Actuality

[Nachtfrost]

Only walls are around and winter's outside.
Only, there's no way out, for many long years
You chase the mirage of true freedom and hide
From horrible nightmare in daydream frontiers.

Every wave that is crashing against the shore
Of the heart in the chest, stiffen and petrified,
Makes it just ever harder to have any hope or
To heartly believe in good turn of the tides.

To believe that some time or the other will crumble
This realm tightly chained in perpetual pain.
When the time doesn't heal you, but aimlessly stumble
Simply settling on windows of new flats again;

When the genuine stars are burning above you,
But their flicker disdains craving look of your eyes;
When you long lost the road back home from your tired view,
But, alas, only now managed to realise

That you're no longer able to pull back together
Yourself, 'cause there's nothing to pull any more,
Losing your mind to the hungering nether
You write down unsettling lexical gore —

This is all Actuality, piercing your daydreams,
Fills your fantasy world with its nightmarish show.
This bitter poison trapped in the blood stream
Will too never save you from this dreadful foe.

And you shall be breathing with smell of the summer
And alike with raw blanket of damp autumn earth.
It shall feed you the night dressed in very same glamour,
As the ships that were burning in skies for you both.

You shall gobble this wind interwoven with trickles
Of smoke from as if namely those cigarettes,
And web of the cold will again catch the ripple
Of the same winter morning's white light in its nets.

Every little detail rings with most bitter longing
And digs into the chest with a venomous sting.
Soul won't ever know peace, it is still firmly holding
This dire remembrance that no single thing

Could be ever brought back, not a day, not an instant,
Only mere spectral wraiths of ethereal dreams —
Its equivalent here just can not exist, and
As this life has died, so have you by all means.

[milo]

Only walls are around and winter's outside.
Only, there's no way out, for many long years
You chase the mirage of true freedom and hide
From horrible nightmare in daydream frontiers.

Every wave that is crashing against the shore
Of the heart in the chest, stiffen and petrified,
Makes it just ever harder to have any hope or
To heartly believe in good turn of the tides.

To believe that some time or the other will crumble
This realm tightly chained in perpetual pain.
When the time doesn't heal you, but aimlessly stumble
Simply settling on windows of new flats again;

When the genuine stars are burning above you,
But their flicker disdains craving look of your eyes;
When you long lost the road back home from your tired view,
But, alas, only now managed to realise

That you're no longer able to pull back together
Yourself, 'cause there's nothing to pull any more,
Losing your mind to the hungering nether
You write down unsettling lexical gore —

This is all Actuality, piercing your daydreams,
Fills your fantasy world with its nightmarish show.
This bitter poison trapped in the blood stream
Will too never save you from this dreadful foe.

And you shall be breathing with smell of the summer
And alike with raw blanket of damp autumn earth.
It shall feed you the night dressed in very same glamour,
As the ships that were burning in skies for you both.

You shall gobble this wind interwoven with trickles
Of smoke from as if namely those cigarettes,
And web of the cold will again catch the ripple
Of the same winter morning's white light in its nets.

Every little detail rings with most bitter longing
And digs into the chest with a venomous sting.
Soul won't ever know peace, it is still firmly holding
This dire remembrance that no single thing

Could be ever brought back, not a day, not an instant,
Only mere spectral wraiths of ethereal dreams —
Its equivalent here just can not exist, and
As this life has died, so have you by all means.

Hello

I am going to come back to this after reading it a couple dozen more times and giving it time to digest but until then, I was wondering if you would be willing to post it in it's original language as well.

Thanks

[Nachtfrost]

Hello

I am going to come back to this after reading it a couple dozen more times and giving it time to digest but until then, I was wondering if you would be willing to post it in it's original language as well.

Thanks

Hi there, thank you for giving it your time.
Of course, although I'm not sure how it might be of use.

Явь

Только стены вокруг и снаружи зима,
Только выхода нет и ты долгие годы
Бежишь в миры снов от кошмарного сна
За миражом настоящей свободы.

И с каждой волной, что швыряет о берег
Камнем застывшего сердца в груди,
Всё сложнее становится искренне верить,
Что изменится к лучшему всё впереди,

Что в предутреннем мраке рассыпется бредом
Нескончаемой болью окованный мир.
Когда время не лечит, а тянется следом,
Оседая на окнах новых квартир;

Когда в небе горят настоящие звёзды,
Но их свету плевать на твой жаждущий взгляд;
Когда понимаешь, увы, слишком поздно,
Что не можешь найти дорогу назад,

Что больше не в силах взять себя в руки,
Потому что рукам этим нечего брать,
Ты, рассудок теряя, нестройные звуки
В отчаяньи пишешь иглою в тетрадь —

Это явь, проникая в блаженные грёзы,
Наполняет своими кошмарами сны.
От неё не спасут ядовитые слёзы
В неровном биении пульса волны.

