NYT Opinionator on the Heresy of Paraphrase
The New York Times' Opinionator responds to the age-old question "So what is your poem about?" Or, further, how can we interpret poetry in "understandable" terms? Writer Ernie Lepore turns first to Eliot:
The main idea — that efforts at paraphrasing poetry into prose fail in ways that parallel attempts for prose do not — was not new. It has been generally agreed upon since Aristotle. This skeptical thesis was championed in the first half of the 20th century by the New Critics as well as by their guiding spirit, T.S. Eliot, who, when asked to interpret the line “Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper tree in the cool of the day…” from his poem “Ash Wednesday,” responded, “It means ‘Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper tree in the cool of the day.’ ”
Eliot’s implication was that repetition is the best we can hope to achieve in interpreting poetry. Translators of Rimbaud likewise lament that because French is soft, melodious and fluid in cadence, English and other non-Romance languages are unsuitable for translation. The poet E.E. Cummings went further, claiming that even the visual impact of the typography of his poems renders them unparaphraseable.
After discussing the heresy of paraphrase and the simple refutations thereof, Lepore then considers how poems might be "about" their own articulations (thus resisting direct translation):
For instance, typing the word “brick” in italics (as in “brick”) obviously draws attention to a particular presentation of the word, not to the word itself. But it is one of many. The word might have been spoken, rendered in Braille or even signed. Surprisingly, in this instance, a moment’s reflection ought to convince you that no other articulation could have been used to make this point in this way. In short, that “brick” is italicized cannot be said out loud or signed or rendered in Braille. In effect, the practice of italicization allows the presentation of a language to become a part of the language itself.
Lepore examines the shape of things, the sounds of things:
Pause and examine these letters as you read them — their shapes are not unappealing. The poet concurs. But, unlike ordinary folk, the poet wants to draw the audience’s attention to these articulations as much as to the ideas the words so articulated express. The poet achieves this end through the devices, for example, of rhyme, alliteration and sundry others. . . .
As W.M. Urban noted, the poet does not first intuit her object and then find an appropriate medium in which to articulate it. It is rather in and through a chosen medium that the poet intuits the object in the first place. The philosopher Suzanne Langer once wrote, “though the material of poetry is verbal, its import is not the literal assertion made in the words but the way the assertion is made and this involves the sound, the tempo … and the unifying all-embracing artifice of rhythm.”
Given this, what might poetic effects achieve? Poe’s “The Raven” is an over-the-top case, but a clear one. The poem is partly about sound and its effects on thought, and words and meter are chosen to evoke the sounds themselves, as well as the words: “the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain..” The repeated rhyme is also important, by the time the raven first says “nevermore,” the pattern is established, so that the raven’s pronouncement arrives with a sense of finality and inevitability which echoes or mirrors or just helps the reader appreciate the way thoughts of death and loss have taken over the narrator’s mind — the bleak obsession that is the theme of the poem.
Though we might have to take a poll regarding Lepore's last couple of sentences, it's an interesting read. Find the full piece here.