Justin Schwartz wrote:
>
> Lots of great art has a message:
>
The new issue of _Socialism and Democracy_ contains "The Manifesto," by Bertolt Brecht, translated by Darko Suvin and with an essay by Suvin, "On Brecht's 'The Manifesto': Comments for Readers in English." I haven't more than browsed in either the translation or the essay yet, but it is of great interest. The essay includes a long section on the choice of metric -- the hexameter of Lucretius, including a short history of the use of that metric in English poetry (not much but some, mostly scattered lines such as Eliot's "What seas what shores what granite sand towards my timbers"). I quote from the essay:
*** . . .I shall close by noting that there is an overriding unnamed figure in the poem: the narrating voice, the poet-narrator. He is an anthropologist, advancing into the jungle of factories and cities with "a hot heart in a cold person" (Brecht, GKA 26:207); and his rigour arises out of the blood, sweat and tears of millions through the centuries. Here is an example for the foregoing discussions, the first lines of the poem:
Wars are destroying the world, and the ruins are visibly haunted By an enormous spectre, not simply born of war. In peace it could already be sighted, terror to the rulers But friend to the children in slums. In scanty kitchens Often it peeps, horrified, angry, into the half-empty pots. Often it waits for the exhausted in front of shipyards and mines; It visits friends in jails, passing without passport. EVen in offices it may be seen and in auditoria Heard. At times it dons a hat of steel, enters Huge tanks and flies with deadly bombers. It speaks in many Tongues, in all of them. And in many it holds its tonuge.
The discourse has shifted to 1945, that is, our of Marx's early 19th-century situation of the Holy Alliance in Europe. We are in the modern world of world-wide wars, of tanks, bombers and ruins, of many languages and repressions in most of them; and yet still a world recognizable to Marx, with mines, shipyards, offices and auditoria, but -- most important -- with half-empty pots, exhausted workers, slums and jails. . . . *** (Socialism and Democracy (Winter-Spring 2002), pp. 25-26)
Suvin's lines seem dry at first, as the hexameter, well or badly written, is bound to in English, but it grows on you rather quickly if you slow up your reading of it. I'm reminded of the fourteeners in Goulding's translation of the _Metamorphoses_ (which Pound called the most beautiful book in English). They take time to get used to.
And of course there is Dante. Paradise Canto II, 'tedious' instruction in the science of his day, is wonderful even in the flat prose of the Huse translation, let alone Binyon's verse:
O ye, embarked in a small skiff, who long
To listen, having followed on its way
My boat, that goes continuing in song,
Turn again home to sight of shore and bay!
Trust not the deep; for peradventure there
By losing me ye might be left astray.
..........................................
"...
But tell me what thine own intelligence
Conceives." And "What appears diverse," said I
"Is caused, I think, by bodies rare or dense."
And she: "Indeed thou'lt see thy guess to lie
Submerged in error, if thou give good ear
To the argument I shall oppose it by.
Many are the lights displayed in the eighth sphere,
Which both in quality and magnitude
May be observed a diverse look to wear.
If this from dense and rare alone ensued,
All with one virute, equal less or more
In distribution, would be found imbued.
But needs must be that diverse virtues flower
From formal principles; and these, save one,
Would on thy reasoning wholly lose their power. . . .
(Par. II, 1-6, 58-72)
One might also note that in arguments about "cliched" verse or prose readers are usually more apt to discover tedium in language the content of which is either strange or offensive. There can be a great delight, I think the greatest delight, in finding expressed with unexpected precision, what one already knows.
The _Vulgar_ thus through _Imitation_ err;
As of the _Learn'd_ by being _Singular_;
So much they scorn the Crowd, that if the Throng
By _Chance_ go right, they _purposely_ go wrong;
So Schismatics the _plain Believers_ quit,
And are but damned for having _too much Wit_.
(Es. on Crit., 424-29)
I think quite a few people on this list would rather be wrong and then be caught expressing an accepted view. The fear of conformity is probably the greatest weakness of U.S. intellectuals in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Carrol