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Versification: Major Language Types: Sixteen Essays
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252 pages, Hardcover
First published June 1, 1972
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July 27, 2020
Being the nerd that I am, I eagerly scooped up this volume at a library book sale. I’m interested in verse forms and how poetry is practiced and defined in other cultures.
If you can read and understand Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew, Greek, German, Irish, Uralic, etc., this book is a great resource. If you don’t know 15 languages, well, it’s not very helpful.
What’s missing from each chapter is a sentence like this: “In English, that would be the equivalent of ….”
But that sentence does not appear. I guess that’s because this is more of a scholarly work than an everyman work.
But how nice (and how interesting) would that have been? Taking the rhythmic forms of other cultures and languages and showing how that might look in English. I know that writers (like Longfellow) have tried to recreate Greek/Latin quantitative verse in English, but I’ve never read a good explanation of what that means or how they did it.
Sadly, that’s a different book. (Does it exist?) There is still much to glean from this work. If you are interested in rhythmic speech, you might want to check it out.
If you can read and understand Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew, Greek, German, Irish, Uralic, etc., this book is a great resource. If you don’t know 15 languages, well, it’s not very helpful.
What’s missing from each chapter is a sentence like this: “In English, that would be the equivalent of ….”
But that sentence does not appear. I guess that’s because this is more of a scholarly work than an everyman work.
But how nice (and how interesting) would that have been? Taking the rhythmic forms of other cultures and languages and showing how that might look in English. I know that writers (like Longfellow) have tried to recreate Greek/Latin quantitative verse in English, but I’ve never read a good explanation of what that means or how they did it.
Sadly, that’s a different book. (Does it exist?) There is still much to glean from this work. If you are interested in rhythmic speech, you might want to check it out.
Displaying 1 of 1 review