Science poetry--or verse that is just informative about nature

poeteye

SURVIVAL OF THE WITLESS

When fire, water, earth and air were thought
to be the elementals that composed
all matter, folks did not become distraught
at what avant-garde chemists then proposed.

Most understand that the Earth is a sphere
(with only one natural satellite);
no matter where folks sail they do not fear
they’ll reach the edge and fall into the night.

Most even have embraced that time’s not fixed
and have adopted relativity.
So why should folks’ beliefs remain so mixed
about evolution’s activity?

Abundant evidence supports this view,
yet institutions argue it’s not true.

poeteye

ILLUMINATED

The physicists in their studies transcribe
formulae that define reality.
Theirs is a cloistered yet secular tribe
that daily deals with strict duality.
Foremost, their math must be made to agree,
precisely, with all that can be observed,
though, often, what we are able to see
can misinform; they must not be unnerved.
To gain acceptance, they are overseen
by peers and the harshly economic,
while pressured to find covenant between
the classical and the subatomic,
and, though they cannot see their superstring,
keep faith that it will answer everything.

marcus

I liked some of these, poeteye. Thanks for posting them!

ninar

Hi, I love poetry... all these poems are great!!! At the time I gained my interest in physics, I attended a particular lecture... and the lecturer brought up the last verses of a beautiful sonet by Francisco de Quevedo, titled "Amor Constante Más Allá De La Muerte" ("Love Constant Beyond Death"):

Alma a quien todo un dios prisión ha sido,
Venas que humor a tanto fuego han dado,
Medulas que han gloriosamente ardido:

Su cuerpo dejará, no su cuidado;
Serán ceniza, mas tendrá sentido;
Polvo serán, mas polvo enamorado.


translated:

My soul, whom a god made his prison of,
my veins, which a liquid humour fed to fire,
my marrows, which have gloriously flamed,

will leave their body, never their desire;
they will be ash but ash in feeling framed;
they will be dust but will be dust in love.

The whole piece can be resumed in the last three lines; particularly, to the last asseveration; AND even more to the last words: dust in love.

edit: i forgot to add, my point is, it made me think about the stars: star dust, the universe... the particles we are made of. They may or may not have anything intrinsically... sentient to it. But, perhaps in life, love, poetry... it is indeed, dust in love.

Later, at another lecture an anthropologist made a remark about life, science: The enigma can be solved, not the mystery.

Yeah, I love this, makes me feel good about life.

marcus

I think that is a very good rhymed verse translation. Does it happen to be your own? This is not especially important, but I think I might appreciate seeing more of the work of that translator. Good verse translation is uncommon. It must be both true and natural.

For comparison here is an alternative which I found at many many websites. It would seem to be the most common English version:

Soul by no less than a god confined,
veins that such a blazing fire have fueled,
marrow to its glorious flames consigned:

the body will abandon, not its woes;
will soon be ash, but ash that is aware;
dust will be, but dust whose love still grows.

Your last line ("dust in love") is, I think, stronger and more natural (than the other about "love still grows"). I would be more apt to say it than the other and happier to hear it spoken.

There is a trivial problem---I suspect that your translation misses a TRIPLE PARALLELISM that Quevedo expected his listener to hear.
Like "Tom, Dick, and Harry are selfish, fat, and silly [respectively]."

To illustrate by temporarily messing with your trans, :

My soul...,
my veins...,
my marrow,
+
will leave its body, never its desire;
will be ash but ash in feeling framed;
will be dust but will be dust in love.
____________________________________

My soul will leave its body, never its desire;
my veins will be ash but ash in feeling framed;
my marrow will be dust but will be dust in love.


Do you think soul, veins, marrow all collectively do the same thing and end up the same way? Or is there a parallel structure with the soul doing its thing and the veins and marrow doing something else which is appropriate to them?

Actually I'm more curious to know if you made the translation. Marrow is self-plural in English, like deer and fish. Or more exactly, blood. One has in one's body a supply of blood, one does not have bloods.

marcus

Mariana,
I'm not a spanish speaker, check me on this. I want to make an accurate literal of the Quevedo sestet.

Alma a quien todo un dios prisión ha sido,
Venas que humor a tanto fuego han dado,
Medulas que han gloriosamente ardido:

Su cuerpo dejará, no su cuidado;
Serán ceniza, mas tendrá sentido;
Polvo serán, mas polvo enamorado.

My soul, to which the whole god Amor has been a prison (my soul imprisoned in all Love itself);
My veins which gave [a refined distillate] fuel to so much fire;
My marrow which has gloriously burned:

Will leave its body, [but] not its care/concern/preoccupation [= its obsession];
Will be ash, but [the ash] will retain feeling;
Will be dust, but dust [entirely head-over-heels] in love.

I think of "humor" as a kind of clear-burning fuel like alcohol, or highly purified gasoline. People have these essences in them which determine their passions and to some extent their behavior. Quevedo I think lived around Shakespeare time, maybe 1600? I'm trying to think what "humor" meant to him. A fluid substance that helps to explain a person's character, impulses, psychology.

atyy

I liked the sound of "marrows" better, so I looked in the OED to vindicate my wrong taste!

"1659 MILTON Considerations touching Hirelings 137 To how little purpose are all those piles of sermons,..bodies and marrows of divinity, besides all other sciences, in our English tongue."

ninar

Yes! Exactly! To my taste, that's a better translation. The words used in spanish are so carefully placed: lyrically, for its syllabus, the cadence, and most important, to powerfully accentuate certain elements.

