It's easier to write good poetry in English than in romance languages

I just want to say to all those of you who write poetry in English that you have an enormous advantage to the rest of us that compose in romance languages (Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese, etc.), and all other languages that are mostly polysyllabic.

Here is the thing: your vocabulary is vastly monosyllabic and that allows you to write metrified verse that can still apprehend vast quantities of material inside ten-syllables lines.

I really believe that this freedom that few people perceive makes a lot of difference. For example, who could translate this Shakespearean line to any romance language using a ten syllable or even a twelve syllable line:

>Disdain and scorn ride sparkling in her eyes

Even the Alexandrine of the French (with twelve syllables) generally cant express as much thought and detail as the iambic pentameter line of English, and that mostly because a large quantity of English words are just one or two syllables long.

None of the romance languages can fill a regular sonnet with so much information as English. Take this, for example:

Design
Robert Frost, 1874 - 1963
I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth--
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches’ broth--
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?--
If design govern in a thing so small.

Or this:

Sonnet 33, Shakespeare

Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy;
user permit the basest clouds to ride
With ugly rack on his celestial face,
And from the forlorn world his visage hide,
Stealing unseen to west with this disgrace:
Even so my sun one early morn did shine
With all-triumphant splendor on my brow;
But, out, alack! he was but one hour mine,
The region cloud hath mask’d him from me now.
Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth;
Suns of the world may stain when heaven’s sun staineth.

This angers me a lot. It is much harder to write poetry in Portuguese.

English obviously has many advantages, but it's not all champagne and oysters.

The main problem is it's very "rhyme-poor", because there are so many different endings.
In Italian, for example, almost every word rhymes with almost every other word, so the difficulty is NOT to rhyme :)
I'm currently translating the Divine Comedy into strict iambic pentameter terza rima, and the damn thing is biting and kicking every inch of the way.

>I'm currently translating The Divine Comedy
Why?

True but romance languages have the advantage of being onomatopeic. There is an extra dimension to them that english doesn't have. For example
>ascoltare tra i pruni e gli sterpi
>schiocchi di merli, frusci di serpi.
or
>Se non eterne, ed io eterna duro

>The main problem is it's very "rhyme-poor", because there are so many different endings.

Yes, you are right about that.

But my main goals is to write blank verse plays (like this, some excerpts of mine, translated):

I am considering changing from ten to twelve syllables, like in these sonnets:

>Some faces of love
>The Loneliness of Time

But still, even twelve syllables are not enough to fill every single line with as much material as English.

I really envy the space that the English verse provides, and also the flexibility to coin new words

I was just thinking something very similar this morning with regard to Russian. Russian words tend to be even more polysyllabic than Romance, so a Russian songwriter has a choice between lines that are about the same length as English but convey less information, or really long lines that aren’t as catchy (I think this is why there are a lot of spoken word over music songs from Slavic countries).
It also affects the content of the lyrics, because certain Russian words or concepts take as long or shorter to express than in English and get included a lot because they’re so succinct.

Tl;dr

OP here.

The solution I have in my plays is to make the speeches longer. Generally one line of English will take one line and a half in Portuguese, but I tend to round it up in two lines.

I am thinking of using the twelve-syllable line now. It’s not as sonorous as the ten syllable, but it offers more possibilities.

The only advantage Portuguese has on English (the Brazilian one) is the sonority, but no more than that.

Because there isn't a good verse translation and I can do better than everyone else who's tried.

>and I can do better than everyone else who's tried.

I liked your confidence :)

French might be encumbered with many syllables, but French writers do have the advantage of being able to choose, in certain circumstances, whether or not to pronounce the final syllable. That certainly adds flexibility when writing metered verse.
Example (from the Frozen soundtrack):
"Cache tes pouvoirs/n'en parles pas"
In the song the 2nd line is pronounced "n'en parlAY pas" while normally it'd be pronounced "n'en parl pas".
And there's also a lot of play within words, e.g. 'doucement' can be 'doo-smont' or 'doo-se-mont'. You can fuck around like that in English of course, but you risk sounding forced and anachronistic.
Or is it forced and anachronistic in French as well? I'm not fluent enough to know.

>Russian words tend to be even more polysyllabic than Romance, so a Russian songwriter has a choice between lines that are about the same length as English but convey less information, or really long lines that aren’t as catchy

feels bad bro

Are other Germanic languages really that much more polysyllabic than English?

Surely Russian's lack of articles cuts down on syllables though.

Why Latin can wrtie long lines that are considered sonorous:

– u u|– u u|– –|– – | – u u| – –
Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris

But if French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, cross the 12 syllable line bar they are thought to be unmusical, clumsy, too-long and un-verse like?

Damn, Marlon Brando was handsome when he was young.

>e.g. 'doucement' can be 'doo-smont'
No, that's impossible.

yes it can though. The french are constantly eliminating syllables in their words when they speak
you rarely hear them say 'ne me parle pas'
you hear something like 'nemparlpa'

>yes it can though.
No, that's impossible in poetry.

I'd say German probably is, they have multiple translations of Shakespeare so it would be good to compare how they did it.

Meant for

bump for interest

>Design
>Robert Frost, 1874 - 1963
>I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
>On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
>Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth--
>Assorted characters of death and blight
>Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
>Like the ingredients of a witches’ broth--
>A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
>And dead wings carried like a paper kite.
>What had that flower to do with being white,
>The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
>What brought the kindred spider to that height,
>Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
>What but design of darkness to appall?--
>If design govern in a thing so small.

10/10

them stressed syllables

>Disdain and scorn ride sparkling in her eyes

Dédain, mépris courent brillants dans ces yeux.

Wasn't that hard...

Now try to translate this in english:

>Une idée ça vrille et ça pousse
>l'idée du champ dans l'épi de blé
>au coeur des feuilles l'idée de l'arbre
>qui va faire une forêt
>et même, même
>forcenée, l'idée du chiendent

>c'est dans l'homme tenu
>sa tourmente aiguisée
>sa brave folie grimpante

>non, ça n'déracine pas
>ça fait à sa tête de travers
>cette idée-là, bizarre! qu'on a
>tête de caboche, ô liberté!

As a native french speaker, I can say you're mostly right, that's why we don't use the word syllable when discussion poetry metric but instead the word pied (which translate to foot). While the number of syllable of a word is mostly fixed, the number of pied in a line can vary and is only an unit of pronunciation.

Yea, even words that look like they rhyme it turns out they don't even though they look the same. Fucking English.

His confidence is so refreshing it makes me want to translate some shit.

French sucks.