[Glenn Wright]

Originally Posted by Carl Copeland

Well done, Glenn. The compression of your new version seems more in keeping with the original. A few more thoughts:

S1L2: How are you scanning this line? I get three stresses. A line or two of trimeter or pentameter in a tet poem wouldn’t necessarily bother me, but I wondered what you had in mind. I fudged four syllables out of “en CIR cl ING”

S1L3: I can squeeze four stresses out of this line by promoting “for” and ending the line with a trochaic substitution, but three seems a lot more natural to me. And how do you understand the line? In your first version, Lorca had some obsessive idea that was giving him pain. Now it sounds like he’s longing for an inkling of something. I used the same trick to get three syllables out of “IN kl ING.” I’m imagining the “one single idea” that pains him to be an “inkling” or incompletely realized notion of his idealized love.

S1L4: Wouldn’t “this anguished sky and world and hour” be more accurate? Yes. Fixed.

S2L2: You could undo the inversion for a more natural “unplucked lyre.” “Profane” seems rather cerebral for this passionate poem. How about “the torch of lust”? Maybe you could rhyme it somehow with “crush.” I could fix the inversion (which doesn’t really sound unnatural to me here), but then I have a meter problem. My two nice iambs (the LYRE/ un PLUCKED) become a pyrrhic and spondee (the un/PLUCKED LYRE)

S2L4: “Taints my sentiment” pales beside “dwells in my breast.” Agreed. That’s why I prefer the pentameter version. You made me sacrifice my shipwreck image, too.

S3L3: Headless line? That’s problematic when the initial syllable isn’t naturally stressed. This one’s going to be read as anapest-anapest-spondee. Yes. Fixed, with bonus of using a more literal translation of “hundido.”.

Thanks, Carl! Very helpful suggestions.
Glenn