What isn't prose?

You just can’t translate poetry. It’s a problem anyone who has ever tried knows quite well. But the reason is fairly interesting.

See, poetry (at least good poetry) is always a complex mixture of cadence, sound, emphasis, grammar, rhyme, nuance, hinting, and presumed cultural references. Way, way, way down on the list of things in a poem is the logical, propositional content of the words. But when you translate poetry, this is the only thing you really have left.

The way the words hung together in the original. The way they reflected off each other or their subject. The way your ear replayed their melody. And the way it all felt in combination. All this is lost in the butchering of even the most careful extraction from the original expression. It’s also why any particular poem would become a completely different one with other words even in the same language. Every poem is inextricably embedded in its particular languagidity.

This, in short, is why Christians believe in the eternal resurrection of your body.

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