The translated first part:

Cerrar podrá mis ojos la postrera
sombra que me llevare el blanco día,
y podrá desatar esta alma mía
hora a su afán ansioso lisonjera;

mas no, de esotra parte, en la ribera,
dejará la memoria, en donde ardía:
nadar sabe mi llama la agua fría,
y perder el respeto a ley severa.

would go (as literal as possible):

Shut may my eyes be by the latter <-- many feel the urge to place a comma here
Shadow that will bring me the white day,
And thus untie this soul of mine
An hour, from its [death’s] anxious flattery;

But not, from that place, in the riverside,
Will leave the memory, in which it burnt:
To swim knows my flame the cold water,
And to lose respect to law’s severity.

As you correctly pointed, Quevedo draws a lot of symmetries:

The first quartet recognizes the faith which we will face: death.

In the second quartet he warns: the "severe law" is not death, but forgetting, that is, to leave its memory in the terrenal world and not be able to take it to that other place.

Then, he sentences(as in judge would):

Alma... su cuerpo dejará, no su cuidado

Its my personal opinion theres a good duality played for genders; it can refer to "su"(its) [the deceased's] body. And the second "its" [care] "caring towards the lover".

Part of the complexity of the poem is on the purity of the concepts...

fire: the flame/flama, to burn/arder, fire/fuego, ash/ceniza, water/agua.
death: “the latter”/postrera, shadow/sombra, white day/día blanco, ash/ceniza, dust/polvo.

Also, a recurring tool is the (i dont know if the term is correct) anastrophe, to alter the regular order of the words. Sort of how Yoda speaks.

I do believe they have their proper way of "becoming dust", the soul leaves the body, leaving it to dust; veins fed to a flame; the marrow gloriously burnt.

As to the humor, it puzzles me, I, too, see it like a clear-fuel that feeds the fire. I think both in english and spanish it refers both to "mood" or "character" that kind of semantics. Also, in ancient times it refered to the vital liquids in a human organism, so, maybe from this definition it derives.

ninar

Marrows sounds good to me too... I translated it myself, but I was trying to reproduce a very good sounding translation I read in a book written in english, when I was a kid.

Marcus, you did a very good interpretation, you study them as a profession?

marcus

Thank you! Poetry translation is a challenging and valuable calling because it helps to keep poetry alive. But I am sorry to say I do not have that as a profession.

Now you and Atyy (a very perceptive person) have almost persuaded me that marrows sounds good.

I am glad to know that you did this translation. You got some things very right. I would like to see more by you, where you actually make it a verse translation. By verse I mean sometimes involving rhyme, rhythm, and other acoustic stuff, not in a rigid way necessarily but being conscious of them. You did that with the sestet. That's what I mean by verse translation.

After a brief search on the web, I find that the prevailing translation is by a literature professor named Alix Ingber. Here is the whole sonnet:
http://sonnets.spanish.sbc.edu/Quevedo_Amor.html
Since you have your own, you may not want to look at Ingber. But just in case, here it is.

One more sample of Ingber's work:
http://sonnets.spanish.sbc.edu/BArgensola_makeup.html
A sonnet about a woman who wears a lot of makeup and whom he finds quite beautiful (because/despite the artifice).
Nicely translated 16th century light verse.

marcus

Mariana, I have one Spanish sonnet I absolutely love---both the Borges original and the Richard Wilbur English. If you could find me another Spanish sonnet as wonderful as this I might try to translate it, or we could collaborate on a translation. I'll try to recite the english from memory.

One thing does not exist, Oblivion.
God saves the metal and he saves the dross,
and his prophetic memory guards from loss
the moons to come, and those of evenings gone.

Everything is: the shadows in the glass
which in between the day's two twilights, you
have scattered by the thousands, or shall strew
henceforward in the mirror as you pass;

and everything is part of that diverse
crystalline memory, the Universe.
Whoever though its endless mazes wanders

hears door on door click shut behind his stride,
and only on the sunset's farther side
shall view at last the Archetypes and Splendors.

===============

I like it so much partly because it realizes for me the 4D block universe of General Relativity.
Existence being a crystal memory of all time and space, our particles the worldlines running through it. That sonnet never goes away, for me. I have, I am a little embarrassed to say, remembered it several times already in this or in other PF threads.

ninar

By the way, you have probably seen this already, I think this kinda counts as science poetry...

'A Glorious Dawn' Carl Sagan ft. Stephen Hawking

marcus

There is a YouTube of that, that I saw. It begins with Carl Sagan on some cliffs by the ocean.
The wind catches at his hair a little. He apologizes for not being a very good singer. He makes some little whoops and wave-rush noise. then he begins. The voices of Sagan and Hawking are heavily altered electronically, in places. Let us get the link to that YouTube. It is real poetry, I think.

ninar

Oops, I forgot to link it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSgiXGELjbc

marcus

I will try yours. I found this one but I don't like it as much as the one I remember
http://www.physorg.com/news177269555.html

Yes! I tried your link. It is the one I remembered. Thrilling.

ninar

Its amazing how well it will place the concept of existence and everness within time and space. Its incredible how some poems will stay for us forever, and we will actually recite from heart.

This poem made me remember a verse from "Poem XX" of Neruda:

"es tan corto el amor... y es tan largo el olvido."
"love is so short... forgetting is so long."

So, so true

btw you can call me mariana

marcus

Thanks. I went back and edited my posts from yesterday to get the name right.