I continued this
thread because of this Philip Metres' intriguing statement:
"Precisely because regular rhyme and meter is still almost completely the norm in Russian poetry, ..."
"Still"? He believes that this is the natural path of evolution -- from rhymed to unrhymed poetry? Weissbort then says that English poetry is several centuries older than Russian, and this and the difficulties with rhymes in English is why contemporary English poetry is almost completely free verse. In other words all possible rhymes are already used up? I found this hard to believe. What is the real reason for predominance of free verse in English poetry?
One of the aforementioned translators (I forgot who of them, but most likely Weissbort) said that rhymed poetry looks childish or pretentious for an English reader. In turn, for a Russian reader unrhymed poetry looks lazy and sloppy.
Weissbort:
"Brodsky, as we have seen, held that the alleged paucity of full rhymes in English was simply an excuse, a cover-up for inferior skills of workmanship. Rhyming might require greater ingenuity in English, but that precisely was the challenge. "
"As he had done several times before, he stressed the importance for him of a "sense of the
inevitability of the statement" (earlier he had spoken of "a certain air of ominousness, of inevitability"). Rhyme had to be positive; it was an indispensable means of conveying that sense of inevitability. "
Brodsky is on to something here. Rhymed poems (good rhymed poems, that's it) do seem more "true" to me, maybe because of apparent inevitability, yes. In particular, Gandlevsky's poems are written in completely conversational language, nothing looks artifical and pretentious, and you can't but marvel at the author's skills.
Weissbort:
"In the Russian, the metre often approximates to natural speech rhythms, while in English it seems to be superimposed. "
Free verses (good free verses, that's it) aren't sloppy poetry, they just require different skills. So the main question is: what are these skills and why did English poetry preferred them over the traditional set -- other than because all the rhymes were used already. :roll:
[ November 07, 2006: Message edited by: Mapraputa Is ]
