Wind, Water, Stone

The English text of this poem is Eliot Weinberger’s translation from Octavio Paz’s Spanish-language original, “Viento, Agua, Piedra.” In most translations of poetry, the first device to be lost (or, rather, radically changed) is the meter. Because metrical patterns and flourishes are so dependent on individual syllables and their emphases, a translation cannot easily reproduce them without altering the diction and meaning. With that important caveat in mind, Weinberger’s translation of Paz’s poem is decidedly free verse. That is, “Wind, Water, Stone” does not follow any rigid metrical or formal constraints, eschewing traditional rhyme and accentual-syllabic structures.

Paz’s poem, even in translation, does maintain a somewhat regular line length. In general, each line contains only three feet (a poetic foot is the basic measure of meter, a single unit of stressed and unstressed syllables). This makes for a poem of four quatrains in trimeter. The first stanza suggests trochaic trimeter: “Water hollows stone” (Line 1), “wind scatters water” (Line 2), but the poem’s more syntactically complex sentences are quick to disregard this pattern: “water escapes and is wind” (Line 7), or “Wind sings in its whirling” (Line 9). Despite the amount of variation, it is still worth recognizing Weinberger’s preservation of a background trochaic rhythm, even in some of the longer lines: “stone’s a cup of / water” (Line 6), or “water / murmurs / going / by” (Lines 10). However, these examples show that the line length sometimes extends into tetrameter (that is, four-footed lines).

While the meter—and the feet (and resulting line lengths)—contributes to a rhythmic cohesion for the poem, it is largely Paz’s repetitive form that unifies his text. Rhyme and traditional forms notwithstanding, Paz’s repetition of his titular elements dominates the poem, providing a form for every stanza except for the final, though even that stanza ends with the structural refrain.