Mike Snider's Formal Blog and Sonnetarium :
Poems, mostly metrical, and rants and raves on poetry and the po-biz.
Updated: 1/24/06; 10:20:22 PM.

 

ME & MINE







AIM: poemando



POETRY SITES & ZINES




















WORKSHOPS & CONFERENCES







RESOURCES










NON-POETRY BLOGS












POET'S SITES: MOSTLY BLOGS
























































































































































Subscribe to "Mike Snider's Formal Blog and Sonnetarium" in Radio UserLand.

Click to see the XML version of this web page.

Click here to send an email to the editor of this weblog.

 
 

Thursday, March 3, 2005

As far as I know, Dorothy Sayers is the only 20th century writer who produced a fully rhymed, metrical, terza rima translation of the Divine Comedy in English. It's still in print, and wonderful; it's actually the translation I like best, though there are more than a few forced moves which approach the silly. James Falen, Charles Johnston, Walter Arndt, and Douglas Hofstadter have all translated Eugene Onegin using Pushkin's original 14-line rhymed tetrameter stanza, and all but Arndt's is in print. Vikram Seth used the Onegin stanza in his delightful The Golden Gate, and it's still in print. It's possible there is actually a market for novel-length, full-rhymed, metrical stories.

But I can't think of any others from the last century. Glyn Maxwell's Time's Fool is terza rima, but the rhymes are almost never full. Both of Fred Turner's epics, The New World and Genesis, are unrhymed, as is Andrew Hudgins's After the Lost War. I'm working on one, so far in full-rhyme (snippets here and here), but I'm thinking it might be better to use slant rhyme most of the time and full rhyme for climactic moments, or perhaps for the ends of sections, the way Shakespeare would end a blank verse scene with a rhymed couplet. (Right. Just that way.) But I also think maybe I'm just finding it damned hard to do and looking for a way out. Does anyone know of other examples I could read?


7:34:52 PM    comment: use html tags for formatting []  trackback []

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

2006 Michael Snider.



Click here to visit the Radio UserLand website.
 




March 2005
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
    1 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9 10 11 12
13 14 15 16 17 18 19
20 21 22 23 24 25 26
27 28 29 30 31    
Feb   Apr


ARCHIVES

Dec 2005
Nov 2005
Oct 2005
Sep 2005
Aug 2005
Jul 2005
Jun 2005
May 2005
Apr 2005
Mar 2005
Feb 2005
Jan 2005
Dec 2004
Nov 2004
Oct 2004
Sep 2004
Aug 2004
Jul 2004
Jun 2004
May 2004
Apr 2004
Mar 2004
Feb 2004
Jan 2004
Dec 2003
Nov 2003
Oct 2003
Sep 2003
Aug 2003
Jul 2003
Jun 2003
May 2003
Apr 2003
Mar 2003
Feb 2003
Jan 2003
Dec 2002
Nov 2002
Oct 2002
Sep 2002