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Polylingual Poetry

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Juxtys

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'Polylingual poetry' is something I thought of yesterday evening and that's what came out:

"I have my future to be had

I had a lifetime in my past.

Turiu aš savo svajones,

Savo jauntystės dieneles.

There is a nature to be tamed

No regrets, no misery to be damned.

Turiu gyvenimą tik sau vienam,

Negaliu paskirti jo kažkam kitam.

My own happiness is my direction,

To me, Faith and Reason have no connection.

Suprast pasaulį siekiu visada,

Nuo savęs paslėpti tiesą nevalia."

As you can see, it is a poem written in two languages: English and Lithuanian. Pretty much a new idea, isn't it?

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Its new to me, but frustratingly I can't read Lithuanian, so it's like trying to read a book with every other page ripped out. :huh:

Too bad I'm the only Lithuanian speaker out here. :(

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'Polylingual poetry' is something I thought of yesterday evening and that's what came out:

"I have my future to be had

I had a lifetime in my past.

Turiu aš savo svajones,

Savo jauntystės dieneles.

There is a nature to be tamed

No regrets, no misery to be damned.

Turiu gyvenimą tik sau vienam,

Negaliu paskirti jo kažkam kitam.

My own happiness is my direction,

To me, Faith and Reason have no connection.

Suprast pasaulį siekiu visada,

Nuo savęs paslėpti tiesą nevalia."

When I look at the poem, I sense that the couplets are just being translated into a different language and not that it is an actual stanza composed of a couplet in english and one in Lithuanian.

As you can see, it is a poem written in two languages: English and Lithuanian. Pretty much a new idea, isn't it?

Anne Tardos. I think there are more, but this is quite different from yours though, for example this one or this one. But Caution! they may hurt ones eyes to read, and don't bother trying to understand it, or you'll "go crosseyed" :) Perhaps it has more to do with sounds or something rather than meaning, like some poets may do in poems. Vachel Lindsay's Congo poem comes to mind with using sounds, though I have only read a very tiny bit of it. I only came upon him through reading about my dear poetess, Sara Teasdale. Recently I read two of his works, just to see what kind of poet/man could woo her or her to fall in love with 9befor she married Filsinger)- and I think to myself - can't be those poems I read... She's the better poet of the two, undeniably.

Edited by intellectualammo
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  • 2 months later...

I believe polylingual poetry has been done before, technically. Look at Hemingway's "A Clean, Well Lighted Place" (which was an utterly demeaning poem, in Objectivist terms, but we won't go into that here), there was a small bit of Spanish included, however, I don't believe there has ever been a style of poetry intentionally called 'polylingual' and designed as such.

You should continue with this, it sounds like a very creative endeavor. You can say the same things in many different languages, and each phrase will have a totally different connotation, as certain words (in all different kinds of languages) are better suited to the particular concept or abstraction that the poet is attempting to convey. The German word "langweilig" (lang-vei-lig) is essentially the same as the English word "boring", but their pronounced sound carries a different connotation, with the former being more spread across the tongue, and thusly a little more mellow than the latter, which is blunt and obvious in comparison.

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