И ты будешь дышать этим запахом лета
И сырым одеялом осенней земли.
Она скормит тебе ночь такого же цвета,
Что пылавшие вам в небесах корабли.

Ты сожрёшь этот ветер со струйками дыма
Как будто бы именно тех сигарет,
И холода будет ловить паутина
Тот же белый зимний утренний свет.

Звенит каждая мелочь горькой тоскою
И отравленным жалом впивается в грудь.
Никогда не оставит душу в покое
Эта память о том, что уже не вернуть

Ничего, ни единого дня, ни момента,
Лишь сновидений бесплотных мечты —
Наяву ей не может быть эквивалента.
Эта жизнь умерла, а с ней умер и ты.

[milo]

Only walls are around and winter's outside.
Only, there's no way out, for many long years
You chase the mirage of true freedom and hide
From horrible nightmare in daydream frontiers.

Every wave that is crashing against the shore
Of the heart in the chest, stiffen and petrified,
Makes it just ever harder to have any hope or
To heartly believe in good turn of the tides.

To believe that some time or the other will crumble
This realm tightly chained in perpetual pain.
When the time doesn't heal you, but aimlessly stumble
Simply settling on windows of new flats again;

When the genuine stars are burning above you,
But their flicker disdains craving look of your eyes;
When you long lost the road back home from your tired view,
But, alas, only now managed to realise

That you're no longer able to pull back together
Yourself, 'cause there's nothing to pull any more,
Losing your mind to the hungering nether
You write down unsettling lexical gore —

This is all Actuality, piercing your daydreams,
Fills your fantasy world with its nightmarish show.
This bitter poison trapped in the blood stream
Will too never save you from this dreadful foe.

And you shall be breathing with smell of the summer
And alike with raw blanket of damp autumn earth.
It shall feed you the night dressed in very same glamour,
As the ships that were burning in skies for you both.

You shall gobble this wind interwoven with trickles
Of smoke from as if namely those cigarettes,
And web of the cold will again catch the ripple
Of the same winter morning's white light in its nets.

Every little detail rings with most bitter longing
And digs into the chest with a venomous sting.
Soul won't ever know peace, it is still firmly holding
This dire remembrance that no single thing

Could be ever brought back, not a day, not an instant,
Only mere spectral wraiths of ethereal dreams —
Its equivalent here just can not exist, and
As this life has died, so have you by all means.

Hello

I am going to come back to this after reading it a couple dozen more times and giving it time to digest but until then, I was wondering if you would be willing to post it in it's original language as well.

Thanks

So, here's the thing, the reason I asked for the original is because poetry (especially formal poetry) has strong concerns with idiomatic language, meter, rhymes, padding ,etc.

Generally, when I see foreign language idioms translated to English it sounds fresh and interesting to my ear.

That is mostly not the case here.

So, let me lay out the reasons I am struggling with this:

• I think this could be a strong poem
  
• I believe very strongly that the wrong from was chosen and that this should be in free verse.
  
• Much of the idiomatic speech comes across as stilted due to the adherence to a form structure that I think you are not familiar with in your native language.
  

So, I need your guidance on where to go from here.

I could do a "mechanical analysis" of the rhyme and meter or, we could consider what this would look like as free verse.

Let me know what you are looking for here and I will taylor my response to fit your needs

Thanks

[Nachtfrost]

So, here's the thing, the reason I asked for the original is because poetry (especially formal poetry) has strong concerns with idiomatic language, meter, rhymes, padding ,etc.

Generally, when I see foreign language idioms translated to English it sounds fresh and interesting to my ear.

That is mostly not the case here.

So, let me lay out the reasons I am struggling with this:

• I think this could be a strong poem
  
• I believe very strongly that the wrong from was chosen and that this should be in free verse.
  
• Much of the idiomatic speech comes across as stilted due to the adherence to a form structure that I think you are not familiar with in your native language.
  

So, I need your guidance on where to go from here.

I could do a "mechanical analysis" of the rhyme and meter or, we could consider what this would look like as free verse.

Let me know what you are looking for here and I will taylor my response to fit your needs

Thanks

I would very much appreciate if you could elaborate precisely on the issues with idiomatic language, padding, on any weaknesses of metaphorical and symbolic imagery, also of course on whether you think the poem as a whole is "narratively sound", i.e. clearly enough conveys the idea and the emotion.

