Re: Hebrew poetry was Re: Insane Question

On Monday 27 January 2003 10:48 pm, Roger Mills wrote:
> (snip interesting listing)
> There are some very fine (almost too fine) translations of Sa'dan Toraja
> (Celebes, Indonesia) funeral chants, published in the 50/60s by the KITLV
> (for those interested), consisting almost entirely parallelisms; I'll see
> if I have any examples....Their poetry provided a ready-made pattern for
> translation of the Psalms; if I can find my copy of their Bible will send a
> few.
        Please do, that sounds interesting.

> >ObConlang: Conlang poems that invent words specifically to rhyme or fit
>
> with
>
> > the meter or whatever is cheating in my opinion. :)
>
> Guilty again, but....less of a crime. If you need a _new_ word X to rhyme
> with Y, why not? Or if X already exists and doesn't rhyme, devise/use a
> synomym that does.  It works in English.
        Because it's cheating! :)
        Seriously, though, one reason I don't like conlang poetry is that I am always
suspicious--this or that word works so well right there...how do I know that
the poet didn't just coin it on the spot? English (or any other natlang) is a
different case; because the vocabulary is already known, any new coins will
be appreciated and understood as coins, specific to that poem. For an extreme
example, take "Jabberwocky." About half of the words in the first stanza are
coins, but because the reader already knows English and already has
pre-conceived notions of sound and meaning, the coins are funny, with a
frustrating air of familiarity. "Jabberwocky" is poetry at play, and not easy
to pull off successfully.
        All that said, I do coin words on the rare occasions that I write poetry, but
in all cases that poetry has been in Cleansed English (English shorn of
French, Latin, Greek, and other barbarous loans), in which the coins are
taken from Germanic roots. The coins may not be transparent in meaning
("girdring" for "surround"), but they have the familiar air of English, and
(hopefully) a hypothetical reader would be able to appreciate them in
context.
        :Peter

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