Poetry and Translation
Marnix has had a love of poetry since learning to recite or sing martial ballads, and to ‘scan’ Latin
‘heroic’ hexameters (of ‘six foot’ lines) at school (Orwell Park nr. Ipswich, and Wellington College,
Crowthorne). This verse depends not on rhyme and stress but on the interplay of long and short syllables.
He became interested in the relation of metrical ‘feet’ to musical bars and their relation to rhythmic
cycles in music and dance.
Marnix feels that word order, as the sequence of image shots in cinema, is crucial to the inherent power of rhythm in verse. Arthur Waley in his translations of Chinese poetry referred to what he called ‘sprung rhythm’ which transcends the regular alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables.
Latin verse allows great flexibility in word order since grammatical relations between words are determined by word endings.
English by contrast depends almost entirely on word order to distinguish subject from object or to connect adjective and noun. This makes it hard or impossible to follow the Latin word order. Nonetheless poetry is not subject to strict rules of grammar, so Marnix has experimentally striven to reproduce Latin word order in renditions of Virgil and Horace. He has not used rhyme which is absent from the original Latin (as from Japanese though present in Chinese).
Marnix applies the same principle to translation of Chinese and Japanese verse, even applying the same number of syllables (5-7-5) which defines the haiku form. Japanese verse uses strict numbers of syllables, and though without stress Japanese does have high and low pitched syllables. Chinese verse uses rhyme, and also strict numbers of word-syllables per line with tonal patterns (píngzé, level and slanting, or high and low) but not stresses. Like classical hexameter or English pentameter (“Shall I compare thee/ to a summer’s day”), the classic Táng meters of regular five-word (2-3) or seven-word (4-3) lines have a break (caesura) in the middle. This provides a pause and adds suspense, in place of a pause at the end of the line which could sound too final.
Other content by Marnix Wells can be viewed in the following pages.
Publius Vergilius Maro (BC 70-19): Proteus the Seer Seal (click here)