Quote:
Originally Posted by A. E. Stallings
I am leary of arguments regarding what is "natural to the language." Prosody is something that grows, after all, from hybridization, from imports--whether it is Latin adopting the dactyllic hexameter Greek system so that we get Virgil and Lucretius; or English adopting hendecasyllabics from Italian and getting decasyllabics; or rhyme borrowed from Latin drinking songs. We borrowed the sonnet, but it has naturalized nicely, even into an English version. If we were writing what was autocthonous to the language, we would be writing alliterative verse. (And nothing wrong with that, either.)
|
I think that the adopted forms which work in English are forms which grew in languages with similar stresses. Italian, which owns the sonnet, is essentially stressed in a way that resembles English. I think the sonnet has always been comfortable in the English tongue. I think there is some confused thinking when forms developed in languages which are far removed from English, are fitted onto English.
Here are the words of a much performed 18th century Italian song by Giordani which shows that the "spaghetti" idea is not the norm. I'll mark the metrical breaks according to the musical setting:
Caro mio ben
Ca/ro mio/ ben,
cre/di/mi al/men,
sen/za di/ te
lan/gui/sce il cor,
ca/ro/ mio ben,
sen/za di /te
lan/gui/sce/ il cor
Il/ tuo/ fe/del
so/spi/ra o/gnor
Ce/ssa, cru/del,
tan/to ri/gor!
Ce/ssa, cru/del,
tan/to/ ri/gor,
tan/to ri/gor!
Ca/ro mio/ ben,
cre/di/mi al/men,
sen/za di/ te
lan/gui/sce il/ cor,
ca/ro mio/ ben,
cre/di/mi al/men,
sen/za di/ te
lan/gui/sce/ il cor
Alicia you are comfortable in Greek and English and know whether they can be honestly married in one form. I can only sense it through an impression. Greek sounds much more angular than English to my ear. I spent a lot of time dealing with musical translations and I do know that some languages simply couldn't be metrically or syntactically matched in translation. When Igor Stravinsky set Shakespeare songs his angular unrelated rhythms, though musically interesting in an abstract way, usually cause mirth in anyone who contemplates performing them. "A liLY and A rose."