Too much poetry
20 April 2026 04:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeLesson 20 is a rare misfire from the "Let's get to know one another" course; these shows usually have an excellent balance between the simplified vocabulary required by the learner and the level of creativity put into making the story-telling/info-dump sound natural and entertaining. Unfortunately this one involves illustrating the life-story of Pushkin with chunks of Pushkin's actual verse, which is on a comprehension/vocabulary level well above the surrounding dialogue -- the result being that a significant portion of the broadcast is effectively inaccessible :-(
The programme about Great Russian Artists worked, because you can show paintings on the screen while having an adult talking about them to an on-screen child in simplified language. But just having your actors reciting verse to a child doesn't offer the same effect... and even Pushkin is too compressed and complex for me to be able to pick up anything to speak of by ear alone. The general dialogue is fine, in terms of providing a highly-compressed biography (with a tactful veil drawn over the end of it), but the intended illustrations fail to demonstrate anything :-(
The only extended passage I was able to pick up was the verse description of St Petersburg, and I strongly suspect that was because we studied the opening of "The Bronze Horseman" at school...
*checks*
Yes, that passage is indeed drawn from the opening of "The Bronze Horseman". I thought I recognized it :-D
The programme about Great Russian Artists worked, because you can show paintings on the screen while having an adult talking about them to an on-screen child in simplified language. But just having your actors reciting verse to a child doesn't offer the same effect... and even Pushkin is too compressed and complex for me to be able to pick up anything to speak of by ear alone. The general dialogue is fine, in terms of providing a highly-compressed biography (with a tactful veil drawn over the end of it), but the intended illustrations fail to demonstrate anything :-(
The only extended passage I was able to pick up was the verse description of St Petersburg, and I strongly suspect that was because we studied the opening of "The Bronze Horseman" at school...
*checks*
Yes, that passage is indeed drawn from the opening of "The Bronze Horseman". I thought I recognized it :-D
no subject
Date: 2026-04-20 10:05 pm (UTC)I've done a certain amount of Derbeniov; I can translate them with considerable labour when I see them written down, but what I can't seem to do is to pick them up when I hear them out loud. If it's something like a song with a repeated chorus, obviously you get more chances -- and you're more likely to be listening to it more than once. But even so, when I hear a song I like, the first thing I do is rush off to see if I can find a transcript of the lyrics to it somewhere so that I can understand it properly...
But my experience with Russians and poetry is that my comprehension just drops abruptly out of the window as soon as they launch into a poem in the middle of an interview; there is just so much less padding on poetry, as it were, than in ordinary speech, where people waffle around while they are trying to think of what to say next. (And the other thing, of course, is that where verse is concerned, on the whole you can't get by via the means of identifying significant words and guessing the rest from context!) I can listen to Mayakovsky or Severyanin spoken by a favourite actor, admire the cadences rolling out, but have absolutely not a clue as to what is going on :-(
Pushkin and Byron, XIX century or not, were actually writing consciously simple and conversational verse in rebellion against the highly stylised poetry of their predecessors, and Byron has weathered the centuries better than, say, Wordsworth or Coleridge, his contemporary Romantic poets. Compare For the sword outwears its sheath,/And the soul wears out the breast,/And the heart must pause to breathe/And love itself have rest to And in the frosty season, when the sun/Was set, and visible for many a mile/The cottage windows through the twilight blaz'd,/I heeded not the summons or And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething/As if this Earth is fast thick pants were breathing,/A mighty fountain momently was forced:/Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst/Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail/Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail... (And then I try to imagine a foreigner with a limited vocabulary trying to parse any of those :-O)
I *like* Pushkin; I went through a massive Pushkin-fandom when I was at university (and one of the reasons for that was that he *was* accessible, as poets go). But unfortunately the state of my Russian is insufficient now for me to understand him without a written text, and preferably an English crib...
no subject
Date: 2026-04-21 12:30 am (UTC)Regarding Maykovsky or Severyanin it’s sometime difficult for russian speaking to understand it. How about Esenin or Pasternak?
Did you try Mandelshtam, Tsvetaeva or Akhmatova? How about Brodsky?