Length

Five foot iambic looks and feels very different to Russians and Americans.

The simplest of reasons and the one most easy to demonstrate is the one associated with the difference in word lengths in the two languages and with accompanying expectations concerning the length of things, especially of utterances.

An average Russian word is three times longer than its English counterpart. Russian publishers use a 1.3 coefficient as a rule of thumb to estimate the number of pages when planning a publication of a book translated from the English language into their own sonorous but lengthy idiom.

Whatever it is, 3 or 1.3, a Russian expects to see a more massive line on the average than does a member of the vanishing breed of American poetry readers. Therefore, a line of five foot iambic looks like an average length line to a Russian and like a longish line to the breed member.

Other differences are a multitude not as easily described, yet they should be reckoned with when considering at what cost to preserve the hallowed length of line.

For example, in order to keep to a fixed number of syllables in a line the translator of verse is often forced to shift images from line to line, add explanations in the best case and platitudes in the worst, pad, borrow and steal. It is usually more trouble than it is worth and a great detriment to the integrity of meaning.

Why not let the number of feet in a given poem fluctuate from four to six when expedient for preserving the one vital invariant: the pattern of image density distribution characteristic to the author and to the poem?

Another sensible, albeit completely unexplored approach would be to establish a correspondence of meters, e.g., five foot trochaic of Russian descent might be argued to correspond to four foot trochaic in English or even to an arcane two foot anapest.

The point of this is to say that it is not very important to preserve the same number of feet in a poetic translation, far from it, it may be better to change the length in the interest of preserving the poet's intent.

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