May 18, 2007
Poetry from East and West
For a while now Katie has been doing regular Friday poetry blogging. I gather there are a lot of literature interested folks who are taking up this meme and I've been vaguely thinking about joining in for a while.
When I write poetry I tend to write very, very short poetry. I've never liked how longer things I wrote turned out. I just don't think I'm very good at crafting words on a larger scale, I guess. I have a backlog of my own poetry I could be posting, but I thought today I'd talk about two poems that I'm quite attached to.Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December,
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow;--vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow--sorrow for the lost Lenore--
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore--
Nameless here for evermore.
The first poem I ever had to memorize was Poe's "The Raven". Despite my deep hatred of memorization, this poem stuck with me and I've always loved it in spite of it's deeply morose sentiments. Part of my liking for it stems from the beautiful liquid turn of phrase, another part from the jewel like images scattered throughout it, and a final part is probably a remnant of the pride with which we were taught to view it in school.
You see growing up in Maryland, Poe was pretty much the closest thing an English teacher could get to a local literature celebrity. He spent a good chunk of his literary career in Baltimore and returned to die there under mysterious circumstances. I guess pushing Poe's work was their way of getting us involved in the heritage of our area.An old pondOkay, it's not much of a translation, but this is my second favorite poem of all time. When I was taking Japanese at the UW there was a huge emphasis on learning culture and idiom as well as pure language. Every week we spent time drilling a particular poem, song, or kanji radical. The poems were great, because generally they picked old, famous ones that every Japanese child learns.
frog leaps
the sound of water
This particular poem is a haiku by Bashoo. I think it's meant to capture the beauty of the scene and the sounds, but my understanding of that part is a little uncertain. I learned the haiku in the original Japanese, but the language is so old that it only bears a slight resemblance to the language I was actually learning in the rest of the class. My translation is more my intuitive understanding of the work rather than the exact literal meaning. I was led to understand that the original poem has a lot more layers of intuitive meaning based upon the choice of kanji (Chinese word-characters) used. Sadly I never reached a level of study where I would start to see such meanings.
So far this poem has proved to be one of the only verbal things that has stuck in my memory for more than few years. I think it helps that it has a strong and beautiful cadence when recited "properly" (and my Sensei was pretty forceful about the fact that we must repeat it until we got it right). It probably doesn't hurt that we drilled it dozens of times in lecture and were threatened with it showing up on the test.
The original poem in romanized characters reads:furu ike yaIf you are interested in other translations of this poem, there are quite a large number archived here.
kawazu tobikomu
mizu no oto
Comments:Thanks for posting poems! I love Poetry Friday! I haven't been brave enough to post any of my own, but I don't have much recent poetry of my own either (I don't write a lot of poetry these days, it's mostly prose). I hope you keep participating! Feel free to add your posts to the weekly round-up if you want other people to see them too.Post a Comment
Links to this post:
All posts and other content on DigitalChangeling.com are © 2005 - 2008 Eva Schiffer.