*distressed* kovacs has assigned the first 10 lines of the daphne-apollo episode to be translated....into verse. he didn't say it had to be in a meter appropriate to the epic form so it doesn't have to be heroic couplets or anything, though somekind of metrical scheme is definitely expected, and free verse would be quite unacceptable. *pause* how? i can't you know. write verse. never been able to do it, probably never will, and wouldn't like to try. oh i know people who can do it. yisheng can, of course, but what kind of verse *can't* he write? choonping of course did moliere into pentameter and homer into hexameter (i was appalled until he said it wasn't dactylic but iambic. can you imagine writing in dactylic hexameter in english? not unless for very young children anyway.). and su-lin is such a good mimic she can do any kind of verse (except that i can't see her writing sonnets or sestinas or anything very contained. none of them would have any problem with the assignment, but i can't. not a poetic bone in my body. *nod* why o why do professors like to do these things though? john o'brien made us do that back in enec 313, and it was another disaster. the only way i can think of of doing it in a regular meter would be to do it in chinese. much easier that way, and afterall he didn't say explicitly that we were to translate it into english, just to translate. not that the final result would be any better, but it would be easier. i always think people who can write poetry have got it good cos they probably can do reasonably good prose too, whereas i can only do prose and only have any sense of rhythm doing that. and then of course everyone thinks they can write prose. i once suggested to yisheng that writing in iambic pentameter doesn't come naturally to us anymore, that poetic meter is probably tied to culture, and shakespeare probably couldn't write decent haikus if he knew what they were. and he explained to me, to my mortal embarrassment, that he naturally thought in iambic pentamenter. ah well.

and i have tickets to go home!