Re: How to translate sound immitaion in poems?
muoyuer wrote:The lines I pasted on are translated from a Chinese poem which is very sad describing the poet herself in the early spring wind and rain and in the original lines the poet uses 14 characters of 7 pairs to reveal her feeling and she chose 7 pairs to express what she was faced with would be trouble and after trouble. Could you find the same in English version?
You did not say that you were talking about Chinese poetry.
The units of poetic metre, like rhyme, vary from language to language and between poetic traditions. They can involve arrangements of syllables into repeated patterns called feet within a line. English meter is traditionally conceived as being founded on the patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables.
In Greek and Latin poetry, the metrical "feet" were based on the length of time taken to pronounce each syllable, which were categorized as either "long" syllables or "short" syllables (also known as "heavy" and "light" syllables, respectively, to distinguish from long and short vowels). The foot is often compared to a musical measure and the long and short syllables to whole notes and half notes. In English poetry, feet are determined by emphasis rather than length, with stressed and unstressed syllables serving the same function as long and short syllables in classical meter.
English is an accentual language, and therefore beats and offbeats (stressed and unstressed syllables) take the place of the long and short syllables of classical systems. In most English verse, the meter can be considered as a sort of back beat, against which natural speech rhythms vary expressively.
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