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: 2026-04-21 10:52 pm (UTC)The one and only example of Pasternak I encountered (last August) was completely beyond me, and when I managed to trace the poem I could see why: https://ruverses.com/boris-pasternak/august/12374/
Akhmatova was just a single couplet tossed into the conversation, but that too brought my comprehension to a halt: https://www.lieder.net/lieder/get_text.html?TextId=43523
The Pushkin in the beginners' course I could probably puzzle out if I had the text in front of me (I haven't tried to trace the individual poems, save for the one I recognised), because I could make out short phrases within the lines...
Edit: yes, here's one (successfully identified just from my memory of the meaning of the first lines!) https://ruverses.com/alexander-pushkin/to/12415/
But it's still multiple levels of difficulty above the 'learners' text' in the rest of the programme, and far more than I can understand from simply hearing it without careful study -- though not as convoluted as the English version given here, which has been twisted around in order to make it rhyme :-p