Subject: Re: [lojban] More Alice

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sun, 3 Jun 2001 20:48:52 EDT

In a message dated 6/3/2001 6:04:10 PM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> . With that example I just wanted
> to show that doing puns in Lojban is not all that hard
> (then again, doing good puns is harder, of course).
> 
Well, it was a play with words, but hardly a play ON words and pretty surely 
not a pun (maybe 2/3, as the saying goes -- but I doubt that). The point is, 
if you try to translate a nearly perfect pun, you ought not be satisfied with 
a really imperfect one; a total miss is better (maybe with the note that "it 
loses something inn the translation").

The Lobster Quadrille looks passable in that (no surprise here -- like 
Chinese, it is hard not to rhyme in Lojban) it rhymes fairly closely, but it 
is not a quadrille or any other regular dance step, though the chorus comes 
close. 
Is it time for another round on what Lojban poetry will be like, given that 
neither rhyme nor rhythm are likely to play major roles? In any case, a 
dance would be a bad candidate for an early contribution.