A poem should not mean, but be. Thread poster: Jacek Krankowski (X)
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Jacek Krankowski (X) 
English to Polish
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Ars Poetica
A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit
Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb
Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Old casement ledges where the moss has grown--
A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds
A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs
Leaving, as the moon releases
... See more Ars Poetica
A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit
Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb
Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Old casement ledges where the moss has grown--
A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds
A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs
Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,
Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind--
A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs
A poem should be equal to:
Not true
For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf
For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea--
A poem should not mean
But be.
Archibald MacLeish
(an American poet of the 20th c.)
[ This Message was edited by: on 2002-11-06 13:01 ]
[ This Message was edited by: on 2002-11-07 10:15 ] ▲ Collapse
| | | | | evoque rather than say | Nov 4, 2002 |
Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.
Gertrude Stein, taken from \"The World is Round\"
fascinating example of evocative language: rather than mean something it merely suggests, conjurs up the image of a rose, petal after petal after petal.
| | | | Aurora Humarán (X)
Argentina
Local time: 09:58
English to Spanish
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| It´s beautiful Jacek | Nov 5, 2002 |
It´s a nice poem from its title to its last word.
Thanks for a \"poetic\" break in the middle of some non-poetic financial statements...
 Au
| | | | | I'm sure it's one of those great poems | Nov 7, 2002 |
we discussed at dr. Durczak\'s seminar in Lublin. I said (rather profoundly) that we would never have another opportunity to discuss poetry. Well...
You\'ve done a great thing Jacek, even if my mind is too stale to spark up a translation.
Kris
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Jacek Krankowski (X)
English to Polish
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TOPIC STARTER
I did not know we went to the same school, although Durczak did his M.A. only 3 years before me, so I could not have worked with him...
| | | | Jacek Krankowski (X)
English to Polish
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TOPIC STARTER | On "Ars Poetica" | Nov 12, 2002 |
In the code language of criticism when a poem is said to be about poetry
the word \"poetry\" is often used to mean: how people construct an
intelligibility out of the randomness they experience; how people choose
what they love; how people integrate loss and gain; how they distort
experience by wish and dream; how they perceive and consolidate flashes of
harmony; how they (to end a list otherwise endless) achieve what Keats
... See more In the code language of criticism when a poem is said to be about poetry
the word \"poetry\" is often used to mean: how people construct an
intelligibility out of the randomness they experience; how people choose
what they love; how people integrate loss and gain; how they distort
experience by wish and dream; how they perceive and consolidate flashes of
harmony; how they (to end a list otherwise endless) achieve what Keats
called a \"Soul or Intelligence destined to possess the sense of Identity.\"
-- Helen Vendler, poetry critic
Rather unsurprisingly, if you think about it, a number of poets have taken a
break from mirroring reality, and turned their gaze inwards, whether upon
other poets, other poems, the nature and role of the Poet, or, most
reflexively, the nature and role of Poetry.
Today\'s poem is a beautiful example. Titled Ars Poetica - \'the Art of
Poetry\'[1] - it attempts to prescribe the nature of poetry, and - in a move
Hofstadter would have loved - does so in the form of a poem. Furthermore, it
does not seek to sidestep the possible pitfalls and inconsistencies this
approach leaves it open to - rather it meets them head on, using words like
\'mute\', \'dumb\' and \'wordless\' to set up a paradox culminating in the
wonderful last stanza, \'a poem should not mean / but be\'.
En route, the main thread is woven through with several exquisite images,
speaking to the reader even as it advocates silence, progressing even as it
advocates motionlessness. And yet, at the end, it does resolve itself into a
seamless, integrated whole, as perfectly self-contained as the globed fruit,
or the timeless, frozen stillness of a winter\'s night. The reader is free to
pick it apart, to tease meaning from the tapestry of contradictions and
images. As for the poem, it simply is.
http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/188.html
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Signi Lenea Falk
\"Ars Poetica\" has been called MacLeish\'s ultimate expression of the art-for-art\'s-sake tenet. Taken as one statement of his theory, the poem does defy the \"hair splitting analysis of modern criticism.\" Written in three units of double-line stanzas and in rhyme, it makes the point that a poem is an intimation rather than a full statement, that it should \"be motionless in time\"; that it has no relation to generalities of truth, historical fact, or love-variations, perhaps, of truth, beauty, and goodness.
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Victor H. Jones
The poem, as \"Ars Poetica\" makes clear, captures a human experience, an experience of grief, or of love, or of loneliness, or of memory. Thus a poem becomes a way of knowing, of seeing, albeit through the senses, the emotions, and the imagination. MacLeish often said that the function of a poem is to trap \"Heaven and Earth in the cage of form.\"
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William Pratt
Archibald MacLeish, who like Cummings arrived on the poetic scene after the first imagists had created the new movement, nevertheless can be credited with the poetic summing up of imagism in his \"Ars Poetica\" in 1926, written well after the imagist decade had ended. It is inconceivable that such a poem could have been written without imagism, because the technique as well as the philosophy of MacLeish\'s most famous poem is imagist. It consists of a sequence of images that are discrete but that at the same time express and exemplify the imagist principles and practice of poetry.
The Latin title is borrowed from Horace, who wrote a prose treatise in the first century A.D., the Silver Age of Rome, called \"Art of Poetry,\" advising poets among other things to be brief and to make their poems lasting. MacLeish wanted to link the classical with the modern in his poetic \"treatise\" as a way of implying that the standards of good poetry are timeless, that they do not change in essence though actual poems change from age to age and language to language. His succession of opening images are all about the enduring of poetry through time, as concrete as \"globed fruit\" or ancient coins or stone ledges, and as inspiring to see as a flight of birds or the moon rising in the sky. The statements are not only concrete but paradoxical, for it is impossible that poems should be \"mute\" or \"Dumb\" or \"Silent\" or \"wordless,\" which would mean that there was no communication in them at all; rather, what MacLeish is stating in his succession of paradoxical images is that the substance of poetry may be physical but the meaning of poetry is metaphysical: poems are not about the world of sensible objects as much as they are about invisible realities, and so the universal emotions of grief and love can be expressed in words that convey the experience in all its concreteness, yet the words reach into the visionary realm beyond experience, toward which all true images point. The final paradox, that \"A poem should not mean but be,\" is pure impossibility, but the poet insists it is nevertheless valid, because beyond the meaning of any poem is the being that it points to, which is ageless and permanent, a divine essence or spiritual reality behind all appearances. MacLeish\'s modern \"Art of Poetry\" is a fulfillment of the three rules of imagism (be direct, be brief, and use free verse), of Pound\'s definition of the image, and at the same time of Horace\'s Latin statement on poetry, that good poetry is one proof that there is a permanence in human experience that does not change but endures through time.
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/macleish/ars.htm
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| | | | Jacek Krankowski (X)
English to Polish
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER | Polish translation | Nov 18, 2002 |
We held a KudoZ competition for the translation of Archibald MacLeish\'s \"Ars Poetica\" into Polish.
I announced today that the winner is Przemyslaw Szkodzinski whose translation can be compared with an existing published Polish translation at:
http://www.proz.com/?sp=bb/viewtopic&topic=6177&forum=35&13
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