[Svein Olav Nyberg]

I'm curious about the outer limits of IP mangling, and here's one line I wonder if would count as IP:

For years she has been a rare sight to see.

You could not arrive at it from a foot-by-foot substitution, but yet it has an "IP quality" to it. What say you, lariat?

------------------
Svein Olav (The poet formerly known as Solan )

[Carol Taylor]

Svein, while we wait for the Lariat, I can tell you that that is a tetrameter line. There's no way to divide the third foot, "a rare sight," into separate feet.


For years/ she has been/ a rare sight/ to see./


The fact of more-or-less equal vocal stress on both rare and sight doesn't make them stand alone metrically. To do that you'd have to read the line like this, making it nonsensical:

For years she has been a rare...sight...to see.

The line's not well expressed anyway, from the redundant cliche "sight to see" at the end on back. More natural to say she's rarely been seen in past years or she hasn't been around much lately.

Carol

[Svein Olav Nyberg]

Thank you, Carol. Maybe I should have asked a bit more in the abstract: What about a line scanning

oSooSoSSoS

? Would it fit into an IP poem, or do your comments still apply? As for the line itself, it's from a first draft of yet another translation I'm working on, a sonnet by Norwegian Nobel laureate Knut Hamsun, an author who might have been ignored too much as a poet.

------------------
Svein Olav (The poet formerly known as Solan )

[This message has been edited by Svein Olav Nyberg (edited May 27, 2005).]

[Carol Taylor]

Svein, oSooSoSSoS could indeed be IP if the words supported it. Your previous line didn't, because "rare sight" is a whole phrase, not one that breaks in the middle.

You would need a word pattern that fit together like this:

oS/ooS/oS/^S/oS

For years/ she has been/ the best/ friend/ I have./

or this:

oS/ooS/oS/So/^S

For years/ she has been/ a rare/ vision/ to me./
For years/ it has been/ a most/ welcome/ retreat./

Did Hamsun use the cliche "sight to see," or are you just resorting to redundancy (what else do you do with a sight but see it?) and cliche for the sake of reproducing his rhyme and exact scansion in English? If he used cliche then by all means translate to cliche, but if you mean to do him justice, the translation should be as good in English as the original is in Norwegian.

Carol

[Svein Olav Nyberg]

His sonnet was a 7-footer, and I'm compressing it to a 5-footer, which seems to work best. But that line is awkward to make rime properly. As for contents, its a pretty mundane line just stating that it's been a long time since the poem ego had seem someone he just now spotted across the street. I might drop it in the Translation forum later, but I am trying to observe the 1 poem/week limit, so for now, it's in pre-crit universe here: http://www.poeten.no/Forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=48452

But the purpose of this thread was a more general inquiry, since I doubt that line wil last half a revision.

------------------
Svein Olav (The poet formerly known as Solan )

[Tim Murphy]

I once got into a public fracas, in Edge City Review, I think, with Richard Moore, who insisted that all we need do is follow Auden's dictum that there never be consecutive substitutions in IP. I wrench IP into greater strains than my contemporaries, and I think I have reason to do so.

Svein, I have no problem hearing your line as IP, but it entirely depends on its context, on the expectations set up by its surround.

DeVOURing TIME, BLUNT THOU the LIon's PAWS,
and BURN the LONG-LIVED PHOEnix in her BLOOD.
PLUCK the KEEN TEETH from the FIERCE TIGer's JAWS,
and MAKE the EARTH deVOUR her OWN SWEET BROOD.


Lines one and three are very irregular here, lines two and four resolve them. I don't pretend that this is how they should be scanned, but this how it appears on an oscilloscope of Murphy reciting Shakespeare. There the peaks and valleys of stress, and the duration of syllables can be scientifically graphed. Has ANYONE else around here actually studied such a printout? I did so only by accident, when my sister Molly recorded me with all that apparatus, and the machines confirmed what my ear already knew.

Dana Gioia in a course on meter told his students to attempt no more than the first foot trochee. I scoffed, and he said "That's advice to my students, not to you."

That said, I think most of the internal or God help us the consecutive substitutions we hear at DE are mere mangling. It takes weight of argument or image to carry substitution, and most of what we hear in that vein is inexpressive, verging on sloppiness.

[oliver murray]

Tim,

Does that oscilloscope printout confirm that there ARE true spondees in English poetry? If so, send a copy to Tim Steele

Is there any agreement (if one isn't one of Dana Gioia's students) on HOW many variant feet one can get away with in a line of IP? I vote for 2 per line, with pyrrhics and spondees (if such mythical creatures exist) being counted as "freebies". Any takers?

[Tim Murphy]

Two is a pretty good limit. And yes, I should send the printout to Tim. He might ascribe it to the pecularities of prairie speech!

[Henry Quince]

Never consecutive substitutions? I think Auden was talking through his hat when he wrote that. Such rules are made to be broken!

We’ve discussed elsewhere Shakespeare’s line “Let me not to the marriage of true minds”, which I (and I think Tim and Carol likewise) scan as:

LET me | NOT to | the MARR| iage of TRUE MINDS|

Trochee, trochee, iamb, double-iamb. Only one regular iamb in the line. How many substitutions is that?

Still, it’s probably true that 99% of the time, more than two substitutions might wreck the line. I just don’t like to see absolute rules. And so what, after all, if the occasional line in a BV piece or sonnet falls out of IP? If the content is rendered effectively, why worry? An example from the fine BV (with occasional rhyme) of Conrad Aiken’s A Letter from Li Po:

Somewhere beyond the Gorge Li Po is gone,
looking for friendship or an old love’s sleeve
or writing letters to his children, lost,
and to his children’s children, and to us.
What was his light? of lamp or moon or sun?
Say that it changed, for better or for worse,
sifted by leaves, sifted by snow; on mulberry silk
a slant of witch-light; on the pure text
a slant of genius; emptying mind and heart
for winecups and more winecups and more words.


Surely none of us could doubt that the “sifted...” line here has 6 beats, but which of us would want to change it?

The last line here has an unusual and interesting pattern — I read for WINEcups and MORE WINEcups and MORE WORDS, (oS|ooSS|ooSS|) and this is indeed the way Aiken himself reads it on a recording I possess. Consecutive double iambs.

Btw, you don’t need an oscilloscope to see the shape and volumes of sounds graphically. Digital recording/editing software shows it all on the screen, and you can change the viewing scale (zoom in, etc). I use something called Goldwave — free version available for download from http://www.goldwave.com . When you use a program like that to open a sound file (.mp3 or .wav, say) you see the graph of the sounds.


Henry





[This message has been edited by Henry Quince (edited May 28, 2005).]

[oliver murray]

I couldn't agree with you more, Henry. This is the first time I had ever heard that caution about consecutive substitutions,
and it doesn't make any sense whatever, as a RULE, provided it is clear where the stresses are in the words used. I think that two variant feet, is, in general, a good rule of thumb, and I am usually cautious about adhering to it, but it should not be an absolute.