similarity (http://lesswrong.com/lw/nk/typicality_and_asymmetrical_similarity). I've insisted over and over that my definitions of prose and poetry are emergent rather than all-or-nothing, a matter of certain elements cropping up in one more so than the other enough to make these labels useful. Me saying that certain elements are a part of what we use to define (perhaps "identify" would be a better word) poetry is not tantamount to saying that all poetry contains these things.

I never said those were the only poetic qualities in Homer, yet they are still poetic qualities that do not survive in translation. But saying they were never part of his poetic quality is absurd since Homer was spoken and recited long before we lost the phonetics of the language, and we haven't really lost the rhythm or, at least not the meter.

Plus, I never said that those elements are "only found in poetry", what I said was that they are frequently focused on in poetry enough to make them an important aspect of it, and when they're focused on as much in prose it's frequently referred to as prose poetry or at least poetic prose. All of the writers you've listed that used these aspects to a high degree like Proust and Flaubert are frequently described as "poetic" precisely because of these qualities. Yet these qualities aren't found more in poetry than in prose?

If I see a line in prose that uses something like phonetics to enhance a point, or a line in prose in which the rhythm is very carefully constructed to shade the meaning, then I don't say "Oh, look, prose just like all other prose I encounter" I say "Oh, look, poetic prose", because such features are much more commonly found in poetry. This isn't to say that they're always found in poetry, or that they define poetry, but merely that they are particular literary elements that find themselves bundled together with others more frequently in objects we called "poetry", and when they're found unbundled with those other elements it makes more since to say that these qualities evoke a poetic feeling more than a typical prose feeling.

All language has rhythm and phonetics but this isn't the same as saying that these two elements are focused on by the writer or speaker when they're utilized. Poetry consciously uses them and manipulates them in a way that works together more effectively with what's being said. And it very well could be an oversight that people don't refer to Flaubert as a prose poet. There's no reason to think that just because someone is or isn't referred to as a poet means that they are or aren't. Afterall, what's stopping Flaubert from being as poetic as any other poet?

You're confusing me as your last sentence referred to prosody rather than meter. What I responded to was your statement that: "Metric? The organization of words according the sound to make it more pleasant and fluid?" when meter clearly isn't defined as the organization of words according to sound. It's defined as the consistent organization of a line according to a language's timing qualities. Prosody is a larger concept that includes meter, but equally the issue of intonation and rhythm, which is partly, but not wholly, determined by the meter. Meter is similar to a tactus in music, which is consistent (assuming the time signature doesn't change) even if the rhythm and intonation are always varying.

Arguing that all text, indeed, all language, has rhythm is different than arguing that all text has meter or that the rhythm is given an equal amount of attention and focus across all texts. When you read a newspaper you are not focusing on the rhythmic qualities of the language, while if you read Homer in his original Dactylic Hexameter the rhythm is inescapable.[/QUOTE]