Word: singsong
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Poems, by Boris Pasternak, translated by Eugene M. Kayden. Though the language curtain sometimes reduces the poet's lyric song to schoolboy singsong, this translation permits more than a glint of Pasternak's genius to filter through...
...filters through; whole stanzas blaze with life and passion. But, since Pasternak frequently relies on a fusion of images and sounds, perhaps only an inspired fellow poet could devise sensuously idiomatic English equivalents. In Translator Kayden's rhymes, Pasternak's lyric song is sometimes reduced to schoolboy singsong...
...ordinary literary standards, Guest's verse was mundane doggerel, written in soporific singsong and filled with synthetic back-country colloquialism. Guest's world abounded with wimmen folks, doctor folks, farmer folks and jes' plain folks. He extolled friendship and friends, God and worship, his wife Nellie, his son Bud, his daughter Janet, the virtues of porch sitting, of babies, tablecloths, wood-burning stoves and wooden tubs, sausage, and two kinds of pie (lemon and raisin). To Edgar Guest, death was "God's great slumber grove" or "the golden afterwhile." Samples of his rhyming...
...Senator Lyndon Johnson (who announced his plan for a legislative-executive commission on unemployment to report in 60 days) and Illinois' Senator Paul Douglas (President Eisenhower, "the kindly Kansan, has unwittingly become the captive of hard-faced men"). The U.A.W.'s Reuther, in a high-pitched, rhythmic singsong? pulled out all the stops, deriding Eisenhower for playing golf and quail hunting in Georgia, and conjuring up the memory of the good old days of World War II, when everybody was working overtime: "If we can have full employment and full production making the weapons of war and destruction...
...still have the impression," Belafonte says, "of lush green vegetation, white sandy beaches, rolling surf, endless winding roads. It was an environment that sang." The people sang with it. The streets of Kingston were thronged with piping vendors or politicians drumming up a vote in the lilting singsong of the islands. It was "a groovy time. I was a great night gazer. I used to climb up in a mango tree and lie back and eat mangoes and look through the leaves...