Ukrainian stress

[Paul B. Gallagher]

Daniel Rancour-Laferriere wrote:

> Dear Paul,
> Here is what Will Ryan wrote:
> 
>> In English, consider the song of the Lord Chancellor in his  
>> unfortunate encounter with the Fairy Queen in Gilbert and Sullivan's  
>> Iolanthe:
>>
>> A plague on this vagary,
>> I'm in a nice quandary!
>> Of hasty tone
>> With dames unknown
>> I ought to be more chary;
>> It seems that she's a fairy
>> From Andersen's library,
>> And I took her for
>> The proprietor
>> Of a Ladies' Seminary!
>>
>> Six out of  ten words at the end of the lines can only be sung with  
>> non-standard stress. It is true that Gilbert was looking for comic  
>> effect, also true that he enjoyed mocking serious opera.

I have never doubted that bad poetry could be written. ;-)
And an attempt at humor is a strong incentive.

> If "I never promised you a rose garDEN" is not convincing, surely  these 
> lines are.

.. but I didn't agree that this was an example of it.

> Regarding stress-shift in a NON-musical context I wrote:
> 
>>> ... And it is curious that the three published poets (Sasha Sokolov,
>>> Aleksei Tsvetkov, Eduard Limonov) shifted word stress significantly
>>> more often than did the rest of the sample (p less than .025 on  
>>> Mann-Whitney U test).
>>> All of which illustrates Roman Jakobson's 1923 thesis that poetic
>>> form is "organized violence" inflicted upon language.
>>> Cheers to the list.
>>> <http://Rancour-Laferriere.com>

I will readily concede that some poets do some violence to some aspects 
of our language(s). Whether a given instance is acceptable pushing of 
limits or not is a matter of taste.

>> I'm sure I will find your site interesting, but I have a deadline  
>> today (my nephew's birthday party 160 miles away), so it will have  to 
>> wait.
> 
> That's OK.  There is no hurry.  Some of us have spent years working on  
> Russian metrics, and there is much more complexity to it than can be  
> handled in list serve banter.  In fact, forget my site and go directly  
> to THE NEW PRINCETON ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POETRY AND POETICS (1993), where  
> there are substantial entries and bibliographies on "Foot" (416-420),  
> "Meter" (768-783), "Music and Poetry" (803-806), "Prosody" (982-994),  
> "Slavic Prosody" (1155-1158), and some others which may be relevant.   
> And no doubt since 1993 other relevant studies have been made.

OK.

-- 
War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left.
--
Paul B. Gallagher
pbg translations, inc.
"Russian Translations That Read Like Originals"
http://pbg-translations.com

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