пятница, марта 04, 2005

Next question.

'Is your prosody like ours?'

Well, Emmy, our pentameter may seem
To foreign ears as if it could not rouse
The limp iambus from its pyrrhic dream.
But close your eyes and listen to the line.
The melody unwinds; the middle word
is marvelously long and serpentine:
you hear one beat, but you have also heard
the shadow of another, then the third
touches the gong, and then the fourth one sighs.

It makes a very fascinating noise:
it opens slowly, like a greyish rose
in pedagogic films of long ago.

The rhyme is the line's birthday, as you know,
and there're certain customary twins
in Russian as in other tongues. For instance,
love automatically rhymes with blood,
nature with liberty, sadness with distance,
human with everlasting, prince with mud,
moon with a multitude of words, but sun
and song and wind and life and death with none.
...

VN
From "The Evening of Russian Poetry"
1945

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