Archives Bio Poetry
December 1, 2009
a pretty girl

11:37 AM

This is my (rather reluctant) translation of 「きれいな女の子」.

a pretty girl

a pretty girl
         is an interesting
     thing

              fingernails 
              the colour of lipstick
                  the sound of her smile

       she lowers her eyes
    where
          is she looking

                a pretty girl
                       is a dangerous
                    thing

            the colour of words
                the price of beauty
                the sound of silence

     she looks down
    what
         is she thinking

Comments

Let me write of your body
Write of the pale skin of your arms
Soft and taunt with strength
And the sun kissed flesh of your hands
Filled with ability

Write of your long fingers
Roughened and calloused with work
Tickling and twined with mine
Like your long dark legs
Tangled and ribboned with mine

Remember the art of your palms
Soft and lined with the tale of your life
And the works of your hands
The masterpiece of their touch

Let me write of you
Solid, warm and unyielding
The feel of you dominant and completing
Pressing and filling
The emptiness of soft curves

Let me write of you
And remember
The spaces of your hands
And the grace as you move
The stride of your walk

Let me write and remember
The taste of your kiss
The shape of your lips
The sound of your voice
As you say goodbye

Posted by MLP on December 4, 2009 10:17 AM

Hey, hey! There is something here, indeed. I liked "Filled with ability" and "tangled and ribboned" very much. However, having said that, there are a few problems with this piece.

First, you can either take the symmetrical approach to stanza metering, or make the arrangement truly asymmetrical, but you can't have five stanzas with five lines each while one of them has only four lines. I know your thoughts on editing, but you are not a beginner.

Second, let's look at the syllable counts and some of your technical approaches:
7, 8, 5, 8, 6 (I think you meant "taut," not "taunt." ;)
6, 7, 6, 5, 7 (Nice parallelism in the third and fifth lines!)
8, 9, 6, 7
5, 7, 11, 5, 7
5, 4, 6, 6, 5
7, 5, 5, 5, 5 (Excellent use of parallel structures, but this is another case when a poem has one line too many. Don't regurgitate your words for the reader. Leave that last line unsaid. Incidentally, if you had cut off that last line, it would give the piece a meaningful symmetry - 5, 5, 4 lines x 2.)

As you can see, some of your lines are very effective in terms of rhythm, but others are either too long (8, 8 or 11 syllables) or they include vocabulary that is somewhat jarring with its placement, length or general register (some good examples are "tickling," "unyielding" and "dominant," which seem to be out of place, and which can be replaced with shorter or better synonyms).

Third - pardon me for saying this, but this is the issue that bothers me the most - this is not new work. The "Let me..." invocation - you've done it before, and more than once. I want you to move past requests, past asking for permission; I want you to really take the bull by the horns. Another issue is that you've abandoned the "composition by field" thing you had going for a short while after Olson, et alii. I'd like you to try to bring it back.

My Little Pony, it is time to try something radical, and I know that you have more than enough imagination to pull it off. I know how hard it is to let go a familiar style. Hell, I used to write my poetry in ALL CAPS for years, before I even thought about eliminating all punctuation (per John Webb), or playing with spacing and typography. You have to move forward. Keep working on it.

Posted by Mike on December 7, 2009 3:06 AM


Post a Comment
Name:

E-Mail Address:

URL:

All anonymous or off-topic comments will be deleted.
Comments:



ihqvcuh njvsqnek