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Unread 10-21-2012, 09:31 AM
Michael Cantor Michael Cantor is offline
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Location: Plum Island, MA; Santa Fe, NM
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Distinguished Guest Amit Majmudar's comments:

It is difficult to add anything to this remarkable poem (a poem that is its own translation) and thorough, perceptive commentary.

Morgenstern is new to me. I looked for some additional work online, but it may have lost something in translation. This Fish’s night-song, however, comes across perfectly.

I think the reason is that it is purely music. We say poetry is what is lost in translation, but it’s primarily the sound of those words in that order that can’t be replicated. It is possible for subtleties of meaning and shifts in tone to be brought across with fairly high fidelity by a skilled translator; but when the poem’s exact sequence of syllables gets disrupted, its unique musicality is lost. I’m speaking of something deeper than rhyme scheme or meter; I mean every vowel, every consonant. In this poem, that isn’t an issue because there aren’t any words.

I think that making the shape resemble a fish more accurately would have diminished the poem, ruined its streamlined symmetry. It would have been easy to add a tail fin or dorsal fin or something. That would have thrown off the mystery of this masterpiece. Likewise a no-no would have been alternating unstress-stress in some attempt to mimic a heartbeat. It’s the visual pattern and the idea of a song that dominate, not the pulse of the fish. It is a nature poem flensed of naturalism.

Contest: Can anyone out there compose a meaningful poem using macrons and breves? Or is Morgenstern’s the only successful poem written in this un-language?
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