"The Ode Less Travelled"
My friend paulvf recently sent me as a gift "The Ode Less Travelled" by Stephen Fry, after hearing of my interest in improving my haiku poetry skills. I have been working through the first few chapters on metre.
Fry concerns himself, at least in the beginning, with the standard iambic pentameter and its variations such as weak endings, trochaic and pyrhhic substitutions. It isn't really the sort of thing that on the face of it has very much to do with haiku which, after all, has none of these things in the original - being a tonal rather than stressed language and one with few multisyllabic words in any event. However English, being a stressed language, must by its nature include these elements in any sort of metrical poetry, and the effect of stress will need to be taken into account in any sort of poem written in English even if it is in a style such as haiku, so the information on metre has still been most useful for my future endeavours in the realm of poetics.
Not being much of a linguist myself, I had never previously considered some of the consequences of language structure on how a poem would be put together. I always rather assumed, foolishly as it turns out, that it works more or less the same way regardless of your language. This rather shocking ignorance came crashing down when I read in Mr. Fry's book about differences between English and French poetry.
French, you see, does not use the same stress rules as English. Words and syllables in French tend to receive equal stress. Take, for example, "Sophie". In English we pronounce it "SO-fee", but in French it is "SO-FEE". Practice that a couple of times - it takes a bit to get it right. Now try picking an English word, say "English", and pronouncing it with equal stress on the syllables - not ""IN-glish" but "IN-GLISH".
Sounds weird doesn't it?
This difference is huge when it comes to poetry. Iambs and trochees go right out the window. Iambic pentameter in French would sound like you were trying to bray like a donkey "hi THERE could YOU tell ME what THE time IS?" French poetry instead seems to rely far more on relations between words, syllable counts, strong vs weak rhyme, and the relationship between lines.
In short, Shakespeare sounds stupid in French.
This brings me to the difficulty of translating works into different languages, and to transplanting a form from one language into another.
The traditional format for the haiku, as every schoolchild learns, is three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables. But Japanese really doesn't have syllables in the same sense that English does - rather it has sounds, all of which are rather short. English syllables vary considerably in verbal duration, compare the word "it" to the word "heaved". Thus the traditional flow of a haiku cannot be achieved by simple syllable count - doing so causes English haiku to be very "wordy" compared to the original Japanese. As previously mentioned Japanese lacks the stresses of English, but instead uses tonal changes, so English haiku tend to be somewhat "flat" compared to their Japanese counterparts. This does not even begin to address issues such as wordplay, subtexts, and onomotopaeism.
Fry's feeling on the matter is that such differences in structure make transporting poetic forms from one language to another problematic, and in the case of haiku sufficiently problematic that it may not be worth doing at all. Which is fine for him - he has his artistic preference and many good poems have come from the English language. I disagree with him, however, in the idea that it simply isn't possible to meaningfully render haiku into the English language, though I can see that he makes some valid points on the matter.
Fry concerns himself, at least in the beginning, with the standard iambic pentameter and its variations such as weak endings, trochaic and pyrhhic substitutions. It isn't really the sort of thing that on the face of it has very much to do with haiku which, after all, has none of these things in the original - being a tonal rather than stressed language and one with few multisyllabic words in any event. However English, being a stressed language, must by its nature include these elements in any sort of metrical poetry, and the effect of stress will need to be taken into account in any sort of poem written in English even if it is in a style such as haiku, so the information on metre has still been most useful for my future endeavours in the realm of poetics.
Not being much of a linguist myself, I had never previously considered some of the consequences of language structure on how a poem would be put together. I always rather assumed, foolishly as it turns out, that it works more or less the same way regardless of your language. This rather shocking ignorance came crashing down when I read in Mr. Fry's book about differences between English and French poetry.
French, you see, does not use the same stress rules as English. Words and syllables in French tend to receive equal stress. Take, for example, "Sophie". In English we pronounce it "SO-fee", but in French it is "SO-FEE". Practice that a couple of times - it takes a bit to get it right. Now try picking an English word, say "English", and pronouncing it with equal stress on the syllables - not ""IN-glish" but "IN-GLISH".
Sounds weird doesn't it?
This difference is huge when it comes to poetry. Iambs and trochees go right out the window. Iambic pentameter in French would sound like you were trying to bray like a donkey "hi THERE could YOU tell ME what THE time IS?" French poetry instead seems to rely far more on relations between words, syllable counts, strong vs weak rhyme, and the relationship between lines.
In short, Shakespeare sounds stupid in French.
This brings me to the difficulty of translating works into different languages, and to transplanting a form from one language into another.
The traditional format for the haiku, as every schoolchild learns, is three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables. But Japanese really doesn't have syllables in the same sense that English does - rather it has sounds, all of which are rather short. English syllables vary considerably in verbal duration, compare the word "it" to the word "heaved". Thus the traditional flow of a haiku cannot be achieved by simple syllable count - doing so causes English haiku to be very "wordy" compared to the original Japanese. As previously mentioned Japanese lacks the stresses of English, but instead uses tonal changes, so English haiku tend to be somewhat "flat" compared to their Japanese counterparts. This does not even begin to address issues such as wordplay, subtexts, and onomotopaeism.
Fry's feeling on the matter is that such differences in structure make transporting poetic forms from one language to another problematic, and in the case of haiku sufficiently problematic that it may not be worth doing at all. Which is fine for him - he has his artistic preference and many good poems have come from the English language. I disagree with him, however, in the idea that it simply isn't possible to meaningfully render haiku into the English language, though I can see that he makes some valid points on the matter.