Corpsey

bandz ahoy
It would be a way of making the auditory/musical effects of poetry audible to a cloth eared peasant like me - to make English make so little sense it's like reading a foreign language
 

luka

Well-known member
It would be a way of making the auditory/musical effects of poetry audible to a cloth eared peasant like me - to make English make so little sense it's like reading a foreign language
That sounds like it would be worth doing in itself I guess
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
I fucking hated all that stupid 'moo cow' stuff at the start of Portrait, that's what kind of put me off Joyce too (is that the kind of whimsy you're on about?) although some other bits of that book are amazing like the fire and brimstone sermon chapter.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
I'm sure this wasn't his intention but reading it is somewhat soothing and meditative because it destroys my rational mind
I was reading some surrealist stuff the other day, Breton and suchlike, that had this effect on me while I was reading it (probably not quite what the poets intended though). I didn't think it was all that good as poetry but it felt like a worthwhile read just for that.

Not comparing the surrealists to Prynne btw cos I haven't read him, just the effect of reading something so sense-destroying.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
Yeah, I suppose with Prynne there's lots of stuff you want to strain to understand and will keep you coming back to it, whereas the surrealist stuff seems like an interesting experience while you're reading it, but not much to follow up on.
 

woops

is not like other people
Maybe sounds better in French?
everything does. in fact as i've said before i'm actually one of the worst people to ask about french poetry because i'll start reading a poem thinking right, let's see what this is all about, and after a couple of lines i'm just like this 🥰 i can imagine it would translate particularly badly though and naturally i wouldn't be caught dead reading éluard in translation.
 

woops

is not like other people
random stanza of éluard:

Une année un jour lointains
Une promenade le coeur battant
Le paysage prolongeait
Nos paroles et nos gestes
L'allée s'en allait de nous
Les arbres nous grandissaient
Et nous calmions les rochers

Problems of translation (list is non-exhaustive)

line 1. "lointains" as a plural adverb refers to both the year and the day so do we have "A distant day and year", "A distant day and a distant year", something closer perhaps to the original unpunctuated spirit like "a year, a day, distant" or something else?

line 2. "Une promenade" = not a promenade (for walking down) but the "walk" itself. "le coeur battant" seems straightforward but "a walk with beating heart" is not quite the sense and also an ambiguous and ugly line. "A walk heart beating" is better but ambiguous.

line 5. "s'en allait" doesn't just mean "went away from us/receded from us" but also "left us (behind)" good luck capturing that double sense

so you see that's just problems of sense, apart from the different music
 
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