{"id":84978,"date":"2015-04-21T13:14:49","date_gmt":"2015-04-21T17:14:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=84978"},"modified":"2015-04-21T15:51:55","modified_gmt":"2015-04-21T19:51:55","slug":"write-tight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/04\/21\/write-tight\/","title":{"rendered":"Write Tight"},"content":{"rendered":"

What is poetry? Etymology provides more questions than answers.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"contestofthepoets\"<\/a>

Contest of the Poets<\/i>, a float design by Jennie Wilde for the 1910 \u201cComus\u201d Mardi Gras<\/p><\/div>\n

T. S. Eliot, who once famously called National Poetry Month the cruelest, was also one of many to point out the hopeless semantic tangles that ensue because \u201cpoetry\u201d has two opposites. Poetry can be the lined stuff, often with rhymes, as opposed to sentences and paragraphs; poetry can also be the good stuff, as opposed to the plodding or simply informational. But if good prose can be poetic, a novel can be \u201cpure poetry,\u201d and poems can be prosaic, then it\u2019s not clear what anyone is talking about, really. Or rather, it\u2019s clear except to theorists trying to come up with definitions. Poetry is what\u2019s thrilling, while a poem is that poor thing with eleven readers, eight of them members of the poet\u2019s extended family.<\/p>\n

Etymology doesn\u2019t help\u2014it only highlights that the apples and oranges here are how the thing is made and how it moves. Poetry<\/em> is from the Greek poiein<\/em>, \u201cto make\u201d: a poem is something made, or in English we would more naturally say crafted<\/em>. Yet everyone agrees good prose is well crafted, too. Prose<\/em> means, literally, \u201cstraightforward,\u201d from the Latin prosa<\/em>, proversus<\/em>, \u201cturned to face forward\u201d (whereas verse<\/em> is all wound up, twisty and snaky, \u201cturned\u201d in every direction except, apparently, forward). Yet we all know that poems can be clear and direct, too, especially when they\u2019re songs. <\/p>\n

Sidelining sonnets and quarantining quatrains in the poetry ghetto does produce a certain clarity. But of course it also creates problems when translating from languages that gerrymander poetry differently. In German, for example, writer<\/em> is a word even more literal than the English \u201csomeone who writes\u201d: it\u2019s Schriftsteller, <\/em>a put-down-on-paper-er (Schrift <\/em>= \u201cwriting,\u201d\u00a0stellen <\/em>= \u201cto place, to put\u201d). Autor <\/em>is a word used a bit less often for pretty much the same thing, unlike in English, where there\u2019s a difference: author<\/em> expresses a professional and financial identity (there are no \u201cunpublished authors,\u201d unless maybe the manuscript is finished and the contract is signed), while a writer is someone pursuing an activity (published or not, paid or not, read or not).<\/p>\n

And then there\u2019s a Dichter<\/em>, usually translated \u201cpoet\u201d but meaning a creator of poetry in the grand sense. The verb dichten <\/em>means \u201cto write poetry, \u201d and a poem is a dichten-<\/em>ed thing, a Gedicht<\/em>, but dichten <\/em>means more generally to write poetically and well. The good stuff. The writer as hero of the spirit. How do you say that in English? We don\u2019t have heroes of the spirit.<\/p>\n

At least not according to Grimm\u2019s German Dictionary<\/em>\u2014the equivalent of the Oxford English Dictionary, <\/em>and started by those same Brothers Grimm who brought us \u201cLittle Red Riding Hood.\u201d It gloats that dichten <\/em>means \u201cto create poetically, filled with a higher intelligence,\u201d and that \u201cthe word does not exist in French and English: they work around it with s\u2019adonner \u00e0 la po\u00e9sie<\/em>, faire des vers<\/em>; to compose a poem<\/em>, to make verses, to versify<\/em>.\u201d The OED <\/em>can fire back all it wants\u2014pleading that dight <\/em>had \u201can extraordinary sense-development\u201d in Middle English from its original \u201csenses of literary dictation and composition,\u201d to become \u201cone of the most widely used words in the language\u201d\u2014but its efforts are in vain. From that whole extraordinary range of meanings we use exactly none anymore.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo understand the word,\u201d Grimm\u2019s poetically goes on, \u201cwe must go back to an earlier time \u2026\u201d Dichten <\/em>originally meant to write something down so it could be read or sung, something that had already been worked out in the mind (from the Latin dictare, <\/em>\u201cto say, to dictate\u201d). It swerved into meaning the mental working-out, too, the originating creative act. A sixteenth-century saying already plays on the same double meaning that causes ambiguity in English: \u201cA good enough rhyme-smith, but hardly a poet\u201d (Reimschmiede genug, aber wenig Dichter<\/em>). But from there, the word left the confines of verse. In German, you can still call someone a poet in the grand sense without consigning him to the poetry ghetto.<\/p>\n

