Hacker News Reader

Comment by zasdffaa | Hacker News Reader

Is it, or is it that you aren't a professional poet? (no offence[1]). I imagine a poet trying to program something non-trivial and wondering how the IT guys get it just flowing off their fingers. Poetry done well takes skill, time and experience which maybe you don't have yet.

The pros do something I love and it seems like magic the way it comes out, but then, they do a very different job

   Green upon the flooded Avon shone the after-storm-wet-sky
   Quick the struggling withy branches let the leaves of Autumn fly
   And a star shone over Bristol, wonderfully far and high.

   - John Betjeman

rest at http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/bristol/hi/people_and_places/art...

[1] maybe you are?

View on HN

CS degree, work in manufacturing, interested in linguistics.

You can judge my skill here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33640260

It may not be professional, but I don't think it'll be found wanting for much.

Note, though: I said translating things from an agglutinative language with very free word order into a more analytical one with restricted word order is torturous, not that you can't write good poetry in English. Merely that the translation itself is really, really hard because of the format differences.

I'm going to be really brief here and careful also as I'm in no place to critique or even comment being a monoglot non-poet, so take this as intended... English word order and general form can be messed with and twisted perhaps more than you think, even if it will never be another language. Look at the Graves poem here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pararhyme

I can't take a better shot at what you've written in your other comment because I can't get a whole picture of what it's trying to say, it seems a rush of images rather than a scene, but as one image that makes sense (gold corrupting, I think)

   I bowed to gold, bowing to gold I grasped at the netherworld

then

   I bow low to gold, and bowing, seize the underworld

Or perhaps not. Anyway that's too much from me already. I probably deserve the coming downvote.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com