Hi,
Well-- good stuff, you seem to know a thing or two about Indian metrical
systems... can we expect some experimental poetry from you in the near
future?
Beats and stress are not the same thing; which is why I guardedly use
the word "transpose". Most Indian languages organise beats through
syllable length and not syllable volume. However, so does ancient
Greek. The origins of the mainstream of current modern English metrics
come from experiments by (among others) Philip Sydney and his wife,
Mary, the Countess of Pembroke with taking those metres and trading
quantity for stress. It was an attempt in the translation of rhythm,
and it was a quixotic and somewhat absurd sounding experiment, but
somewhere along the way it ended up completely changing the rhythms of
English poetry. Thus the current metrical system in English that we
think of as "classical" was not "natural" to English, no more than
rhyme, which came from late Latin/Italian. So discussions of what is or is not
"natural", whether for English poets writing in England or India, are futile.
English stress is, alas, surprisingly easy for Indians writing in
English-- too easy. That's precisely the problem. Because (some of the
lesser) poets are not devoting enough time to making themselves
conscious of the English tradition, they are unconsciously reproducing it.
What makes you think that "different" is disyllabic in the West and
trisyllabic in India? Is that the conclusion of some linguist or
doctrinary dictionarian ardent on classification? Well, to my ear,
things are not so simple. In fact, if you look at poems where syllabic
count is significant, here or in the West, you'll find that "different"
is sometimes counted as disyllabic, sometimes trisyllabic. The count of
the form in any given poem itself acts as a guide to the reader as to
how many syllables the author wants to construe the word as having.
And: the possibility of this ambiguity arises precisely from the fact
that everywhere that my ear has strayed, India, Africa, USA, UK, or
Australia, standard English or dialect, the stress is always on the
first syllable, ie. one pronounces it, properly, DIFFerent. This means
that the second two syllables are half-stresses, which allows one to
collapse them into effectively one syllable if one wishes [the choice is
whether to accord the second syl an intermediary volume between the
first and third, or make it as low as the third]. If one insisted,
perversely, on pronouncing it diFERRent, then people are likely to
confuse what you're saying with the word "deferent", or even be unsure
as to what word you intend... hear what I mean? So there are metres
where that last syllable would be significant, and metres where it would
not. One last caveat: many Indian English speakers seem to play with
syllable quantity in addition to stress, because of their background.
So if you think you're hearing someone say diffeRENT, listen closely and
you'll find that they are just lengthening the last syllable, but not
giving it the main volume stress. There have been attempts to introduce
quantitative metres into English-- Keats uses syllable length but not in
a precise way, Robert Bridges, Hopkins' disciple, seems to have made a
mess of trying to formalise it, but here perhaps it will be an Indian
with a very sharp ear who makes inroads.
There are words where there is different stress between England and
America, or even within England-- as in "detail", which I pronouce
"DEtail" and Gertrude Stein pronounces "deTAIL" in a recording, but
these minor variations have never stopped anyone writing in metre. If
there is any confusion, one can just put a stress mark (') over the
syllable that would be in doubt, as Geoffrey Hill still does.
I forgot to note, by the way, that the poems of Nissim Ezekiel, the
granddaddy of Indian English poetry, are very often metrical. So
sorry-- it's embedded in our tradition too, right from the start, it's
far too late to legislate against it! Perhaps if you were an
influential litterateur fifty years ago you might have had a chance to
save our identity by nipping this anti-patriotic metrical thing in the bud.
But-- if we have "strayed" into English in the first place, why would we not do
well to stray right into the heart of that tradition, master it, and then
intuit better how to upturn it? If we don't, we will very likely continue to
reproduce English rhythms but in a flattened,
unconscious way... as has been (largely) the case. You may think you're being
Indian but you're not going there deep enough.
All acerbic and ironic comments purely in the interests of the joust,
Vivek
subba rayudu wrote:
> Dear Vivek,
>
> I agree with the Indian metrics in English poetry experiment. Try
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