![]() The Caesura breaks-up verse into manageable chunks – just the sort of practice that Educational Psychology encourages, in terms of cognitive processes. Oh, and have you ever heard something like “Yeah, but don’t worry about the Caesura?” Silly. “What about the other syllables,” you ask? Now check this out, by underlining syllables long-by-position, we get the exact info provided by traditional Scansion, you won’t confuse syllable length with vowel length, AND you don’t have to print-off double-spaced text from just to scan above the words: WHY NOTATE BOTH!?!?!?!………….(if not long, it’s SHORT!)Īs it turns out, we already have a system of notating long vowels, which gives us most of the long syllables anyway: The historical development of modern English verse has been away from any prosodic regularity of this sort.Traditional Scansion is a silly practice, especially in how it’s notated…the info is already there!!! So before you think I’m nuts, how many possibilities are there in terms of quantity? Two (long and short). No conscious attempt is made in the translations in this collection to imitate the Icelandic system of alternating heavy and light feet. The regular alternation of light and heavy feet (an alternation emphasized by alliteration), coupled with the relative infrequency with which (in modern Icelandic verse) rhetorical stress overrides this pattern, or is counterpointed against it, is responsible for the sing-song manner - anathema to the modern English or American ear - in which this verse is so often read and recited. And indeed, one could assemble a vast collection of examples of faulty alliterant-placement in the work of poets writing today. ![]() In longer lines, however, e.g., lines of eight syllables or more, the ear sometimes finds itself at a loss, since there are now a number of syllables with strong - in fact variably strong - stress to choose among. The placement of alliterants is a simple and straightforward matter when lines are no more than six syllables long. Finnur Jónsson complained in 1892, less than fifty years after Jónas's death: His rival Grímur Thomsen, another important 19th-century poet, had a poor ear for this sort of thing, a real tin ear, and infringes the rules almost as often as do the present translations. Jónas regularly observes these rules for him this will have been a matter of inference, taste, and intuition, based on a sensitive and finely-tuned ear. Then as now, however, whether the alliterant-placement in a line is correct or not is something that "an Icelander hears immediately, if he has an ear for poetry, whereas a foreigner requires long practice in it" ( Rr11). In Jónas's day, this alternation of light and heavy feet had not yet been described in writing, nor had the alliterant-placement rules been formulated as an explicit part of the poetic gradus. Presumably the poetic practice codified in these rules evolved gradually over time in order to guarantee that alliterants did not stand too far away from one another in poetic lines that were four and five feet long - lines that only came into use centuries after alliteration had been adopted as a structural principle in lines that were two feet long (i.e., in fornyrðislag and its Primitive Germanic ancestor).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |