[white ribbons...] by Senna

[Senna Jawa]

This poem is dear to me. I wrote it first in Polish. But in English I can't quite get the meaning in the last stanza. I want to say that I dread it when she looks at me (in my mind, when I can't help it but imagine, remember), I don't know how to fix this last stanza. Possibly U will have a lucky idea. I did try on occasions but with no success.



* * *


    white ribbons of vapor
    have fallen like dust
    after tiny jet planes
    landed in ports of the past

    a small rocket died
    in my head - of the grace
    of feet that ran to me
    the grass hides not a trace

    the green world wilts unable
    to live in a beggar's eyes
    a small meadow flattened
    like a ping-pong table

    airy ping-pong balls
    or her eyes I dread
    knock ever so loud
    against my wooden head


                    Wlodzimierz Holsztynski ©
                    (author's transl. from Polish)
                    California, 1991

Once I fix it I'll post it

 

[Senna Jawa]

I want to say that I dread it when she looks at me (in my mind, when I can't help it but imagine, remember

To be precise (too precise?): something is knocking against my head, and I dread that these (what is knocking) are her eyes.

Regards,

 

[KatPurrs]

Hi Senna,

Well I'm not too sure you need to change anything. I understood from the poem what you said you're trying to convey in the last stanza.

I did have a bit of a problem with seeing ping pong in two consecutive lines I think because they really scream out at me.

This is just a thought. If you don't mention ping pong balls or eyes, you could try to lead the reader to figure it out themselves with this morphed attempt:

white, airy, haunting orbs
fill me with dread
and knock ever so loudly
against my wooden head

Good luck! I hope it falls into place for you.

Kat~

 

[Senna Jawa]

Hi Senna,

Well I'm not too sure you need to change anything. I understood from the poem what you said you're trying to convey in the last stanza.

Hi KatPurrs,

That was a surprise to me (I got mixed signals in the past).
I am resonding to your comment only now because I was hoping for reactions from other participants too. Somehow our poetic board is not too active these days.

I did have a bit of a problem with seeing ping pong in two consecutive lines I think because they really scream out at me.

This is just a thought. If you don't mention ping pong balls or eyes, you could try to lead the reader to figure it out themselves with this morphed attempt:

    white, airy, haunting orbs
    fill me with dread
    and knock ever so loudly
    against my wooden head

Hm, I don't know   I'll think about the p-p repetition.

Good luck! I hope it falls into place for you.

Kat~

Your nick is truly Literotical
Thank U, KatPurrs for your comment,

 

[Unmasked Poet]

Lost in the translation

Senna Jawa, I am confused yet I see clearly.


white ribbons of vapor
have fallen like dust
after tiny jet planes
landed in ports of the past

I can live with first line although a bit contrite.
The second line bothers me. Vapor cannot fall like dust. Vapor is composed of water molecules. Dust is solid particles. Vapor can fall but only as mist. While poetic license can allow you to defy the laws of nature I cannot.
The third line connects to the first. So why did you not just say vapor trails? Tiny is not needed in this sentence. The fourth line is clumsy planes do land in ports. Ships dock at ports. Then again this could be poetic license, or as my title suggests I am lost in the translation.

a small rocket died
in my head - of the grace
of feet that ran to me
the grass hides not a trace

A small rocket died? Okay whatever you say. I'm sure this is an abstraction for a thought or emotion that passed through your mind. Forget the kennings, sometimes you just have to say what you mean.
The line “of the grace of feet that ran to me.” is little more than nonsense.
The fourth line seems to exist for rhyme and as a bridge to the next stanza to set up your metaphor.

the green world wilts unable
to live in a beggar's eyes
a small meadow flattened
like a ping-pong table

The third stanza is your best overall.
Terms like “beggar’s eye” should be changed in my opinion. (Too cliché)
Third line, forget small just say “meadow flattened”.
Fourth line; forget the simile here say “into” instead of “like”.

airy ping-pong balls
or her eyes I dread
knock ever so loud
against my wooden head

This is just off beat, this last stanza is the worst. I have not a clue. I think a large part of the problem is in the translation. I assume Polish is your native language. I’m sure it is wonderful but in English this poem is unfocused and confused and transfers very little to the reader.

U.P.

 

[karmadog]

What the hell are kennings? You two (Senna and UP) have mentioned this in other threads and I didn't know what you were talking about there either.

As you do not seem wedded to a strict rhyme scheme, how about this: "... of the graceful
feet that ran to me
the grass hides not a trace"?

But at the same time I don't understand how the rocket that died in your head relates to the rest of the stanza at all. It seems like a nonsequitor.

 

[Senna Jawa]

What the hell are kennings?

Check the literature and U will see that kenning is not a well understood notion. In fact, it is more than one. All of them being under the umrella of the following syntax:   something of something   (or something's something). One notion of kenning is the Old Chinese or, what is about the same I think, the Old English kenning. I was not interested in them (there are doctoral dissertations written about them). Then there are Skaldic kennings. Some authors came close to their understanding, but Skaldic kennings were not really understood well until, after a few years of being both fascinated by them and frustrated, I got it clearly around 1970. Then I sold it to other poets on a few occasions. Different sources will tell U vaguely that kenning is a kind of a metaphor, which is not of much help to a working poet™. The full understanding of kenning explains also why it's so easy to confuse Skaldic kennings with other devices. There are two more related notions that I know of: dead metaphors and what I call   extractions   (I have not seen this one mentioned anywhere in literature). All of them are sharing the same syntax while differing semantically.

Skaldic kenning is a powerful and flexible device. It is a great pity, I feel, that poets today are not aware of its potential, that since Skalds, kennings occur only accidentally. Besides a couple of my own poems (e.g.   San Jose)   I don't know any modern poems (but one superficial) based on kennings, in which Skaldic kennings play basic role; and I myself would like to do much more in this direction (if in any). There was, in another thread, a resistance to my proposition, I understand it, so I forgot about it and I'll stop now.

Best regards,

            Senna Jawa

PS. I'll write more about [white ribbons...] separately in this thread. BTW, it was an error on my part to mention that my English text was a translation from my Polish original .

 

[Senna Jawa]

[white ribbons...] -- comments

Thank U, UP, for your (confused but clear ) comments. I'll respond like any other reader/critic (true, as the author I do have some lazy advantages).

Senna Jawa, I am confused yet I see clearly.


        white ribbons of vapor
        have fallen like dust
        after tiny jet planes
        landed in ports of the past

[...] Dust is solid particles. Vapor can fall but only as mist. While poetic license can allow you to defy the laws of nature I cannot.

UP, I share the principle behind your comment: the poem should work above all on the elementary, literal level of images; it can be somewhat less crisp on the metaphoric level. Is it the problem here, with "white ribbons of vapor" and dust? Perhaps minimal, it's not clear. I could write a longer analysis about it but at the most only U would read it. Let me mention myself another moment which can be disputed. The strength of a simile depends, besides other things, on the (conceptual) distance between the two components. Here "vapor" and "dust" are not dramatically apart, which usually is a drawback. Is it so here? Again the situation is subtle due to the global considerations, which take into account the entire poem.

The third line connects to the first. So why did you not just say vapor trails? Tiny is not needed in this sentence.

I understand only too well your objections, I made a lot of similar comments about other poems. But I also look at the poem globally. U follow some helpful principles. They help to organize one's thinking, they direct the analysis. But that's where their usefullness ends. They may even mislead U, as here, I'll explain at the end of this post. Let me only say now, that "tiny" is a part of a device

The fourth line is clumsy planes do [not] land in ports. Ships dock at ports. Then again this could be poetic license, or as my title suggests I am lost in the translation.

Here I simply disagree (and let's forget that this was a translation, that's irrelevant). This is after all poetry, we can use language differently than on everyday ooccasions. We do have airports. U may consider that we have here language more efficient than usually.

        a small rocket died
        in my head - of the grace
        of feet that ran to me
        the grass hides not a trace

A small rocket died? Okay whatever you say.

We do say "engine died", hence in poetry we may also say that a rocket died. Here English works very well, very poetically. The standard language creates dead metaphors like "engine died", which would be poetic except for the fact that they r used all the time, hence the poetry is lost. My line goes back to the poetic source of English and brings the dead metaphor back to life. Anyway, all this is optional, as U more or less have observed yourself:

I'm sure this is an abstraction for a thought or emotion that passed through your mind.

U mean just the opposite, concretization or symbolization (a rocket is something concrete, the emotions are abstract). Simply let yourself go with the poem, just enjoy the images and the images within the images, the image of the sky and planes and the rocket, and then the image of all this scenery being inside the subject's head.

Forget the kennings, sometimes you just have to say what you mean. The line “of the grace of feet that ran to me.” is little more than nonsense.

I competely disagree (and kennings have nothing to do with this discussion ).

The fourth line seems to exist for rhyme and as a bridge to the next stanza to set up your metaphor.

        the green world wilts unable
        to live in a beggar's eyes
        a small meadow flattened
        like a ping-pong table

[...]Terms like “beggar’s eye” should be changed in my opinion. (Too cliché)

.Perhaps (but I don't think so). I wonder what others think about it.

Third line, forget small just say “meadow flattened”.
Fourth line; forget the simile here say “into” instead of “like”.

These are the same kind of suggestions as U made earlier. If they were followed the result would be a very weak poem or none. The delicate construction of my poem would be destroyed.

        airy ping-pong balls
        or her eyes I dread
        knock ever so loud
        against my wooden head

This is just off beat, this last stanza is the worst. I have not a clue.U.P.

Yes, I had mixed signals in the past. Some people object strongly to it, others have no problem.

If one ingredient in a dish is missing it disqualifies the dish. I have my worries about the language of my text. Most likely the language ingredient is missing from my "dish" and my text is not an item of art. This is why I have NOT submitted it. Nevertheless, despite your comments, which degrade my text, my text has the other ingredients of a poem, it is poetic. It has a clear construction/concept followed by a clear execution. There is the past and the present time. The past is distant and "pretty" (has almost a childish toy quality but is nicer than that, is more real than that). Thus "white ribbons". Thus ""tiny", "small". These expresssions add to the "prettiness" and create distance (in time; distant objects r smaller). U don't have there, in the past, simply airplanes etc. U have a green world, in which U have small airlplanes, and U have also "white ribbons." All this is happening in the subject's mind. U can't have there anything as trivial as ping-pong table. With the passage of time U have only a hint of things going wrong, a hint of a ping-pong table, but it still is a meadow. For a contrast, in the present world the ping-pong balls "knock...loud" (are way louder than all the planes from the past, because this is poetry, because this is the impression of the subject). The poem is still aesthetic but the present world is not "pretty", just like ping-pong balls are not pretty when compared to eyes. My poem (pre-poem? ) is well integrated.

Thank U, UP, again. Best regards,

 

[dark stranger]

primo poem

really enjoyed it as written
it is your vison
as you saw it...well done