485 - What is your inventory

 

The original poem was born in French, in the poetic bubble of January 19 (2024) at LucieBulle's, the promot was : what is your inventory?

We voted in poll with two other possibilities:

where is and what is your garden?

What do you know about your era?

In the half hour allotted, I lacked inspiration for two minutes, before composing the entire poem, almost in one go, managing to rhyme it, partly directly, and the rest using two rhyming sites for specific ideas.

I first share my English adaptation and then shall comment my changes and rhyming differences between it and the original French text. 

What is your inventory?

A library stands within me,

its contents are just as revealing

as book genres placed on shelves.

Lucien is a multifaceted individual.

Sometimes facets are merged and joint,

other times they stand out like day and night themselves.

Possibilities create choices to each moment's,

activities, before committing

in a wide lane, or a particular pavement.

If I have to leave my house, I often dread,

because anxiety lives in this apartment, and challenges me.

In these cases, under the umbrella I must find shelter;

Not against the real rain which falls, unburdening

a well-placed cloud, but that of fears irrational,

of catastrophic scenarios running through my head,

like film Premieres in private screening.

Once tamed, these ideas give way to powder.

Liberated at last, I become fit, capable, functional,

and walk towards my quest's destination.

From a flat line, my emotions can easily keel over,

and sink into the deepest waters, carried away by a whirlpool.

With a little, or a lot of help, they are fished out, exposed to the scarlet light.

Calmed down, or beginning to palpitate, inspiration can rise to boiling point

I have to quickly write down ideas, or transcribe narrow mental illustrations

before they fade away and disappear forever.

And thus rise from the surface, towards height.

Comparison between my English adaptation Vs Original French, via the rhyming color-coding 

I start with images demonstrating the differences in associated rhymes and rhythms. And then I would split and comment on the changes for this adaptation.

You can already see with these colors that the rhymes are shifted.

So, if we initial composition I have "en moi" ("within me") which with "choix" (choices), this was not possible in English. The "me" of 'moi' only rhymes with another "me" further down, the line of "challenges me" and as a result, from the first rhyme, we have gaps which grew throughout my adaptation.

Where in French I rhymed imagées with s'engager (imaged and committed) the English got 4 rhymes : revealing, committing, unburdening, screening.

And so on.

I now present to you a comparison of the first 6 stanzas in full

To preserve the meaning of pictorial content but also have a rhyme, I chose the term 'revealing', which a bit different from "imagé", pictorial, or pictured - in the sense of the initial poem, of pictorial = metaphorical, or even symbolic. . The directly equivalent terms in English would have forced me to rewrite the initial text, something I wanted to avoid, because of its composition in a poetic bubble. This choice also involves the new sentence its contents are just as revealing as book genres placed on shelves. Indeed, shelves is very difficult to rhyme with any particular road equivalence, I decided to shift the rhyme, upwards: other times they stand out like day and night themselves. Equivalent to the line d'autres fois, elles se démarquent tel le jour et la nuit & which had rhymed with parapluie. 

My feeling being that I didn't need to rewrite my original lines to better correspond.

My last example is a gap between

Les possibilités dressent des choix 

aux activités du moment, avant de s'engager

dans une voie large, ou une route particulière.

Where the original composition rhymes choix, s'engager, particlière, 

With the resulting english

Possibilities create choices to each moment's,

activities, before committing

in a wide lane, or a particular pavement.

But that became a deliberate choice in my own adaptation - I knew my overall meanings, and chose which I could bend a bit.