Quote:
Originally Posted by Carl Copeland
That was my line of reasoning too, along with the repeated “four” in the poem, but I dismissed it as too easy and too superficial a use of the poem. And if you’ve got your camera screen turned on … but that’s “cheap cheating” again. How different math is from philosophy! To say that it’s “cheating” to distinguish image from reality!
|
The cheating is in the betting on the ambiguity of the words.
No, the iPhone has nothing to do with the question: when I ask 3rd graders, I draw a girl with a flower and ask how many flowers she sees.
"Four" indeed occurs in the poem, but this is not specific to the poem - any quatrain has 4 lines. To give you a further "poetic" hint:
There is an article by Gasparov about this poem of Usov (mostly he compares the lexicon of the "source" and "translation" to conclude that the mock translation is indeed a translation of the source, and not the other way around) but at the end he praises the poem for the excellent match between form and content.