are poetic "tools" applicable in other languages??

[clara in miami]

Hi Lene, Tracy and every body else ;D

What I mean , is poetry like music...although styles vary music terms and tools (beat, measures, notes, clefs etc) are the same in all languages..so..how about issues of meter , rhyme and the others tools of analysis..can they be employed in other languages ( I would specificaly be trying it in Spanish, after I get a "clue" in English of course)..

hope this makes sense
Clara in Miami

[Tracy Gustilo]

Yes, absolutely, Clara. That's the short answer. Do you want the long one?

Most of the basic techniques for poetry analysis originated with the ancient Greeks and Romans. For example, they understood about meter, poetic forms, and figures of speech. (If you look at Silva Rhetorica you'll see that most of the figures of speech have Greek names, for example.)

However... each language has its own unique poetic "possibilities". In English there was a strong move to accentual syllabic meter, that is, syllables that take either accents or not, fitted together into patterns that create poetic meter. In other languages, and even in the earliest English poetry, it doesn't work like that! Greek and Latin, for example, use, instead of accented syllables, long and short vowel sounds to create poetic meter. Rhyme, also, places a different role in the poetry of different languages.

For more info, check out the recommended web sites listed in ch. 5 of CW-Poetry. You can also do a web search on poetry for the language you are interested in.

Tracy

[Clara in Miami]

Thanks for the "long" answer..I love those, I'm off to see the reccomended websites
Clara in Miami

[Tracy Gustilo]

Here's a potpourri "teaser" from the Freeware Prosody web site:

www.n2hos.com/acm/pagetwo.html

"History rears its head.  One of the things visible in English prosody is that it was not derived from one place.  Disciples of W.C. Williams who hold structure, stanza, meter and foot as attributes of empirial British prosody are ignorant of its history.   English prosody is a multicultural artifact, growing out of a variety of sources.  While it is not certain where the Greeks in 600 BC got theirs (Indo-European standard meters, say linguists with a confidence bolder than the evidence), the route is known from Greece to classical Rome (200BC to 400AD)  to Constantinople (350-1100 AD) to the Islamic world (800-1500AD), to the Italian city states in the Renaissance (1200-1600 AD) to Spain and France (1300-1700) to northern Europe and on to England and the rest of the English-speaking world (1500-present).   On the way, the meanings of terms shifted, notably as  feet and syllables were defined, going from pitch and duration in Greek, Latin and the Romance languages to the stress/less-stressed beat of English (with vestiges of pitch and duration still evident).   Much of what we describe as classical form in rhyme was derived from Islamic poets (there is little rhyme in poetry of Greek and Roman antiquity).  The sonnet, the canzone, the ballade, in fact, most repetitive, stanzaic forms in English were derived from forms created in Arabic, whose meters were drawn from Latin and Greek.  Many "newer" forms in English, such as  the pantoum and haiku, arrived from Japan or southeast Asia.   The blues form used by many contemporary poets is traceable to the Mississippi delta in the late 19th century.   Most of the figures of speech were codified by Roman rhetoricians before the second century AD, and recapitulated and expanded by rhetoricians from the Middle Ages through the English renaissance."

Cool.

[Lene Mahler Jaqua]

Yes, I agree, poetic tools are applicable in other languages, within limits.

Certain languages, especially languages which are inflected with similar endings on words in certain conjugations and declensions lend themselves better to easy rhyming, like Italian, f.ex. Some language derive their meter from long and short vowel sounds primarily, while other languages are stress oriented.

English is minimally inflected and therefore considerably harder to rhyme than other languages... but on the other hand, because of its multi-source vocabulary it is very elegantly rhymed when well done.

I cannot speak for oriental languages, other than to say, I know that the music of the far east works with quarter notes, which are incomprehensible to us in the west where half notes are the limit of tonal discrimination. Also, their languages have quite a different structure in terms of sounds, syllables, words, syntax, and I imagine that their poetry follows different rules, symmetries. Poetry seems to be a matter of creating rhythms and patterns in sound, wherever a language lends itself to such.

Our family has learned sign language, ASL, which remarkably has its own syntax and also its own "rhymes/repetitious patterns" in the way one creates hand signs in terms of hand shape, location, movement and body posture, speed and direction of motion and facial expression.

That being said, once you get the hang of poetry in a couple of languages, the over all concept of poetry, in terms of repetition of patterns in time and space, is recognizable regardless of language.

Lene