Everyday speech is full of poetry –
There’s no-one here to take your call right now; please leave a message when you hear the tone.
Few people would recognize this as perfect Iambic Pentameter (di-DUM five times over) that would fit easily into a contemporary Shakespearean sit-com –
“There’s no-one here to take your call right now;
Please leave a message when you hear the tone.”
“Hello? Hello? Girl, please pick up the phone.
I really need to hear your voice right now.
Can you believe she’s going out with him?
Text me as soon you know what’s going on.”
What passes for Everyday Speech is often full of poetry and we are only sometimes aware of it. Poetry on the other hand is never full of Prose, unless it is a deliberate gesture. Poetry contains the element of sculpture and design that Prose has only by accident. Poetry is literary sculpture, and although its medium is the word, its message is made more sophisticated by the form that has been imposed upon those words – These are the times that try men’s souls expresses with gravitas what Soulwise, these are trying times trips over in clumsiness. Artful architecture confers more than the words alone.
Connecting with poetry from a foreign language is therefore extremely difficult, because to reproduce the elements beyond simply the meaning with any accuracy makes the translator’s job an almost impossible one. Here are some sample renderings of Hamlet’s existential musing To be, or not to be: that is the question –
Être, ou ne pas être, telle est la question
Sein oder Nichtsein; das ist hier die Frage
Essere o non essere, questo è il problema
¿Ser o no Ser esa es la cuestión?
Each may convey the meaning to each new audience, but the rhythm of the poet’s monosyllables has been destroyed, and their profound semantic simplicity has of necessity been sacrificed. As Robert Frost observed, Poetry is what gets lost in translation.
To set a poem to music is to do it further damage; compositional treatment is itself a form of translation, since it forces spoken or thought text into the language of music, solidifying an interpretation of the text that remained ambiguous while it was still unspoken.
Consider the following –
Shall I compare thee to a Summer’s day?
I can imply at least six different meanings in the musical phrases I use to set the text –
- Shall I (and not someone else) compare thee to a Summer’s day?
- Shall I (or shan’t I?) compare thee to a Summer’s day?
- Shall I compare thee (or shall I contrast thee?) to a Summer’s day?
- Shall I compare thee (or shall I compare thy sister?) to a Summer’s day?
- Shall I compare thee to a Summer’s (or a Winter’s) day?
- Shall I compare thee to a Summer’s day (or a Summer’s morning)?
Some of these are clearly incorrect, and some are more incorrect than others, and some should get me laughed off the stage. Then there is the issue of sensitivity to tempo, tone, volume, etc. Yell any one of them at speed and you will get my meaning.
A composer who ignores the rhythm of the language, misunderstands the text, or is not interested in the ‘whole truth’ of the poem does great violence to the original.
If someone ground your homemade gingerbread cookies into the crust for a cheesecake and presented that entirely new dish as ‘the dessert you had brought to share’ you too would be as horrified, because you have clearly lost control of your brand; the ‘meaning’ of those cookies has been hijacked. You had intended their shape and dryness to be a comment on the bland aridity of the guests, but the host felt they needed tarting up lest dinner end in disaster.
Pity the poor poets whose work is hijacked, repackaged and sold as their own. Shall I compare thee to a Summer’s day? SHALL I?