So what is a Dichter <\/em>in prose? I have caved on occasion and translated Dichter <\/em>as \u201cpoet,\u201d in cases where the character in question may or may not be a poet (e.g., Robert Walser\u2019s story \u201cLetter from a Poet to a Gentleman\u201d), or happens to be a poet even if that\u2019s not really the point. Goethe was a poet, so the title of his autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit<\/em>, can be translated as it usually is, Poetry and Truth<\/em>, even though the book is not particularly about verse as opposed to other forms. His topic is actually Imagination and Truth<\/em>, but imagination set down on paper. To put it anachronistically: Creative Writing and the Truth.<\/em><\/p>\n

Sometimes, though, \u201cpoet\u201d risks being downright misleading. A twentieth-century German writer named Uwe Johnson, known as the Dichter der beiden Deutschlands <\/em>(the Dichter <\/em>of both East and West Germany), wrote only prose. Call him the \u201cpoet of both Germanies\u201d and people will think he\u2019s a poet. He is more like \u201cthe voice of divided Germany,\u201d or even \u201cthe bard,\u201d despite being neither a songwriter nor Shakespeare. In English, we can get the grandeur (voice) or the job (writer, author, novelist), but not both.<\/p>\n

There are cognates of dichten<\/em>, from the same Latin dictare<\/em>, but they never took on the same soaring spirit in English, at least since the demise of dight<\/em>. Very much on the contrary. Our closest cognate, indite<\/em>, \u201cto put into words, write, compose, give literary form to,\u201d was more or less completely swamped by what was once the same word, indict<\/em>, \u201cto write up charges, bring legal action against.\u201d (Probably under interference from indicare<\/em>, \u201cto indicate, give evidence against\u201d; and indicere<\/em>, \u201cto declare publicly,\u201d compare Italian indicere<\/em>, \u201cto denounce.\u201d) To translate Dichter <\/em>as \u201cinditer\u201d won\u2019t do. Even our least sarcastic Dichter<\/em> is sarcastic about that: \u201cPerhaps my best moments I never jot down; when they come I cannot afford to break the charm by inditing memoranda\u201d\u2014Walt Whitman.<\/p>\n

Coincidentally, dicht<\/em> in German also means \u201ctight,\u201d as in watertight or airtight (from Old Norse \u00fe\u00e9ttr<\/em>, apparently completely unrelated etymologically to dictare<\/em>), and the verb dichten<\/em> is also \u201cto seal, caulk, make impermeable,\u201d as well as \u201cto make more dense or compact.\u201d Ezra Pound played on the pun in his second most well-known slogan for what poetry does (after \u201cMake it new\u201d): dichten = condensare. <\/em>An imagist manifesto in twenty characters: to write poetry is to condense and supercharge language. (Pound attributed the equation to the poet Basil Bunting \u201cfumbling about with a German\u2013Italian dictionary\u201d; actually, Bunting knew what he was doing, and wasn\u2019t exactly fumbling. Pound = condescendere<\/em>.)<\/p>\n

This may not be a less ambiguous definition of poetry, but it is a good challenge for the Dichter<\/em>s in our midst, in poetry or prose. Don\u2019t just make it new: make it tight.<\/p>\n

Damion Searls<\/a>, the <\/em>Daily\u2019s language columnist<\/a>, is a translator from German, French, Norwegian, and Dutch.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What is poetry? Etymology provides more questions than answers. T. S. Eliot, who once famously called National Poetry Month the cruelest, was also one of many to point out the hopeless semantic tangles that ensue because \u201cpoetry\u201d has two opposites. Poetry can be the lined stuff, often with rhymes, as opposed to sentences and paragraphs; […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":754,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[807],"tags":[15309,17840,10882,1273,892,16982,17841,16937,7221,165,17842,1772,530,17843,264,2393],"class_list":["post-84978","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-translation","tag-definitions","tag-dichten","tag-etymology","tag-german","tag-goethe","tag-greek","tag-grimms-german-dictionary","tag-latin","tag-poems","tag-poetry","tag-prose","tag-t-s-eliot","tag-translation","tag-versification","tag-walt-whitman","tag-words"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nHow Do You Define \u201cPoetry\u201d?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"For National Poetry Month, Damion Searls looks at the etymology of the word and its uses in German, which raise more questions than answers.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/04\/21\/write-tight\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Write Tight by Damion Searls\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"April 21, 2015 \u2013 What is poetry? 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