[Alexandra Baez]

Hi, Carl,

You’re a poet and native speaker of English, and no more tools are needed to evaluate a translation as English verse.

Yes, as English verse—but what I’ve noticed is that assessing this element alone often sidesteps other important, even overriding, considerations. Thus, the translator often has to carefully sift out what parts of such suggestions might actually be applied appropriately given all the other factors at stake. If it feels worth it to you to do all that sorting, I’ll see, at least once, what I can do with commenting. Not out of a sense of obligation--of adventure.

I did have “but” in that position, but it felt too leading—which is what you want, of course, and you may be right.

Oh, my! I guess I feel good that I read part of your mind, at least.

Christmas 2023 was one of the darkest in memory for me, so maybe that’s how it happened.

I’m so sorry about that. It has my imagination running wild. I hope you are pulling out of that darkness, whatever it is. Wishing you light.

Ok, this is helpful. It tells me that you—and probably others who’ve complained—are determined to stress “screens.” I’m resistant to that (in the anapestic context), but I’ll have to take it into account.

It’s actually a virtually nonexistent stress for me—I think I’m really just instinctively promoting it because of the surrounding meter.

About reading styles, I actually do what you do to an extent—I’m not completely artless—but I think that my natural speech sensor is set just a bit higher than yours. (I see this matter as less binary than a range.) For example, I’ve always preferred to pause at least a bit at the end of each line. Another factor to consider is the possibility of “authorial bias”—you, more than anyone else, have known since the beginning what you were aiming for metrically (and otherwise) in this poem, so I think you are more likely than anyone else to see that aim being met. At least that’s how it goes with me and my own work!

Anyway, I did an experiment to see if a different placement of “LCD” in a wannabe anapestic tet line could make me naturally perceive this term as an anapest. It does! For example, I’d unquestioningly categorize it as one here:

In the room, LCD screens all merrily blink

although it’s a mite heavy on “L” and “C,” both relatively long syllables. I think that in cases like this, it helps not only to have established the meter firmly in the poem as a whole before the questionable element, but also to have established the meter even in the particular line before the special element is introduced.

What would you think about “that snug Christmas past”?

Yes, I guess that would embrace the ambiguity more and thus make me less uncomfortable with it.