I CAN'T READ EPIC POETRY! I'VE TRIED SEVERAL TIMES, BUT I JUST CAN'T!
>>25265958I can read it in Finnish, but English ones lose me. Something in that language is so distant from poetry.
Poetry is lame.
>>25265958I'm too obtuse to read poetry in general except during the night for some reason. Sometimes when I can't sleep my brain goes into poetry mode and I read for like an hour or two. Maybe try it if you can't sleep at some point, your brain will have less distractions and it'll be easier to concentrate. Don't stay up all night doing it though, just an hour or two here and there, like our ancestors used to do in the middle ages by having some alone time in the middle of the night between two sleep sessions.Also you can maybe find a good audiobook, read along, stop caring about the meaning of every sentence and just enjoy how it sounds like.
>>25265958but you CAN! it's just left to right like all other books!
>>25265958Have you tried reading it out loud?Another way I found helps is just to 'let go', don't read with a sharp critical eye
>>25265966>Something in that language is so distant from poetry.Lmao this
What's your problem anon? It'd help if you could be more specific. You don't have to rush either; just give whatever passage is giving you trouble another read or two, maybe Google it if you really want to understand it, or just move on.
>>25266145I can't figure out what's going on. It's different from prose.
>>25265958I read the entire sundarkand in Ramayana once. But I can't understand sanskrit so everything went above my head
I just could never get into the Iliad but the Odyseey took. I think I read some of the sagas when I was a Tolkien-obsessed teenager but that was a long time ago. I retained very little. I think I might try tackling the Iliad again.
>>25265966>Something in that language is so distant from poetry.Does finnish have a lot of inflection? I suspect that English being a relatively isolating (IE words have few variants, they're relatively independent building blocks) language is the reason for this. I can read a tiny bit of German and Lithuanian and poetry in those languages always strikes me more than (most) poetry in English. Or maybe Goethe is just that good.
I only read poetry in my native language, french.
