{"id":6489,"date":"2021-12-02T19:27:09","date_gmt":"2021-12-03T01:27:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.daveomeara.com\/home\/?p=6489"},"modified":"2022-03-20T17:23:36","modified_gmt":"2022-03-20T22:23:36","slug":"notes-on-primero-sueno-first-dream-lines-1-24","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.daveomeara.com\/home\/6489\/","title":{"rendered":"Notes on Primero Sue\u00f1o (First Dream)<\/em> lines 1-24"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This translation<\/a> began as a crib to help me memorize these lines<\/a>, which I find to be part of one of the most remarkable poems ever written.\u00a0 As I began to live with these lines, slowly adding one per day to my rituals of memory, as the words became more and more a part of the rhythmic structure of my world (this is what always happens when I memorize a poem that turns out to be worth the effort), I found myself revising he crib sheet trying to make it capture at least a little bit of the strange beauty of the original. I sometimes wanted to clarify the often difficult syntax (now just what is the subject of this verb?<\/em>) without losing the wild shifts of imagery, the impressionistic dream-logic wed to baroque cosmology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

My first choice arrived with the first word of the poem: pyramidal<\/em>. The word is spelled exactly the same in Spanish and English, but the pronunciations are hugely different: in Spanish, with the strong stress on the final syllable, pyramiDAL <\/em>is rich, sonorous and authoritative; in English, the word ends with a swallowing sound, as if the speaker has suddenly thought better of even trying to turn the word pyramid <\/em>into an adjective. Instead, I chose pyramid-shaped<\/em>, which at least demands a little bit of attention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I did not attempt to capture the wonderfully irregular rhyme scheme of the original, nor the 11 syllable and 7 syllable lines, and instead arrived at something like a vision of William Blake with echoes of Milton’s Lycidas and the late poems of Donne.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This translation began as a crib to help me memorize these lines, which I find to be part of one of the most remarkable poems ever written.\u00a0 As I began to live with these lines, slowly adding one per day to my rituals of memory, as the words became more and more a part of […] →Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","episode_type":"audio","audio_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[36],"tags":[],"series":[],"class_list":["post-6489","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crystal-cabinets"],"episode_featured_image":false,"episode_player_image":"https:\/\/www.daveomeara.com\/home\/wp-content\/plugins\/seriously-simple-podcasting\/assets\/images\/no-album-art.png","download_link":"","player_link":"","audio_player":false,"episode_data":{"playerMode":"dark","subscribeUrls":[],"rssFeedUrl":"https:\/\/www.daveomeara.com\/home\/feed\/podcast\/david-brendan-omeara","embedCode":"

Notes on Primero Sue\u00f1o (First Dream)<\/em> lines 1-24<\/a><\/blockquote>