{"id":4025,"date":"2018-04-09T09:00:38","date_gmt":"2018-04-09T01:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?p=4025"},"modified":"2018-04-09T08:14:47","modified_gmt":"2018-04-09T00:14:47","slug":"madrid-on-chinese-rhyme-spoilage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?p=4025","title":{"rendered":"Madrid on Chinese “Rhyme Spoilage”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Anthony Madrid (writing for the Paris Review<\/a>) doesn’t like half-rhymes, slant-rhymes, or eye-rhymes:<\/p>\n

Everybody who cares anything for old poetry in English knows how it feels\u2014knows how awful<\/i> it feels\u2014when a poem is rhyming away and then suddenly the rhyme goes off the rails for a second because English pronunciation has changed since the time the poem was written.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But,<\/p>\n

What does all this have to do with Chinese? Well, if you don\u2019t already know, you could easily guess that the Chinese language\u2014with all its dialects, creoles, sister languages, and God knows what all\u2014has changed a great deal in the last, oh, three thousand years.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He then launches into a discussion on what he calls “rhyme spoilage.” But what he finds interesting is that<\/p>\n

I can also see how different from modern Mandarin the various words were in 1000 B.C.E.<\/small>\u00a0 … Yet\u2014and this is the crazy part\u2014they still rhyme in their new forms. This can only be because all the vowels and the consonants shifted together and consistently, like with the Great Vowel Shift in the Indo-European languages. Or that other thing where all the p<\/em>\u2019s in Latin show up as f<\/em>\u2019s in English (pater<\/i>\/father<\/i>, et cetera).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Nevertheless,<\/p>\n

Would it be right to say that a lot of old Chinese poetry has pretty much gone from being perfectly rhymed Robert Frost poems to being weirdly rhymed Emily Dickinson poems?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He wants your answers:<\/p>\n

Right now there are people reading these very words who know\u2014who truly know\u2014the answers to these questions. So I\u2019m going to go ahead and announce a very exciting conference that is to be held in my gmail inbox. We are looking for papers that would speak to the two questions, above.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Click the image above to read his full post with Madrid’s email to write him with your own expertise and opinions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Anthony Madrid (writing for the Paris Review) doesn’t like half-rhymes, slant-rhymes, or eye-rhymes: Everybody who cares anything for old poetry in English knows how it feels\u2014knows how awful it feels\u2014when a poem is rhyming away and then suddenly the rhyme … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[3],"tags":[1975,1976,927],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8srwF-12V","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":3049,"url":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?p=3049","url_meta":{"origin":4025,"position":0},"title":"Morse on Bradbury’s Hsia Y\u00fc","author":"Lucas Klein","date":"March 2, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"At Paper Republic Canaan Morse reviews Salsa by Hsia Y\u00fc \u590f\u5b87 as translated by Steve Bradbury: In order to recreate these transformative linguistic effects, Bradbury uses assonances, parallel structures, and rhymes with English words that may not appear in the original. 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Here\u2019s how it begins: This ambitious study focuses on details of music and prosody in late imperial China qu \u66f2 performance, with a focus on famed playwrights\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Dissertation Reviews"","block_context":{"text":"Dissertation Reviews","link":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?cat=623"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3837,"url":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?p=3837","url_meta":{"origin":4025,"position":3},"title":"Chinese Poetry on the Lucien Stryk Shortlist","author":"Lucas Klein","date":"August 16, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"ALTA (the American Literary Translators Association) has announced the shortlist for the 2017 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize, recognizing the importance of Asian translation for international literature and promoting the translation of Asian works into English. 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