washington crossing the delaware

okay friends, family, and strangers. please prepare to be blown away: complete with wide eyes, gaping mouths, a little drool and a strange sense of squirmy giggling behind covered lips. this is the poem i promised you a couple weeks ago. the one from the class reading.

a sonnet (1936), by david shulman, based on a famous painting:

Washington Crossing the Delaware

A hard, howling, tossing water scene:
Strong tide was washing hero clean.
"How cold!" Weather stings as in anger.
O silent night shows war ace danger!

The cold waters swashing on in rage.
Redcoats warn slow his hint engage.
When general's star action wish'd "Go!"
He saw his ragged continentals row.

Ah, he stands - sailor crew went going,
And so this general watches rowing.
He hastens - Winter again grows cold;
A wet crew gain Hessian stronghold.

George can't lose war with's hands in;
He's astern - so, go alight, crew, and win!

okay now. so this is a reading on the "untranslatable" (oh it's for the translation unit of my applied linguistics course). the author of this reading is a pretty funny guy, and he is giving examples of (mostly) poems which at first seem like they are certainly untranslatable, but he perseveres and often shows that there is, infact, a way; employing a splash of genius and a truckload of creativity.

Reading this vivid poem, could anyone fail to feel the raw whipping of the winds, the violence of the waves, the threat of the oncoming Brits, the bravery of our valiant Johnnys..
Well, yes - it's a little odd, I admit. Some of the lines, like the one about the redcoats, are a bit hard to parse. And does "anger" really rhyme with "danger"? Here and there, the poem seems somewhat forced. Still such defects mught be excused when one considers that David Shulman, its author, was working under duress when he penned it sometime in 1936. Like a poor soul penned in jail, Shulman was deprived of certain luxuries. Indeed, paying a kind of complementary lipo-service to Varaldo in his Latin incarnation, Shulman deprived himself of "u", though he allowed himself all other vowels (accually, not "y" either). Well is that all there is to it?
As a matter of fact, no. In vain will one seek any of the letters, "b", "f", "j", "k", "m", "p", "q", "v", "x", "y", and "z". Now we're starting to talk contraints! Indeed what letters do appear in this poem? The answer - and I hope this knocks your socks off - is: exactly the letters in the poem's title, and no others. This is quite a lipogram, after all.
And yet, there is more. Notice that on every line there is a "w". Or rather, two of them. But why? Because there are two "w"'s in the poem's title! ... and so on down the line. In a word, in this fully metric and rhyming sonnet, every single line is a perfect anagram of the title, and still the whole thing basically makes sense. ... If you're looking for tangledness of medium with mesage, this is about as extreme an example as I think you're likely to find. It is a wonderful, inimitable word-carving inextricably ,married to the English language.

so i guess it goes without saying that that is an example of an untranslatable piece of text. haah so now that i have bored you to tears...