Salient ordering of free verse and its translation

Abstract

In the first Polish attempt to systematically describe free verse Urbafska (1995) argues that this poetic form requires ‘visual perception during mental (silent) reading’. As free verse gradually adapts to late 20th-century culture, where the visual supersedes the oral, the intonation and rhythm of a poem increasingly come to depend on its graphic segmentation. Consequently, the visual design of the poem constitutes its meaning. As cognitive linguistics admits that sensory imagery, also visual, ‘plays a substantial role in conceptual and semantic structure’ (Langacker, 1983), it seems possible to employ the cognitive parameters of focal adjustments to analyse a poem composed in free verse. If we assume that reading such a poem involves ‘scanning through a domain’ of the page and ‘along a line’ of the poem ‘until a contrast is registered’ (Langacker, 1983), then we can discuss the whole poem in terms of the figure/ground organization. The whole poem can thus be treated both as the figure in itself and as the background to each of the verses, which demands from its readers constant readjustment of the viewpoint. Therefore the awareness of the cognitive strategies of focal adjustments may help to analyse syntactic and stylistic resources of the salient ordering offered by free verse. Moreover, it may assist the translation of poems composed in free verse and the assessment of translated texts.