I'm especially intrigued by your point about the stiltedness of the idiomatic speech, as for the life of me I genuinely can't spot any use of idioms; I might be deeply confused, but to me my language here seems to be mostly either metaphorical or literal, with a couple of minor lyrical references, like for instance this one (just as a side note, to clarify in case you wonder):

The phrase "there's no way out" is a reference to certain iconic song lyrics, in which the feelings of hopelessness and despair are semantically linked to a specific subway sign's design as a poetic allusion to an urban legend about the aforementioned signs, whose double meaning supposedly had been exacerbating negative emotions to the point of causing one or several suicides among people suffering from depression. For the context, here's my translation of the relevant part of that song:
"Dawn is about,
There's no way out,
So turn the key and we'll fly away.
I need to add
To someone's pad
Written with blood, like in the subway:
«There's no way out»"

The critique of metre and especially rhymes is also very much welcome. I'm an amateur of course, and when forming a rhythmic structure I honestly simply go by a feeling.
Admittedly, I never really appreciated particularities of formal poetry like iambs and amphibrachs. They always felt too rigid, almost "academic" to me, if that makes sense, — 20 years ago due to immaturity and ignorance, nowadays I think rather because I've grown to love authors like Brodsky, heh. I admire his "The End of a Beautiful Era", Yesenin's "The Black Man", Mayakovsky's "Lilichka" — not least for how alive such unconventional metrical feet are. In contrast, free verse simply doesn't do it for me: neither emotionally, nor expressively.

I find your thought about translating foreign idioms to English really interesting. On one hand, in undeniably preserves the original artistic expression. But on the other hand, I think that it greatly compromises the main purpose of any translation: to convey the substance. As, I presume, a native English speaker, do you not feel like it makes the translation confusing and convoluted? Personally, I think that examples where an idiom is so semantically intertwined with the text that translating it literally is the only way to preserve the narrative integrity are extremely rare. In literature, especially in poetry, it's quintessential to preserve the linguistic "flow", the ease with which a native speaker grasps the meaning of the words being strung together. Just as a random example, imagine that in the middle of a dynamic and tense poem you suddenly stumble upon the line "Our ears are on the top of our heads!" That would completely ruin the pace that was supposed to be in its actual meaning — "Our troops are curt on high alert!"

Sorry is this is too much offtopic babbling. 
Thank you for your response.

[milo]

So, here's the thing, the reason I asked for the original is because poetry (especially formal poetry) has strong concerns with idiomatic language, meter, rhymes, padding ,etc.

Generally, when I see foreign language idioms translated to English it sounds fresh and interesting to my ear.

That is mostly not the case here.

So, let me lay out the reasons I am struggling with this:

• I think this could be a strong poem
  
• I believe very strongly that the wrong from was chosen and that this should be in free verse.
  
• Much of the idiomatic speech comes across as stilted due to the adherence to a form structure that I think you are not familiar with in your native language.
  

So, I need your guidance on where to go from here.

I could do a "mechanical analysis" of the rhyme and meter or, we could consider what this would look like as free verse.

Let me know what you are looking for here and I will taylor my response to fit your needs

Thanks

I would very much appreciate if you could elaborate precisely on the issues with idiomatic language, padding, on any weaknesses of metaphorical and symbolic imagery, also of course on whether you think the poem as a whole is "narratively sound", i.e. clearly enough conveys the idea and the emotion.

I'm especially intrigued by your point about the stiltedness of the idiomatic speech, as for the life of me I genuinely can't spot any use of idioms; I might be deeply confused, but to me my language here seems to be mostly either metaphorical or literal, with a couple of minor lyrical references, like for instance this one (just as a side note, to clarify in case you wonder):

The phrase "there's no way out" is a reference to certain iconic song lyrics, in which the feelings of hopelessness and despair are semantically linked to a specific subway sign's design as a poetic allusion to an urban legend about the aforementioned signs, whose double meaning supposedly had been exacerbating negative emotions to the point of causing one or several suicides among people suffering from depression. For the context, here's my translation of the relevant part of that song:

I do promise to get back to this and I will go through many more aspects of the poem but just in the beginning we see:

no way out
many long years
wave . .  craching against the shore
heart in the chest

etc


"Dawn is about,
There's no way out,
So turn the key and we'll fly away.
I need to add
To someone's pad
Written with blood, like in the subway:
«There's no way out»"

[milo]

Your moniker, I assume, means night frost.  Very cool.  The title, "Actuality" feels a little soft and non descript in English at least.  I would not stop to read a poem titled "actuality" on title alone.  Existential would be more likely to get a read - maybe some play on words, not sure.

Only walls are around and winter's outside.
Only, there's no way out, for many long years
You chase the mirage of true freedom and hide
From horrible nightmare in daydream frontiers.

ok, starting with the meter.  Because you mentioned amphibrachs in another post, I assume you are shooting for amphibrachic tetrameter here.  Just a note, I commonly refer to this as offset anapestic tetrameter because it is the exact same meter, with a starting catalexis and anapestic is considered more common.  

