I am stupid pls educate me. Were they actually poems?
I’ve always wondered just how much gets lost when poetry gets translated to another language. The translator must take tons of liberties in order for it to read properly in the language it’s being translated too.
Dante’s Divine Trilogy is a good example of a poem with a very specific rhyme scheme (the terza rima) that only infrequently gets retained in (English) translation. It’s been translated so many times by so many different people, and the vibe can potentially be wayy off from the original language - to the point where there’s a whole separate wiki page for the different translations.
Anyways read Pinsky’s version of Inferno, he does a good job of keeping close to the Italian without sounding stilted
sure, but this is true to a lesser extent for prose too. translation is partly a rewrite.
think of the pun about the east pole in winnie the pooh, that’s not gonna work in any language where poles and poles arent homonyms.
but of course, the songs/poems in winnie the pooh needed even more work. eg, the pun about the trotechnician being always Alec only works if the name Alec is a homonym of the front part of the word electrotechnician.
(examples from the hungarian translation of winnie the pooh)
back then, people were just really fucking stupid, and didn’t understand the difference between prose and poetry (does it rhyme???). but the works were called poems, and by convention, the descriptions have stuck w/ us ever since.
Beowulf (like a lot of epics) was originally an oral tradition and thus was originally recited as verse because it’s easier to memorise that way.
When it was finally written down, it retained the verse structure, which is all you really need to classify a written work as a poem.
Idk about Paradise Lost, never read it.
I think the thing was back then they weren’t writing stuff down so they’d give stories a bit of a rhythm, rhyme or just general poetic quality to make it easier to recite and remember but idk I ain’t no nerd
Others have discussed meter and rhythm, but Beowulf is also alliterative which is why it doesn’t rhyme. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliterative_verse#Old_English_poetic_forms
