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I am posting this as a benchmark, not because I think I'm playing very well yet.  The idea would be post a video every month for a ye...

Wednesday, May 17, 2017

8

One of the translators of Spanish ballads has a thumping trochaic rhythm, Hiawatha style.  It amounts to an octosyllabic line, "tyger tyger burning bright" style. It is unlike the Spanish 8 syllable line though, because

*there are fewer accents in proportion to syllables in Spanish (more polysyllables), therefore Spanish rarely sounds thumping like that.  

*Most romances are not exclusively trochaic or dactylic.  That would be very monotonous and soporific, or in the case of the dactylic pattern, heavy handed.  So there's more variety in the 8-syllable line than in English meters of comparable length.  

***

Kenneth Rexroth refers to a poem as a cancionero, not aware that this word means a collections of songs, not a single one.

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