Word: iambic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...this Frenchman who rates an alexandrine above iambic pentameter and dares insult the memory of William Shakespeare? Self-exiled on the shores of Lake Geneva, Francois-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire, the author of the satire Candide, is preparing a missive on that matter for the Academic null He plans to ridicule his countrymen's Anglophilia, specifically a recent translation of Shakespeare that praises the English playwright as a "creative divinity." Ironically, it was Voltaire, now 82, who promoted the craze when in 1734 he made the first translations of Shakespeare into French. Now he is alarmed that...
There is much more to Kieu than escapist melodrama. Written by a renowned Vietnamese classicist named Nguyen Du (1766-1820), the poem in Vietnamese has a wide range of wordplay. The meter is a flowing iambic called luk-bat, full of rhyming and nearly as easy to memorize as a song. Much of this is unavoidably lost in the otherwise excellent English translation by Huynh Sanh Thong, a Vietnamese scholar who has lived in the U.S. all his adult life. Jaded Western readers who may find Kieu's plight unconvincing can still enjoy the poem for its language, especially...
...Pound was only partly right. Poetry did need to escape from its iambic prison, but not break its neck in the attempt. It is high time this pseudo poetry of disjecta membra was put in its place, as you have done in the fine peroration of the article's last two paragraphs...