Our narrator is an observer and their target (I will call them n going forward) is being spoken to them in second person.  I am assuming both the walls and the winter are metaphorical based on the title, possibly allegorical as well.

second line - padding: many and long.  If you are double modifying a noun, you chose the wrong noun.
"true" freedom is twee - freedom is strong enough.
4th line - horrible is padding.  Nightmares are horrible by definition.
"daydream frontiers" is the first interesting concept in the poem

Every wave that is crashing against the shore
Of the heart in the chest, stiffen and petrified,
Makes it just ever harder to have any hope or
To heartly believe in good turn of the tides.

your meter held up in S1 but starts breaking down here
L1 --' --' -' -' should be --' --' --' --'
padded it might look something like this:

Every wave that is crashing up against the dark shore

this is just an example and not a particularly good ones, for future metric anomalies I will just state the line and meter

L2 meter.  "Of the heart" - cliche "in the chest" - pointless.  stiffen and petrified is a dangling modifier.  i supposed "stiffened" would fix it
L3 meter.  The shore/or is problematic because it doesn't work without an awkward promotion on "OR"
L4 - meter. Heartly I think is a mis spell of heartily.

For content, this is a continuation of the first S - oh no, life can be tough, comes at you in waves - dark stuff I guess
What happened to our narrator though with his second person POV?

To believe that some time or the other will crumble
This realm tightly chained in perpetual pain.
When the time doesn't heal you, but aimlessly stumble
Simply settling on windows of new flats again;

You have a dangling participle leaving me wondering WHAT will crumble?  It reads as if time itself will crumble which is fine but then or the other doesn't make sense
Your meter is back on track here for the most part.
L3 - same problem with the participle so it sounds like time is stumbling.
not sure what flats means here without context.  With windows preceding it, it sounds like n is switching apartments but that is really not cohesive with previous stanzas.
Also, pay attention to how much filler you use through here:
To, some,will, This, When but, Simply

When the genuine stars are burning above you,
But their flicker disdains craving look of your eyes;
When you long lost the road back home from your tired view,
But, alas, only now managed to realise

L1 filler: genuine
looks of your eyes is awkward in English, we would never say this.
L3 meter
L4 meter

For content, we have made it pretty deep in the poem and I don't feel we are moving forward.  Yes, life is still bad, but would it make sense to take a single image and use it for a metaphor that encompasses all of this?

That you're no longer able to pull back together
Yourself, 'cause there's nothing to pull any more,
Losing your mind to the hungering nether
You write down unsettling lexical gore —

ok, unsettling lexical gore made me laugh.  It sounds like it should be in a limerick.

I have decided that for the remainder, I will skip the meter and give you time to make any corrections based on what I already wrote, same with the filler.

For content - 4 or 5 stanzas in and I think we have moved past the heavy existentialism to perhaps what our central metaphor is: writing to deal with the dread.
I feel that this could be enhanced with bridge metaphor as well as stronger word choice.

This is all Actuality, piercing your daydreams,
Fills your fantasy world with its nightmarish show.
This bitter poison trapped in the blood stream
Will too never save you from this dreadful foe.

So daydreams is just wrong in this case.  We have already beaten the dreams concept to death I fear.
"Will too" - not English I am afraid

And you shall be breathing with smell of the summer
And alike with raw blanket of damp autumn earth.
It shall feed you the night dressed in very same glamour,
As the ships that were burning in skies for you both.

You shall gobble this wind interwoven with trickles
Of smoke from as if namely those cigarettes,
And web of the cold will again catch the ripple
Of the same winter morning's white light in its nets.

Every little detail rings with most bitter longing
And digs into the chest with a venomous sting.
Soul won't ever know peace, it is still firmly holding
This dire remembrance that no single thing

Could be ever brought back, not a day, not an instant,
Only mere spectral wraiths of ethereal dreams —
Its equivalent here just can not exist, and
As this life has died, so have you by all means.

I feel like I have given you a lot to work on here.  First pass you might want to clean up the meter and any awkward phrasing.  Second pass work on stripping these filler words out of there.

Well what can you replace them with?  Strong nouns and verbs that point back to your metaphor.

Images.

Look, the poem is great for translating from another language into metric verse, I couldn't do it.  The result doesn't work  as an English poem yet.

Thanks for posting in the intensive and serious forum

[milo]

Forgot to mention this before (assuming you are still checking back and working on it)

For meter, you have chosen anapestic tetrameter which generally gives poems a frivolous or fun feel.  The subject matter is definitely not frivolous or fun so I wasn't sure whether you wanted to draw a juxtaposition from the meter to the subject matter and if so to what effect.  If not, you may wish to choose a different meter.

Thanks