Poetry Question

[zombie-laika.livejournal.com]

After reading some Russian poetry in class, I told my teacher that writing rhyming poetry must be easy in the Russian language because of the declined words having similar suffixes. He told me that writing a poem that rhymes using declensions was considered bad taste. Is this true? Is there a term for it?

Comments

[wolfie-18.livejournal.com]

Yeah, in English it's called "wussing out." :)))

Now for the seriousness, I'd also like to add a question. Would it also be considered in bad taste to rhyme with verb infinitives? Because seeing as how most of them end in -ать or -ить, it must also be pretty easy to rhyme those as well.

[avysk]

As far as I know verb rhymes (not only infinitives but also, e.g., past tense) are not acceptable. And they sound... well... not inspiring to say the least -)

[yers.livejournal.com]

It's particularly bad taste to rhyme in verb infinitives, or any other coinciding verb forms for that matter.

The only "good" verbal rhyme is one in which the entire verb sounds similar to the one it's rhymed with, eg. "подожду — подожгу", "перестать — пролистать" etc.

[malaya-zemlya.livejournal.com]

This is like rhyming information and desolation in English : )

[apollotiger.livejournal.com]

English doesn't really have an equivalent of this, since we don't have verbs that are that regular or nouns that decline. Basically, though, it would be the equivalent of rhyming a pronounced "ed" on the end of every line, like:

I spoke to him and he considerèd
And then he intonèd ...

etc., etc.

Some have done that in Latin (the song Dies Irae does it, to an extent, but actually manages to do fairly well on keeping off that), and that just sounds AWFUL. Rhyming "abamus" with "abamus" with "abamus" just sounds stupid.

[oryx_and_crake]

Actually, in poetry "it's thought that counts", i.e. you can have a poem with very simple rhymes, including verb rhymes, but if this poem is filled with well-expressed emotions, and speaks to the heart of the reader, no one would care about a couple of verb rhymes.

See, for example, this one; I'd say it's good, even though the author rhymes "будут-забудут".
http://www.litera.ru/stixiya/authors/berggolc/otchayaniya-malo-skorbi.html

On the other hand, if the poet has nothing to say, the fact that he says it badly does not help at all.

[yers.livejournal.com]

HOWEVER, none of this applies to 19th century poetry, when people just tended to use "grammatical rhymes" heavily, and some nonetheless managed to write great poems. Pushkin, for example, rhymed suffixes/verb endings a lot, and didn't care; however, Pushkin was extraordinarily sound-conscious with regard to a line of verse as a whole, so that rhymes aren't the single most important phonetic component of his poetry.

But, Russian poetry as we know it largely didn't exist before the 19th century, and the reason that "grammatical rhymes" are now deprecated is probably not so much because they're inherently flawed, but because so much easy doggerel has been written since the 19th century that such rhymes became its annoying hallmark. Nowadays, they're to be found in trashy pop song lyrics. Russian has so many rhyming possibilities that you'll never need "grammatical rhymes", unless you want to use one for effect and know what you're doing.

[wolk-off.livejournal.com]

Note that the early Russian non-Church poetry, from Trediakovsky through Sumarokov, did use grammatical rhymes, though (or, more likely, because?) the whole "syllabotonic" system of the 19th century classic Russian poetry wasn't evolved yet.

Василий Тредиаковский, "Элегия":

Не возможно сердцу, ах! не иметь печали;
Очи такожде еще плакать не престали:
Друга милого весьма не могу забыти,
Без которого теперь надлежит мне жити.
Вижу, ах! что надлежит, чрез судьбу жестоку,
Язву сердца внутрь всего толь питать глубоку:
С Илидарою навек я уж разлучился
И в последние тогда весь в слезах простился... etc.

Sorry I don't give a translation to it - it is written in archaic 18th century Russian, so I even have troubles comprehending it :)))

[kehlen-crow.livejournal.com]

More so as it would be better to translate it using old-sounding English ;)

[wolk-off.livejournal.com]

Well, all I could do was to possibly add "Ye Aulde" in front of each noun, and to use a lot of words like "mailshirt," "seven men walk abreast," "to my reckoning" and "thou shalst not pass," but it would be J.R.R.Tolkien, not Trediakovsky :)))))

[ashalynd.livejournal.com]

I'd say that it depends. End rhyme is not the one and only important thing for making a good verse. There is also alliteration and rhythm. Since approx. the end of 18 century, most of Russian verses are syllabotonic, ie they have a meter along with rhymes (di-syllables being most popular).

Of course the rhyme that does not use two words of the same declension would be considered more "interesting". There are also "new style" rhymes based on the way the words are pronounced rather than the way they are written, and more heavily using alliteration - e.g.: лбов - любовь; Mayakovsky was the one who started using them a lot. But nobody says that it is completely forbidden to use the "simple" rhymes at all. Even Pushkin used "себя - тебя" and stuff like that when it seemed to be appropriate :)

[mangiami.livejournal.com]

Does Russian poetry in general tend to be more based on meter than rhyme? Based on what little experience I have with Latin poetry, I can say that Latin, a heavily inflected language, has more meter based poetry, so I thought that perhaps Russian, also being inflected, would be more based on meter since rhyming seems so much easier (than in a relatively non-inflected language, like English).

[wolk-off.livejournal.com]

Russian poetry currently (well, during the last 50 years) has two major trends - the conventional, rhyme-and-meter based poetry, and the modern poetry, based on all sorts of verse libre, free-style, etc. The second line has been ignited in 1910 by early Russian avant-garde poets - futurists etc. - like Mayakovsky, who could be completely free in his verse, or to be based on a strong (though flexible) metered rhythm only, or to use VERY advanced (still regarded as advanced, after 80-90 years) rhyming techniques as well.