Poetry is useless.
Language, communication, investigation, beauty, are all crammed
into one futile thing, after all, in comparison to essential needs.
Their usefulness is extremely arbitrary, erratic, ambiguous.
i have begun to feel detached from academics, essays on literature, even writing, as I hate to see me in a flow, a flood of self-centered aesthetic jaded characters.
Then of course, I go to see a concert and the power of art is clear and self-evident, its function too, however hard it be to write about it objectively.
I think translations are avery healthy form of art, as they develop the brain, extend logic and reasonment, highten endurance and teach humbleness and carefulness, translating peppers up humour, and introduce the mind to wider plains.
it is a way of empathy with poets, battles with technical text vocabs spawning out of technical texts, a way of small details revealing truths on peoples and their tongue and their history. One kind of tranlsator only sees what she does as a job: she is the most bored by dull translation works, boring blurbs on erratic subjects, from micro-fibronizers to washing machine hand-books, from industrial structures to papermill machinery functions.
The really autistic, heartful translator can feel the poor interest in the overall text, but will also find little pearls, a few new hints, vocabs. It is a well-paid game if you like to see word roots manifesting their meaning somewhere hidden between suffixes and shifting morphemes.
It is a form of joy, yet so little is left of it: it is very lucky to translate soemthing relevant, to get to work in a field of interest, and those dull industrial washing machine handbooks still come handy at the end of the month to top up.
I see how translation is the truest ways, genuine and focused in the right approach to poetry.
The translator considers the meaning
considers the sound
considers the context
considers the target lang context
relates to the topic, to the perception, to thepatterns of rhymes.
Isn't he, then, who most thoroughly tries to perceive the corte, the center of gravity of a stanza, like Ulysses, listeining to the logic and semantic meaning of the words, but faring open-sail towards a destination where whole chunks, sentences, phrases, come up, sprout, blossom in the mind, and they all come together.
You ARE then the poet himself, you do not even need to make a GOOD translation: Once you feel the poem during the process of translating it, it does become yours, because you have asked it so many questions, its life has turned clear to you, and you have become familiar with its shades and seasons.
Isn't this what whoever loves a poem does?
trying to understand what does it say in one's own language,
and then re-speaking it and re-listening to it, only the sound this time,
forgetting what does it actually mean.
Poetry is important, and relevant, and essential, if it is seen as a practice; its relevance should be found not in the result, but in the act of making poetry.
As without making poetry, or translating it, there is no possibility for some to ever appreciate it.
Some persons possess the innate tool of sensitiveness, and although they might not ever write a single verse in their life, they understand , recognise the beauty of a poem.
But many others feel poetry is dusty, smirk at the moan of a poet on stage, at the pauses, and perhaps do not know of the latest beautiful avantgarde waves that are growing. Many are not aware of how to love a poem because noone taught them to say it aloud and feel playful, and not awed, with it.
Most people, if encouraged even slightly, will let themselves be seduced by poems, but relevantly, this will happen much more easily if listeining to a voice reading out the poem, rather than silently reading it on their own.
That brings us back to the parctice: the speech skills.
I am a rather bad reader. Leyendas de guatemala, by i think miguel angel asturias, is a 350 pages book, and the author knew it from top to end by heart, as he used to read it to his friends, and gradually leaarned it by heart himself: this was partly in order to give to the language a very fluent sound. To a chieve it, it is fundamental to be at ease with the voice.
Poetry and drama are very close kin, and are both a practice, a pleasure and a mental condition, which every human should be able to benefit from, if he wishes to. Certainly poetry and literature cultural events should be more encouraged and promoted, espaecially in Italy, and speking of the context of indipendentVSmoney struggle.
But what is being lost, is the oral familiarity, the game.
As philologists stripped Beowulf of its fabulous charme, to highlight several historical and literary features, so for poetry, the real battle worth to fight is not to make people think poetry is cool, it cdoes not have to be boring, it is still alive.
Of course.
TO READ A POEM: watching a game of chess without being explained the rules
POETRY AT SCHOOL: having to learn the rules of chess without being allowed to play it
POST-MODERN POETRY: deleting rules
the average guy still does not get it.
The effort in it must be understood, because poetry is a shy craft, and does not communicate as blatantly as a sculpture the effort of creation.
being explained the rules is just twice as long and boring.
If you want to learn how rhymes and long and short vowels
and syllabes and alexandrines, endecasillabi, whuuf...
much quicker to write a few, to speak a few, than to study them for hours.
Oral storytelling is very important for us, as natural escapers.
technology can only be balanced by really strong narrative skills, adequate to make up for the lack of technologies hallucinogen features (audio/video, interactivity, altered identity....)
storytelling, poetry, drama, have a genetic capacity to enthrall humans one another.
it is an endogen skill, as close to buddhist practices as no other western path is.
myth-making, protection of oral traditions.
The naturally theatrical part of our selves will choose not the screen within, where images appear guided by a skillful voice; the actor within will be more and more fascinated with virtual worlds, and there is no snobbishness in my words.
Music has saved most of the genes of poetry, and still shares its soul. The great wave of self-produced music has given new life to many.
Rap, freestyling, slam-poetry, are involving and encourage to use mouth, breathing, words in a free way, releasing, in direct contact with an audience of empathic listenrs/performers. I think rap is where poetry fled and sheltered lately.
One might say there are dozens of thousands of beautiful poetic lyrics in non-rap songs. I mean to say that as rap is in nature live, based on improvisation, and as it relates best of all others genres to our present society, it is very representative and integrated that is, there is where according to me poetry preserves its primal features.
poetry should be instinctively thought as somethin you do, not something you read.
One does not need to WRITE poems: when he learns some lyrics, some verses, and speaks them heart-feltedly, whether out loud or in the back of his head, he is performing poetry.
