Poetry Is More Than What You Think It Is
According to the Britannica encyclopedia, at the beginning of things, hypothetically, poetry was the only way of using language or simply was language tout court. Prose is only the derivative and younger rival. At the dawn of humanity, magic incantations, which we call now poetry, were not used to communicate with each other but rather to create a pathway to the divine. Modern poetry lost this enchanted speech. Modern poetry is dead.
The word poetry comes from the Greek Ποιώ, which translates as “to make”. God did not create the world, He “ποίησε” it. That is, He “poetised” it. Poetry in Greece arose as a way to express the unspoken using the word in a metric (measured and calculated) mode. Poetry is a necessity for all human intellectual activity since all phenomena require a human interpretation. The world around us is not made without our participation, it is made by a man’s interpretation – his or her poetic representation. There is no world without a mind’s “perception” of it. Therfore, in effect, the world is created by our poetic consciousness. We make interpretations using symbols.
That’s the definition of poetry: making interpretations of the “outside” world using symbols. We have no other way to describe it. This makes the world an interpretation – an act of poetry. Poetry uses images, alliteration, repetition, metaphors, and sound (rhythm) to transmit ideas, awaken feelings, and activate the imagination, which connects the individual mind and heart to universal human experience.
Modern Poetry Is Prose
Poetry is unique to human consciousness. No machine can understand poetry. Therefore metered poetry is a creative art set apart from prose. A machine (Google), on the other hand, can translate prose word for word using dictionary meanings. Poetry is characterized by going beyond mere dictionary meaning. For these reasons, only a human brain can interpret the beauty, depth and richness of poetry. The phraseology used in poetry sometimes has triple meanings, when prose has one. Poetry uses meter, strong memorable speech, and most importantly, tells a narrative story – called epic poetry.
Not all modern poetry is in fact poetry. Most modern poets just express feelings they had that day, share their self-referent emotions or common thoughts using plain “newspaper” prose. There is no attempt in modern poetry to tell an important or lengthy narrative. Just because this is accepted as poetry does not make it correct.
What Makes Poetry Different From Prose?
- Poetry is metrical, prose is not.
- Poetry can rhyme, prose never rhymes.
- Prose is rational, each word has an exact dictionary meaning. The words of poetry are not rational. They are irrational, that is, they can have multiple layers of meaning.
- Poetry communicates by using images and does not rely on rational thought, like prose that is used in an instruction manual.
- The meters of poetry allow easy memorization, as a memnotic device. Prose is hard to recall word for word, because it has no music or rhyme.
- Poetry incants with a memorable musical enchantment, it uses alliteration and repetition as a craft of their art. Prose does not use these devices.
- A poem cannot be translated. Prose can be translated word for word. A translated version of a poem is another poem, but not the original one.
“Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.”
T.S. Eliot
The Elephant In The Room
Since 1960s poetry became a cathartic psychotherapy prose using greeting card expressions. It is pretty, even touchy, but is it poetry? The total want of modern poetic excellence is proved by the lack of a vibrant market in modern poetry. No poet can make a living in the West solely based upon writing poetry. No man on the street can name a living modern poet. That’s the elephant in the room.
As in the same way that modern art is not art, but politics (even drawn by a dauphin, a monkey, or a child), modern poetry is not poetry. Modern poetry follows no conventions, meters or even common sense. The only rule is the total want of rules. But more importantly, modern poetry has renounced its ancient excellence of narrative. Instead, modern prose-poetry exhibits ideological and common group think – and thus is mediocre and boring.
How much value have my sorrows about my disease, my oppression, my deceased mother? It means everything to me, but nothing to others. Some of you feel sorry for the poet, some will simply pass, thinking that it is too common, stale, and self-referent. This kind of poetry does not tell a story. It will not change the world around us. We might call it sentiments on a postcard – or a doctor’s chart – but not poetry. Modern poetry is a dead poetry.
Modern Poetry Is a Poor Language
Modern English speech is losing its power. First, modern technology removed the necessity of writing long beautiful thoughts through letters. Texting, emails, slang – all that made us pick the simplest language possible. But more importantly, globalization encouraged the input of non-native speakers who now write and speak in English. They naturally have a smaller English vocabulary than native speakers. And they do not understand poetry the way native speakers do.
Poetry is engraved inside the culture, and idiomatic understanding only comes with the mother tongue language. As a person speaking 5 languages and having lived in multiple countries, I can tell you that only native speakers can fully understand poetry, or humor, for example (humor being a type of poetry). Culture is not something you can teach to an adult. You have to be born with it. Pejoratively, we can tell that we absorb it with our mothers’ milk. This is why poetry with all its rich language and cultural nuances can be fully understood only by native speakers. Foreigners can study the meanings of metaphors, expressions, idioms, etc. But only people born with that language can “feel” the poetry.
This is why we often say that poetry can not and should not be translated. You loose it in the translation. Translation becomes a new creation of poetry by itself. The Hebrew Bible, the King James Bible translation, is a prime example of a new independent creation of poetry. It makes sense. But the true power of poetry in the Hebrew texts can be perceive only by people who can read the Bible in original language.
Is Modern Poetry Prophetic?
You might be surprised to learn that about 90% of all religious scriptures are written in poetry: Vedic scriptures, Old Testament, Torah, Psalms, Proverbs etc. A substantial portion of the prophetic writings is also poetic in structure. Many of the prophets of ancient Israel wrote their messages in Hebrew poetic forms, and their discourses recorded in the Old Testament are often framed in Hebrew poetry. In more recent times, Nostradamus wrote his prophecies in poetry as well.
For the ancient Greeks, prediction, prophecy, and poetry were often intertwined. Prophecies were given in verse, and the word for poet in Latin is “vates” or prophet, diviner, foresee. Ancient poets and oracles claimed to be inspired by forces outside themselves. In ancient China, divination is regarded as the oldest form of occult inquiry and was often expressed in verse.
Shakespeare, Milton, Keates, Wordsworth, Arnold, Yeats, and Eliot all spoke in prophetic speech. Try to name a prophet in modern era! Modern poetry is not prophetic. Sharing your own emotions but not telling the story is only a school exercise with language. Enchanted memorable speech, prophetic voice, is what makes a text a great poem.
Modern Poetry Is Corrupted
Can we reform poetry? Probably not. We have to start from the beginning. In fact, we have to go back to its origins, when poets had a voice of power, when poetry was memorable speech. Poetry needs new faces. Or, in fact, it should be faceless, genderless, ageless and not influenced by any politics of fashion. We should not judge a poem’s value on the color, sex, origin or age of the poet. That is only justice. Anything else is modern ideological bias – not the ancient art of poetry. Poetry is incantation, it is listening to your inner being and to the universe out there. It is creating your own world and changing the world around you.
Extras:
A great example of a powerful poetry: Sailing to Byzantium by W.E. Yeats.
About challenges that translators face while translating modern poetry.
